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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III,
+Complete, by John Forster
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete
+
+Author: John Forster
+
+Release Date: June 20, 2008 [EBook #25851]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Emmy, Juliet Sutherland, Andrew Templeton and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+For the reader: Italic text is surrounded by _underscores_, bold text is
+surrounded by =equal signs= and underlined text is surrounded by
+~tildes~. Two breves above the letter e are indicated by [)e] in the
+text.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFE
+
+OF
+
+[Illustration: Signature: Charles Dickens]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFE
+
+OF
+
+CHARLES DICKENS
+
+BY
+
+JOHN FORSTER.
+
+THREE VOLUMES IN TWO.
+
+VOL. I.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ BOSTON:
+ JAMES R. OSGOOD & COMPANY,
+ (LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.)
+ 1875.
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFE
+
+OF
+
+CHARLES DICKENS
+
+BY
+
+JOHN FORSTER.
+
+VOL. I.
+
+1812-1842.
+
+ TO THE
+
+ DAUGHTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS,
+
+ MY GOD-DAUGHTER MARY
+
+ AND
+
+ HER SISTER KATE,
+
+ =This Book is Dedicated=
+
+ BY THEIR FRIEND,
+
+ AND THEIR FATHER'S FRIEND AND EXECUTOR,
+
+ JOHN FORSTER
+
+
+
+
+NOTE TO THE PRESENT EDITION.
+
+
+SUCH has been the rapidity of the demand for successive impressions of
+this book, that I have found it impossible, until now, to correct at
+pages 31, 87, and 97 three errors of statement made in the former
+editions; and some few other mistakes, not in themselves important, at
+pages 96, 101, and 102. I take the opportunity of adding that the
+mention at p. 83 is not an allusion to the well-known "Penny" and
+"Saturday" Magazines, but to weekly periodicals of some years' earlier
+date resembling them in form. One of them, I have since found from a
+later mention by Dickens himself, was presumably of a less wholesome and
+instructive character. "I used," he says, "when I was at school, to take
+in the _Terrific Register_, making myself unspeakably miserable, and
+frightening my very wits out of my head, for the small charge of a penny
+weekly; which, considering that there was an illustration to every
+number in which there was always a pool of blood, and at least one body,
+was cheap." An obliging correspondent writes to me upon my reference to
+the Fox-under-the-hill, at p. 62: "Will you permit me to say that the
+house, shut up and almost ruinous, is still to be found at the bottom of
+a curious and most precipitous court, the entrance of which is just past
+Salisbury Street. . . . It was once, I think, the approach to the halfpenny
+boats. The house is now shut out from the water-side by the Embankment."
+
+ PALACE GATE HOUSE, KENSINGTON,
+ _23d December, 1871_.
+
+
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+
+CHAPTER I. 1812-1822.
+
+Pages 21-46.
+
+CHILDHOOD. AET. 1-10.
+
+ PAGE
+ Birth at Landport in Portsea 21
+ Family of John Dickens 22
+ Powers of observation in children 23
+ Two years old 23
+ In London, aet. 2-3 23
+ In Chatham, aet. 4-9 23
+ Vision of boyhood 24
+ The queer small child 25
+ Mother's teaching 26
+ Day-school in Rome Lane 27
+ Retrospects of childhood 27
+ David Copperfield and Charles Dickens 28
+ Access to small but good library 29
+ Tragedy-writing 30
+ Comic-song singing 31
+ Cousin James Lamert 31
+ First taken to theatre 32
+ At Mr. Giles's school 32
+ Encored in the recitations 33
+ Boyish recollections 33
+ Birthplace of his fancy 35
+ Last night in Chatham 35
+ In London 36
+ First impressions 36
+ Bayham Street, Camden-town 36
+ Faculty of early observation 37
+ His description of his father 38
+ Small theatre made for him 38
+ Sister Fanny at Royal Academy of Music 39
+ Walks about London 39
+ Biography and autobiography 40
+ At his godfather's and his uncle's 41
+ First efforts at description 42
+ "Res Angusta Domi" 42
+ Mother exerting herself 43
+ Father in the Marshalsea 43
+ Visit to the prison 44
+ Captain Porter 44
+ Old friends disposed of 45
+ At the pawnbroker's 46
+
+
+CHAPTER II. 1822-1824.
+
+Pages 47-70.
+
+HARD EXPERIENCES IN BOYHOOD. AET. 10-12.
+
+ Mr. Dilke's half-crown 48
+ Story of boyhood told 48
+ D. C. and C. D. 48
+ Enterprise of the cousins Lamert 49
+ First employment in life 51
+ Blacking-warehouse 51
+ A poor little drudge 52
+ Bob Fagin and Poll Green 52
+ "Facilis Descensus" 52
+ Crushed hopes 53
+ The home in Gower Street 53
+ Regaling alamode 54
+ Home broken up 54
+ At Mrs. Roylance's in Camden-town 55
+ Sundays in prison 55
+ Pudding-shops and coffee-shops 56
+ What was and might have been 57
+ Thomas and Harry 58
+ A lodging in Lant Street 59
+ Meals in the Marshalsea 59
+ C. D. and the Marchioness 60
+ Originals of Garland family 60
+ Adventure with Bob Fagin 61
+ Saturday-night shows 61
+ Appraised officially 62
+ Publican and wife at Cannon Row 63
+ Marshalsea incident in _Copperfield_ 64
+ Incident as it occurred 65
+ Materials for _Pickwick_ 66
+ Sister Fanny's musical prize 66
+ From Hungerford Stairs to Chandos Street 67
+ Father's quarrel with James Lamert 68
+ Quits the warehouse 68
+ Bitter associations of servitude 69
+ What became of the blacking business 70
+
+
+CHAPTER III. 1824-1830.
+
+Pages 71-95.
+
+SCHOOL-DAYS AND START IN LIFE. AET. 12-18.
+
+ Outcome of boyish trials 71
+ Disadvantage in later years 72
+ Advantages 73
+ Next move in life 74
+ Wellington House Academy 74
+ Revisited and described 75
+ Letter from a schoolfellow 76
+ C. D.'s recollections of school 77
+ Schoolfellow's recollections of C. D. 77
+ Fac-simile of schoolboy letter 79
+ Daniel Tobin 81
+ Another schoolfellow's recollections 82
+ Writing tales and getting up plays 83
+ Master Beverley scene-painter 84
+ Street-acting 84
+ The schoolfellows after forty years 85
+ Smallness of the world 86
+ In attorneys' offices 87
+ At minor theatres 88
+ The father on the son's education 89
+ Studying short-hand 90
+ In British Museum reading-room 90
+ Preparing for the gallery 91
+ D. C. for C. D. 91
+ A real Dora in 1829 92
+ The same Dora in 1855 93
+ Dora changed into Flora 94
+ Ashes of youth and hope 95
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. 1831-1835.
+
+Pages 96-106.
+
+REPORTERS' GALLERY AND NEWSPAPER LITERATURE.
+
+AET. 19-23.
+
+ Reporting for _True Sun_ 96
+ First seen by me 97
+ Reporting for _Mirror_ and _Chronicle_ 97
+ First published piece 97
+ Discipline and experiences of reporting 98
+ Life as a reporter 99
+ John Black 100
+ Mr. Thomas Beard 101
+ A letter to his editor 102
+ Incident of reporting days 102
+ The same more correctly told 103
+ Origin of "Boz" 104
+ Captain Holland 104
+ Mr. George Hogarth 105
+ Sketches in _Evening Chronicle_ 105
+ C. D.'s first hearty appreciator 106
+
+
+CHAPTER V. 1836.
+
+Pages 107-115.
+
+FIRST BOOK, AND ORIGIN OF PICKWICK. AET. 24.
+
+ _Sketches by Boz_ 107
+ Fancy-piece by N. P. Willis: a poor English author 107
+ Start of _Pickwick_ 108
+ Marriage to Miss Hogarth 108
+ First connection with Chapman & Hall 109
+ Mr. Seymour's part in _Pickwick_ 109
+ Letters relating thereto 110
+ C. D.'s own account 110
+ False claims refuted 111
+ Pickwick's original, his figure and his name 112
+ First sprightly runnings of genius 113
+ The _Sketches_ characterized 114
+ Mr. Seymour's death 115
+ New illustrator chosen 115
+ Mr. Hablot K. Browne 115
+ C. D. leaves the gallery 116
+ _Strange Gentleman_ and _Village Coquettes_ 116
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. 1837.
+
+Pages 117-140.
+
+WRITING THE PICKWICK PAPERS. AET. 25.
+
+ First letter from him 117
+ As he was thirty-five years ago 118
+ Mrs. Carlyle and Leigh Hunt 119
+ Birth of eldest son 119
+ From Furnival's Inn to Doughty Street 119
+ A long-remembered sorrow 120
+ I visit him 120
+ Hasty compacts with publishers 121
+ Self-sold into quasi-bondage 121
+ Agreements for editorship and writing 121
+ Mr. Macrone's scheme to reissue _Sketches_ 122
+ Attempts to prevent it 123
+ Exorbitant demand 123
+ Impatience of suspense 123
+ Purchase advised 124
+ _Oliver Twist_ 125
+ Characters real to himself 125
+ Sense of responsibility for his writings 126
+ Criticism that satisfied him 126
+ Help given with his proofs 126
+ Writing _Pickwick_, Nos. 14 and 15 127
+ Scenes in a debtors' prison 128
+ A recollection of Smollett 128
+ Reception of _Pickwick_ 129
+ A popular rage 129
+ Mr. Carlyle's "dreadful" story 130
+ Secrets of success 130
+ _Pickwick_ inferior to later books 131
+ Exception for Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick 131
+ Personal habits of C. D. 132
+ Reliefs after writing 133
+ Natural discontents 134
+ The early agreements 134
+ Tale to follow _Oliver Twist_ 135
+ Compromise with Mr. Bentley 135
+ Trip to Flanders 135
+ First visit to Broadstairs 136
+ Piracies of _Pickwick_ 137
+ A sufferer from agreements 138
+ First visit to Brighton 138
+ What he is doing with _Oliver Twist_ 139
+ Reading De Foe 139
+ "No Thoroughfare" 139
+ Proposed help to Macready 140
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. 1837-1838.
+
+Pages 141-151.
+
+BETWEEN PICKWICK AND NICKLEBY. AET. 25-26.
+
+ Edits _Life of Grimaldi_ 141
+ His own opinion of it 142
+ An objection answered 142
+ His recollections of 1823 142
+ Completion of _Pickwick_ 143
+ A purpose long entertained 144
+ Relations with Chapman & Hall 144
+ Payments made for _Pickwick_ 145
+ Agreement for _Nicholas Nickleby_ 145
+ _Oliver Twist_ characterized 146
+ Reasons for acceptance with every class 146
+ Nightmare of an agreement 147
+ Letter to Mr. Bentley 147
+ Proposal as to _Barnaby Rudge_ 148
+ Result of it 148
+ Birth of eldest daughter 149
+ _Young Gentlemen_ and _Young Couples_ 149
+ First number of _Nicholas Nickleby_ 150
+ 2d of April, 1838 150
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. 1838.
+
+Pages 152-164.
+
+OLIVER TWIST. AET. 26.
+
+ Interest in characters at close of _Oliver_ 152
+ Writing of the last chapter 153
+ Cruikshank illustrations 154
+ Etchings for last volume 154
+ How executed 154
+ Slander respecting them exposed 155
+ Falsehood ascribed to the artist 155
+ Reputation of the new tale 156
+ Its workmanship 157
+ Social evils passed away 157
+ Living only in what destroyed them 157
+ Chief design of the story 158
+ Its principal figures 158
+ Comedy and tragedy of crime 159
+ Reply to attacks 160
+ Le Sage, Gay, and Fielding 160
+ Likeness to them 161
+ Again the shadow of _Barnaby_ 161
+ Appeal to Mr. Bentley for delay 161
+ A very old story 162
+ "Sic vos non vobis" 162
+ _Barnaby_ given up by Mr. Bentley 163
+ Resignation of _Miscellany_ 163
+ Parent parting from child 164
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. 1838-1839.
+
+Pages 165-179.
+
+NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. AET. 26-27.
+
+ Doubts of success dispelled 165
+ Realities of English life 166
+ Characters self-revealed 167
+ Miss Bates and Mrs. Nickleby 167
+ Smike and Dotheboys 167
+ A favorite type of humanity 168
+ Sydney Smith and Newman Noggs 168
+ Kindliness and breadth of humor 169
+ Goldsmith and Smollett 169
+ Early and later books 170
+ Biographical not critical 171
+ Characteristics 171
+ Materials for the book 171
+ Birthday letter 172
+ A difficulty at starting 172
+ Never in advance with _Nickleby_ 173
+ Always with later books 173
+ Enjoying a play 174
+ At the Adelphi 174
+ Writing Mrs. Nickleby's love-scene 175
+ Sydney Smith vanquished 175
+ Winding up the story 176
+ Parting from creatures of his fancy 177
+ The Nickleby dinner 178
+ Persons present 178
+ The Maclise portrait 178
+
+
+CHAPTER X. 1838-1839.
+
+Pages 180-190.
+
+DURING AND AFTER NICKLEBY. AET. 26-27.
+
+ The Cottage at Twickenham 180
+ Daniel Maclise 180
+ Ainsworth and other friends 181
+ Mr. Stanley of Alderley 182
+ Petersham cottage 182
+ Childish enjoyments 182
+ Writes a farce for Covent Garden 183
+ Entered at the Middle Temple 183
+ We see Wainewright in Newgate 184
+ _Oliver Twist_ and the _Quarterly_ 184
+ Hood's _Up the Rhine_ 185
+ Shakspeare Society 185
+ Birth of second daughter 186
+ House-hunting 186
+ _Barnaby_ at his tenth page 186
+ Letter from Exeter 187
+ A landlady and her friends 187
+ A home for his father and mother 188
+ Autobiographical 189
+ Visit to an upholsterer 189
+ Visit from the same 190
+
+
+CHAPTER XI. 1839.
+
+Pages 191-199.
+
+NEW LITERARY PROJECT. AET. 27-28.
+
+ Thoughts for the future 191
+ Doubts of old serial form 192
+ Suggestion for his publishers 192
+ My mediation with them 193
+ Proposed weekly publication 193
+ Design of it 193
+ Old favorites to be revived 194
+ Subjects to be dealt with 194
+ Chapters on Chambers 194
+ Gog and Magog Relaxations 194
+ Savage Chronicles 195
+ Others as well as himself to write 195
+ Travels to Ireland and America in view 195
+ Stipulation as to property and payments 196
+ Great hopes of success 197
+ Assent of his publishers 197
+ No planned story 197
+ Terms of agreement 197
+ Notion for his hero 198
+ A name hit upon 199
+ Sanguine of the issue 199
+
+
+CHAPTER XII. 1840-1841.
+
+Pages 200-216.
+
+THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP. AET. 28-29.
+
+ Visit to Walter Landor 200
+ First thought of Little Nell 200
+ Hopeful of Master Humphrey 201
+ A title for the child-story 202
+ First sale of _Master Humphrey's Clock_ 202
+ Its original plan abandoned 203
+ Reasons for this 203
+ To be limited to one story 203
+ Disadvantages of weekly publication 204
+ A favorite description 204
+ In Bevis Marks for Sampson Brass 205
+ At Lawn House, Broadstairs 205
+ Dedication of his first volume to Rogers 205
+ Chapters 43-45 206
+ Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness 207
+ Masterpiece of kindly fun 207
+ Closing of the tale 208
+ Effect upon the writer 208
+ Making-believe very much 209
+ The end approaching 209
+ The realities of fiction 209
+ Death of Little Nell 210
+ My share in the close 211
+ A suggestion adopted by him 211
+ Success of the story 211
+ Useful lessons 212
+ Its mode of construction 213
+ Character and characteristics 213
+ The art of it 213
+ A recent tribute 214
+ Harte's "Dickens in Camp" 215
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII. 1840.
+
+Pages 217-231.
+
+DEVONSHIRE TERRACE AND BROADSTAIRS. AET. 28.
+
+ A good saying 217
+ Landor mystified 218
+ The mirthful side of Dickens 218
+ Extravagant flights 218
+ Humorous despair 219
+ Riding exercise 220
+ First of the ravens 220
+ The groom Topping 220
+ The smoky chimneys 221
+ Juryman at an inquest 222
+ Practical humanity 222
+ Publication of _Clock's_ first number 222
+ Transfer of _Barnaby_ settled 223
+ A true prediction 224
+ Revisiting old scenes 224
+ C. D. to Chapman & Hall 224
+ Terms of sale of _Barnaby_ 225
+ A gift to a friend 226
+ Final escape from bondage 226
+ Published libels about him 227
+ Said to be demented 227
+ To be insane and turned Catholic 228
+ Begging letter-writers 228
+ A donkey asked for 228
+ Mr. Kindheart 229
+ Friendly meetings 229
+ Social talk 229
+ Reconciling friends 230
+ Hint for judging men 230
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV. 1841.
+
+Pages 232-248.
+
+BARNABY RUDGE. AET. 29.
+
+ Advantage in beginning _Barnaby_ 232
+ Birth of fourth child and second son 233
+ The Raven 233
+ A loss in the family 234
+ Grip's death 235
+ C. D. describes his illness 235
+ Family mourners 236
+ Apotheosis by Maclise 237
+ Grip the second 239
+ The inn at Chigwell 239
+ A _Clock_ Dinner 240
+ Lord Jeffrey in London 240
+ The _Lamplighter_ 240
+ The _Pic Nic Papers_ 241
+ Character of Lord George Gordon 241
+ A doubtful fancy 242
+ Interest in new labor 243
+ Constraints of weekly publication 243
+ The prison-riots 244
+ A serious illness 244
+ Close of _Barnaby_ 244
+ Character of the tale 245
+ Defects in the plot 245
+ The No-Popery riots 245
+ Descriptive power displayed 246
+ Leading persons in story 247
+ Mr. Dennis the hangman 248
+
+
+CHAPTER XV. 1841.
+
+Pages 249-262.
+
+PUBLIC DINNER IN EDINBURGH. AET. 29.
+
+ His son Walter Landor 249
+ Dies in Calcutta (1863) 250
+ C. D. and the new poor-law 250
+ Moore and Rogers 251
+ Jeffrey's praise of Little Nell 251
+ Resolve to visit Scotland 251
+ Edinburgh dinner proposed 252
+ Sir David Wilkie's death 252
+ Peter Robertson 253
+ Professor Wilson 253
+ A fancy of Scott 254
+ Lionization made tolerable 254
+ Thoughts of home 255
+ The dinner and speeches 255
+ His reception 256
+ Wilson's eulogy 256
+ Home yearnings 257
+ Freedom of city voted to him 257
+ Speakers at the dinner 257
+ Politics and party influences 258
+ Whig jealousies 259
+ At the theatre 260
+ Hospitalities 260
+ Moral of it all 260
+ Proposed visit to the Highlands 261
+ Maclise and Macready 261
+ Guide to the Highlands 262
+ Mr. Angus Fletcher (Kindheart) 262
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI. 1841.
+
+Pages 263-276.
+
+ADVENTURES IN THE HIGHLANDS. AET. 29.
+
+ A fright 264
+ Fletcher's eccentricities 264
+ The Trossachs 264
+ The traveler's guide 265
+ A comical picture 265
+ Highland accommodation 265
+ Grand scenery 266
+ Changes in route 267
+ A waterfall 267
+ Entrance to Glencoe 267
+ The pass of Glencoe 268
+ Loch Leven 269
+ A July evening 269
+ Postal service at Loch Earn Head 269
+ The maid of the inn 270
+ Impressions of Glencoe 270
+ An adventure 271
+ Torrents swollen with rain 271
+ Dangerous traveling 272
+ Incidents and accidents 272
+ Broken-down bridge 273
+ A fortunate resolve 273
+ Post-boy in danger 274
+ The rescue 274
+ Narrow escape 274
+ A Highland inn and inmates 275
+ English comfort at Dalmally 275
+ Dinner at Glasgow proposed 276
+ Eagerness for home 276
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII. 1841.
+
+Pages 277-283.
+
+AGAIN AT BROADSTAIRS. AET. 29.
+
+ Peel and his party 277
+ Getting very radical 278
+ Thoughts of colonizing 278
+ Political squib by C. D. 278
+ Fine old English Tory times 279
+ Mesmerism 280
+ Metropolitan prisons 280
+ Book by a workman 280
+ An August day by the sea 281
+ Another story in prospect 281
+ _Clock_ discontents 281
+ New adventure 282
+ Agreement for it signed 282
+ The book that proved to be _Chuzzlewit_ 283
+ Peel and Lord Ashley 283
+ Visions of America 283
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII. 1841.
+
+Pages 284-291.
+
+EVE OF THE VISIT TO AMERICA. AET. 29.
+
+ Greetings from America 284
+ Reply to Washington Irving 284
+ Difficulties in the way 285
+ Resolve to go 286
+ Wish to revisit scenes of boyhood 286
+ Proposed book of travel 286
+ Arrangements for the journey 287
+ Impatience of suspense 287
+ Resolve to leave the children 288
+ Mrs. Dickens reconciled 288
+ A grave illness 288
+ Domestic griefs 289
+ The old sorrow 289
+ At Windsor 290
+ Son Walter's christening 290
+ At Liverpool with the travelers 291
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX. 1842.
+
+Pages 292-309.
+
+FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA. AET. 30.
+
+ Rough passage 293
+ A steamer in a storm 293
+ Resigned to the worst 293
+ Of himself and fellow-travelers 294
+ The Atlantic from deck 294
+ The ladies' cabin 294
+ Its occupants 295
+ Card-playing on the Atlantic 295
+ Ship-news 296
+ A wager 297
+ Halifax harbor 297
+ Ship aground 297
+ Captain Hewitt 298
+ Speaker of House of Assembly 299
+ Ovation to C. D. 299
+ Arrival at Boston 300
+ Incursion of editors 300
+ At Tremont House 300
+ The welcome 301
+ Deputations 301
+ Dr. Channing to C. D. 302
+ Public appearances 302
+ A secretary engaged 303
+ Bostonians 303
+ General characteristics 304
+ Personal notices 304
+ Perils of steamers 305
+ A home-thought 305
+ American institutions 306
+ How first impressed 306
+ Reasons for the greeting 306
+ What was welcomed in C. D. 307
+ Old World and New World 308
+ Daniel Webster as to C. D. 308
+ Channing as to C. D. 308
+ Subsequent disappointments 309
+ New York invitation to dinner}
+ Fac-similes of signatures }
+ Additional fac-similes } Facing page 309.
+ New York invitation to ball }
+ Fac-similes of signatures }
+ Additional fac-similes }
+
+
+CHAPTER XX. 1842.
+
+Pages 310-334.
+
+SECOND IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA. AET. 30.
+
+ Second letter 310
+ International copyright 311
+ Third letter 311
+ The dinner at Boston 312
+ Worcester, Springfield, and Hartford 313
+ Queer traveling 313
+ Levees at Hartford and New Haven 313
+ At Wallingford 314
+ Serenades 314
+ Cornelius C. Felton 315
+ Payment of personal expenses declined 315
+ At New York 315
+ Irving and Colden 315
+ Description of the ball 316
+ Newspaper accounts 317
+ A phase of character 317
+ Opinion in America 318
+ International copyright 318
+ American authors in regard to it 319
+ Outcry against the nation's guest 319
+ Declines to be silent on copyright 319
+ Speech at dinner 320
+ Irving in the chair 320
+ Chairman's break-down 321
+ An incident afterwards in London 321
+ Results of copyright speeches 322
+ A bookseller's demand for help 322
+ Suggestion for copyright memorial 323
+ Henry Clay's opinion 323
+ Life in New York 324
+ Distresses of popularity 324
+ Intentions for future 325
+ Refusal of invitations 325
+ Going south and west 325
+ As to return 326
+ Dangers incident to steamers 326
+ Slavery 327
+ Ladies of America 327
+ Party conflicts 328
+ Non-arrival of Cunard steamer 328
+ Copyright petition for Congress 328
+ No hope of the Caledonia 329
+ A substitute for her 330
+ Anxiety as to letters 330
+ Of distinguished Americans 330
+ Hotel bills 331
+ Thoughts of the children 331
+ Acadia takes Caledonia's place 332
+ Letter to C. D. from Carlyle 332
+ Carlyle on copyright 332
+ Argument against stealing 333
+ Rob Roy's plan worth bettering 334
+ C. D. as to Carlyle 334
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI. 1842.
+
+Pages 335-357.
+
+PHILADELPHIA, WASHINGTON, AND THE SOUTH. AET. 30.
+
+ At Philadelphia 335
+ Rule in printing letters 335
+ Promise as to railroads 336
+ Experience of them 337
+ Railway-cars 337
+ Charcoal stoves 337
+ Ladies' cars 338
+ Spittoons 338
+ Massachusetts and New York 339
+ Police-cells and prisons 339
+ House of detention and inmates 340
+ Women and boy prisoners 341
+ Capital punishment 342
+ A house of correction 342
+ Four hundred single cells 343
+ Comparison with English prisons 344
+ Inns and landlords 344
+ At Washington 344
+ Hotel extortion 345
+ Philadelphia penitentiary 345
+ The solitary system 345
+ Solitary prisoners 346
+ Talk with inspectors 346
+ Bookseller Carey 347
+ Changes of temperature 347
+ Henry Clay 348
+ Proposed journeyings 348
+ Letters from England 349
+ Congress and Senate 349
+ Leading American statesmen 349
+ The people of America 350
+ Englishmen "located" there 350
+ "Surgit amari aliquid" 351
+ The copyright petition 351
+ At Richmond 351
+ Irving appointed to Spain 352
+ Experience of a slave city 353
+ Incidents of slave-life 353
+ Discussion with a slaveholder 353
+ Feeling of South to England 354
+ Levees at Richmond 354
+ One more banquet accepted 355
+ My gift of _Shakspeare_ 355
+ Home letters and fancies 356
+ Self-reproach of a noble nature 356
+ Washington Irving's leave-taking 357
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII. 1842.
+
+Pages 358-380.
+
+CANAL-BOAT JOURNEYS: BOUND FAR WEST. AET. 30.
+
+ Character in the letters 358
+ The _Notes_ less satisfactory 359
+ Personal narrative in letters 359
+ The copyright differences 360
+ Social dissatisfactions 360
+ A fact to be remembered 361
+ Literary merits of the letters 361
+ Personal character portrayed 362
+ On board for Pittsburgh 362
+ Choicest passages of _Notes_ 362
+ Queer stage-coach 363
+ Something revealed on the top 364
+ At Harrisburg 364
+ Treaties with Indians 365
+ Local legislatures 365
+ A levee 365
+ Morning and night in canal-boat 366
+ At and after breakfast 366
+ Making the best of it 367
+ Hardy habits 368
+ By rail across mountain 368
+ Mountain scenery 369
+ New settlements 369
+ Original of Eden in _Chuzzlewit_ 369
+ A useful word 370
+ Party in America 371
+ Home news 371
+ Meets an early acquaintance 372
+ "Smallness of the world" 372
+ Queer customers at levees 372
+ Our anniversary 373
+ The Cincinnati steamer 374
+ Frugality in water and linen 374
+ Magnetic experiments 375
+ Life-preservers 376
+ Bores 376
+ Habits of neatness 377
+ Wearying for home 377
+ Another solitary prison 378
+ New terror to loneliness 378
+ Arrival at Cincinnati 378
+ Two judges in attendance 379
+ The city described 379
+ On the pavement 380
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII. 1842.
+
+Pages 381-406.
+
+THE FAR WEST: TO NIAGARA FALLS. AET. 30.
+
+ Descriptions in letters and in _Notes_ 381
+ Outline of westward travel 382
+ An Arabian-Night city 383
+ A temperance festival 383
+ A party at Judge Walker's 383
+ The party from another view 384
+ Young lady's description of C. D. 384
+ Mournful results of boredom 385
+ Down the Mississippi 386
+ Listening and watching 386
+ A levee at St. Louis 386
+ Compliments 387
+ Lord Ashburton's arrival 387
+ Talk with a judge on slavery 388
+ A negro burnt alive 388
+ Feeling of slaves themselves 389
+ American testimony 389
+ Pretty little scene 390
+ A mother and her husband 390
+ The baby 391
+ St. Louis in sight 392
+ Meeting of wife and husband 392
+ Trip to a prairie 393
+ On the prairie at sunset 393
+ General character of scenery 394
+ The prairie described 394
+ Disappointment and enjoyment 394
+ Soiree at Planter's House Inn 395
+ Good fare 395
+ No gray heads in St. Louis 396
+ Dueling 396
+ Mrs. Dickens as a traveler 397
+ From Cincinnati to Columbus 397
+ What a levee is like 398
+ From Columbus to Sandusky 398
+ The travelers alone 399
+ A log house inn 400
+ Making tidy 400
+ A monetary crisis 400
+ Americans not a humorous people 401
+ The only recreations 401
+ From Sandusky to Buffalo 402
+ On Lake Erie 402
+ Reception and consolation of a mayor 403
+ From Buffalo to Niagara 403
+ Nearing the Falls 404
+ The Horse-shoe 404
+ Effect upon him of Niagara 405
+ The old recollection 405
+ Looking forward 406
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV. 1842.
+
+Pages 407-418.
+
+NIAGARA AND MONTREAL. AET. 30.
+
+ Last two letters 407
+ Dickens vanquished 407
+ Obstacles to copyright 408
+ Two described 408
+ Value of literary popularity 409
+ Substitute for literature 410
+ The secretary described 410
+ His paintings 411
+ The lion and ---- 411
+ Toryism of Toronto 412
+ Canadian attentions 412
+ Proposed theatricals 413
+ Last letter 413
+ The private play 414
+ Stage manager's report 414
+ Bill of the performance 415
+ The lady performers 417
+ A touch of Crummles 417
+ HOME 418
+
+ PAGE
+
+Autograph of C. D. (1837) _Fly-leaf_
+
+C. D. aet. 27. From Maclise's Painting, by Graves, A.R.A. _Title-page_
+
+Fac-simile of Letter written in Boyhood 79
+
+Outline of the Maclise Painting of 1839. Engraved by Jeens 178
+
+Apotheosis of Grip the Raven, by Maclise, R.A. 237
+
+Fac-simile of C. D.'s autograph signature Boz (1841) 276
+
+Fac-simile of Invitation to the Public Dinner in New York, with
+ the signatures 309
+
+Fac-simile of Invitation to the Public Ball in New York, with
+ the signatures 309
+
+Fac-simile of the Bill of the Private Play in Canada 415
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFE
+
+OF
+
+CHARLES DICKENS.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+CHILDHOOD
+
+1812-1822.
+
+ Birth at Landport in Portsea--Family of John
+ Dickens--Powers of Observation in Children--Two
+ Years Old--In London, aet. 2-3--In Chatham, aet.
+ 4-9--Vision of Boyhood--The Queer Small
+ Child--Mother's Teaching--Day-School in Rome
+ Lane--Retrospects of Childhood--David
+ Copperfield and Charles Dickens--Access to
+ Small but Good
+ Library--Tragedy-Writing--Comic-Song
+ Singing--Cousin James Lamert--First taken to
+ Theatre--At Mr. Giles's School--Encored in the
+ Recitations--Boyish Recollections--Birthplace
+ of his Fancy--Last Night in Chatham--In
+ London--First Impressions--Bayham Street,
+ Camden-town--Faculty of Early Observation--His
+ Description of his Father--Small Theatre made
+ for him--Sister Fanny at Royal Academy of
+ Music--Walks about London--Biography and
+ Autobiography--At his Godfather's and his
+ Uncle's--First Efforts at Description--"Res
+ Angusta Domi"--Mother exerting Herself--Father
+ in the Marshalsea--Visit to the Prison--Captain
+ Porter--Old Friends disposed of--At the
+ Pawnbroker's.
+
+
+CHARLES DICKENS, the most popular novelist of the century, and one of
+the greatest humorists that England has produced, was born at Landport
+in Portsea on Friday, the 7th of February, 1812.
+
+His father, John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy-pay office, was at this
+time stationed in the Portsmouth dockyard. He had made acquaintance with
+the lady, Elizabeth Barrow, who became afterwards his wife, through her
+elder brother, Thomas Barrow, also engaged on the establishment at
+Somerset House; and she bore him in all a family of eight children, of
+whom two died in infancy. The eldest, Fanny (born 1810), was followed by
+Charles (entered in the baptismal register of Portsea as Charles John
+Huffham, though on the very rare occasions when he subscribed that name
+he wrote Huffam); by another son, named Alfred, who died in childhood;
+by Letitia (born 1816); by another daughter, Harriet, who died also in
+childhood; by Frederick (born 1820); by Alfred Lamert (born 1822); and
+by Augustus (born 1827); of all of whom only the second daughter now
+survives.
+
+Walter Scott tells us, in his fragment of autobiography, speaking of the
+strange remedies applied to his lameness, that he remembered lying on
+the floor in the parlor of his grandfather's farm-house, swathed up in a
+sheepskin warm from the body of the sheep, being then not three years
+old. David Copperfield's memory goes beyond this. He represents himself
+seeing so far back into the blank of his infancy as to discern therein
+his mother and her servant, dwarfed to his sight by stooping down or
+kneeling on the floor, and himself going unsteadily from the one to the
+other. He admits this may be fancy, though he believes the power of
+observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for
+its closeness and accuracy, and thinks that the recollection of most of
+us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose. But
+what he adds is certainly not fancy. "If it should appear from anything
+I may set down in this narrative that I was a child of close
+observation, or that as a man I have a strong memory of my childhood, I
+undoubtedly lay claim to both of these characteristics." Applicable as
+it might be to David Copperfield, this was simply and unaffectedly true
+of Charles Dickens.
+
+He has often told me that he remembered the small front garden to the
+house at Portsea, from which he was taken away when he was two years
+old, and where, watched by a nurse through a low kitchen-window almost
+level with the gravel walk, he trotted about with something to eat, and
+his little elder sister with him. He was carried from the garden one day
+to see the soldiers exercise; and I perfectly recollect that, on our
+being at Portsmouth together while he was writing _Nickleby_, he
+recognized the exact shape of the military parade seen by him as a very
+infant, on the same spot, a quarter of a century before.
+
+When his father was again brought up by his duties to London from
+Portsmouth, they went into lodgings in Norfolk Street, Middlesex
+Hospital; and it lived also in the child's memory that they had come
+away from Portsea in the snow. Their home, shortly after, was again
+changed, on the elder Dickens being placed upon duty in Chatham
+dockyard; and the house where he lived in Chatham, which had a
+plain-looking whitewashed plaster front and a small garden before and
+behind, was in St. Mary's Place, otherwise called the Brook, and next
+door to a Baptist meeting-house called Providence Chapel, of which a Mr.
+Giles, to be presently mentioned, was minister. Charles at this time
+was between four and five years old;[1] and here he stayed till he was
+nine. Here the most durable of his early impressions were received; and
+the associations that were around him when he died were those which at
+the outset of his life had affected him most strongly.
+
+The house called Gadshill Place stands on the strip of highest ground in
+the main road between Rochester and Gravesend. Often had we traveled
+past it together, years and years before it became his home, and never
+without some allusion to what he told me when first I saw it in his
+company, that amid the recollections connected with his childhood it
+held always a prominent place, for, upon first seeing it as he came from
+Chatham with his father, and looking up at it with much admiration, he
+had been promised that he might himself live in it, or in some such
+house, when he came to be a man, if he would only work hard enough.
+Which for a long time was his ambition. The story is a pleasant one, and
+receives authentic confirmation at the opening of one of his essays on
+traveling abroad, when as he passes along the road to Canterbury there
+crosses it a vision of his former self:
+
+"So smooth was the old high-road, and so fresh were the horses, and so
+fast went I, that it was midway between Gravesend and Rochester, and the
+widening river was bearing the ships, white-sailed or black-smoked, out
+to sea, when I noticed by the wayside a very queer small boy.
+
+"'Holloa!' said I to the very queer small boy, 'where do you live?'
+
+"'At Chatham,' says he.
+
+"'What do you do there?' says I.
+
+"'I go to school,' says he.
+
+"I took him up in a moment, and we went on. Presently, the very queer
+small boy says, 'This is Gadshill we are coming to, where Falstaff went
+out to rob those travelers, and ran away.'
+
+"'You know something about Falstaff, eh?' said I.
+
+"'All about him,' said the very queer small boy. 'I am old (I am nine),
+and I read all sorts of books. But _do_ let us stop at the top of the
+hill, and look at the house there, if you please!'
+
+"'You admire that house?' said I.
+
+"'Bless you, sir,' said the very queer small boy, 'when I was not more
+than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be brought to
+look at it. And now I am nine, I come by myself to look at it. And ever
+since I can recollect, my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often
+said to me, _If you were to be very persevering and were to work hard,
+you might some day come to live in it_. Though that's impossible!' said
+the very queer small boy, drawing a low breath, and now staring at the
+house out of window with all his might.
+
+"I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy; for
+that house happens to be _my_ house, and I have reason to believe that
+what he said was true."
+
+The queer small boy was indeed his very self. He was a very little and a
+very sickly boy. He was subject to attacks of violent spasm which
+disabled him for any active exertion. He was never a good little
+cricket-player. He was never a first-rate hand at marbles, or peg-top,
+or prisoner's base. But he had great pleasure in watching the other
+boys, officers' sons for the most part, at these games, reading while
+they played; and he had always the belief that this early sickness had
+brought to himself one inestimable advantage, in the circumstance of his
+weak health having strongly inclined him to reading. It will not appear,
+as my narrative moves on, that he owed much to his parents, or was other
+than in his first letter to Washington Irving he described himself to
+have been, a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy;"
+but he has frequently been heard to say that his first desire for
+knowledge, and his earliest passion for reading, were awakened by his
+mother, who taught him the first rudiments not only of English, but
+also, a little later, of Latin. She taught him regularly every day for a
+long time, and taught him, he was convinced, thoroughly well. I once put
+to him a question in connection with this to which he replied in almost
+exactly the words he placed five years later in the mouth of David
+Copperfield: "I faintly remember her teaching me the alphabet; and when
+I look upon the fat black letters in the primer, the puzzling novelty of
+their shapes, and the easy good nature of O and S, always seem to
+present themselves before me as they used to do."
+
+Then followed the preparatory day-school, a school for girls and boys to
+which he went with his sister Fanny, and which was in a place called
+Rome (pronounced Room) Lane. Revisiting Chatham in his manhood, and
+looking for the place, he found it had been pulled down to make a new
+street, "ages" before; but out of the distance of the ages arose
+nevertheless a not dim impression that it had been over a dyer's shop;
+that he went up steps to it; that he had frequently grazed his knees in
+doing so; and that in trying to scrape the mud off a very unsteady
+little shoe, he generally got his leg over the scraper.[2] Other similar
+memories of childhood have dropped from him occasionally in his lesser
+writings; whose readers may remember how vividly portions of his boyhood
+are reproduced in his fancy of the Christmas-tree, and will hardly have
+forgotten what he says, in his thoughtful little paper on Nurses'
+stories, of the doubtful places and people to which children may be
+introduced before they are six years old, and forced, night after night,
+to go back to against their wills, by servants to whom they are
+intrusted. That childhood exaggerates what it sees, too, has he not
+tenderly told? How he thought the Rochester High Street must be at least
+as wide as Regent Street, which he afterwards discovered to be little
+better than a lane; how the public clock in it, supposed to be the
+finest clock in the world, turned out to be as moon-faced and weak a
+clock as a man's eyes ever saw; and how in its town-hall, which had
+appeared to him once so glorious a structure that he had set it up in
+his mind as the model on which the genie of the lamp built the palace
+for Aladdin, he had painfully to recognize a mere mean little heap of
+bricks, like a chapel gone demented. Yet not so painfully, either, when
+second thoughts wisely came. "Ah! who was I that I should quarrel with
+the town for being changed to me, when I myself had come back, so
+changed, to it? All my early readings and early imaginations dated from
+this place, and I took them away so full of innocent construction and
+guileless belief, and I brought them back so worn and torn, so much the
+wiser and so much the worse!"
+
+And here I may at once expressly mention, what already has been hinted,
+that even as Fielding described himself and his belongings in Captain
+Booth and Amelia, and protested always that he had writ in his books
+nothing more than he had seen in life, so it may be said of Dickens in
+more especial relation to David Copperfield. Many guesses have been made
+since his death, connecting David's autobiography with his own;
+accounting, by means of such actual experiences, for the so frequent
+recurrence in his writings of the prison-life, its humor and pathos,
+described in them with such wonderful reality; and discovering in what
+David tells Steerforth at school of the stories he had read in his
+childhood, what it was that had given the bent to his own genius. There
+is not only truth in all this, but it will very shortly be seen that the
+identity went deeper than any had supposed, and covered experiences not
+less startling in the reality than they appear to be in the fiction.
+
+Of the "readings" and "imaginations" which he describes as brought away
+from Chatham, this authority can tell us. It is one of the many passages
+in _Copperfield_ which are literally true, and its proper place is here.
+"My father had left a small collection of books in a little room
+up-stairs to which I had access (for it adjoined my own), and which
+nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room,
+_Roderick Random_, _Peregrine Pickle_, _Humphrey Clinker_, _Tom Jones_,
+the _Vicar of Wakefield_, _Don Quixote_, _Gil Blas_, and _Robinson
+Crusoe_ came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive
+my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time,--they,
+and the _Arabian Nights_ and the _Tales of the Genii_,--and did me no
+harm; for whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me; _I_
+knew nothing of it. It is astonishing to me now how I found time, in the
+midst of my porings and blunderings over heavier themes, to read those
+books as I did. It is curious to me how I could ever have consoled
+myself under my small troubles (which were great troubles to me), by
+impersonating my favorite characters in them. . . . I have been Tom Jones
+(a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together. I have
+sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I
+verily believe. I had a greedy relish for a few volumes of voyages and
+travels--I forget what, now--that were on those shelves; and for days
+and days I can remember to have gone about my region of our house, armed
+with the centre-piece out of an old set of boot-trees: the perfect
+realization of Captain Somebody, of the royal British Navy, in danger of
+being beset by savages, and resolved to sell his life at a great
+price. . . . When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a
+summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my
+bed, reading as if for life. Every barn in the neighborhood, every stone
+in the church, and every foot of the churchyard, had some association of
+its own, in my mind, connected with these books, and stood for some
+locality made famous in them. I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the
+church-steeple; I have watched Strap, with the knapsack on his back,
+stopping to rest himself upon the wicket-gate; and I _know_ that
+Commodore Trunnion held that club with Mr. Pickle, in the parlor of our
+little village ale-house." Every word of this personal recollection had
+been written down as fact, some years before it found its way into
+_David Copperfield_; the only change in the fiction being his omission
+of the name of a cheap series of novelists then in course of
+publication, by which his father had become happily the owner of so
+large a lump of literary treasure in his small collection of books.
+
+The usual result followed. The child took to writing, himself, and
+became famous in his childish circle for having written a tragedy called
+_Misnar_, the Sultan of India, founded (and very literally founded, no
+doubt) on one of the _Tales of the Genii_. Nor was this his only
+distinction. He told a story offhand so well, and sang small comic songs
+so especially well, that he used to be elevated on chairs and tables,
+both at home and abroad, for more effective display of these talents;
+and when he first told me of this, at one of the Twelfth-night parties
+on his eldest son's birthday, he said he never recalled it that his own
+shrill little voice of childhood did not again tingle in his ears, and
+he blushed to think what a horrible little nuisance he must have been to
+many unoffending grown-up people who were called upon to admire him.
+
+His chief ally and encourager in these displays was a youth of some
+ability, much older than himself, named James Lamert, stepson to his
+mother's sister, and therefore a sort of cousin, who was his great
+patron and friend in his childish days. Mary, the eldest daughter of
+Charles Barrow, himself a lieutenant in the navy, had for her first
+husband a commander in the navy called Allen; on whose death by drowning
+at Rio Janeiro she had joined her sister, the navy-pay clerk's wife, at
+Chatham; in which place she subsequently took for her second husband Dr.
+Lamert, an army-surgeon, whose son James, even after he had been sent to
+Sandhurst for his education, continued still to visit Chatham from time
+to time. He had a turn for private theatricals; and as his father's
+quarters were in the ordnance hospital there, a great rambling place
+otherwise at that time almost uninhabited, he had plenty of room in
+which to get up his entertainments. The staff-doctor himself played his
+part, and his portrait will be found in _Pickwick_.
+
+By Lamert, I have often heard him say, he was first taken to the
+theatre at the very tenderest age. He could hardly, however, have been
+younger than Charles Lamb, whose first experience was of having seen
+_Artaxerxes_ when six years old; and certainly not younger than Walter
+Scott, who was only four when he saw _As You Like It_ on the Bath stage,
+and remembered having screamed out, _Ain't they brothers?_ when
+scandalized by Orlando and Oliver beginning to fight.[3] But he was at
+any rate old enough to recollect how his young heart leaped with terror
+as the wicked king Richard, struggling for life against the virtuous
+Richmond, backed up and bumped against the box in which he was; and
+subsequent visits to the same sanctuary, as he tells us, revealed to him
+many wondrous secrets, "of which not the least terrific were, that the
+witches in _Macbeth_ bore an awful resemblance to the thanes and other
+proper inhabitants of Scotland; and that the good king Duncan couldn't
+rest in his grave, but was constantly coming out of it and calling
+himself somebody else."
+
+During the last two years of Charles's residence at Chatham, he was sent
+to a school kept in Clover Lane by the young Baptist minister already
+named, Mr. William Giles. I have the picture of him here, very strongly
+in my mind, as a sensitive, thoughtful, feeble-bodied little boy, with
+an unusual sort of knowledge and fancy for such a child, and with a
+dangerous kind of wandering intelligence that a teacher might turn to
+good or evil, happiness or misery, as he directed it. Nor does the
+influence of Mr. Giles, such as it was, seem to have been other than
+favorable. Charles had himself a not ungrateful sense in after-years
+that this first of his masters, in his little-cared-for childhood, had
+pronounced him to be a boy of capacity; and when, about half-way through
+the publication of _Pickwick_, his old teacher sent a silver snuff-box
+with admiring inscription to the "inimitable Boz," it reminded him of
+praise far more precious obtained by him at his first year's examination
+in the Clover Lane academy, when his recitation of a piece out of the
+_Humorist's Miscellany_ about Doctor Bolus had received, unless his
+youthful vanity bewildered him, a double encore. A habit, the only bad
+one taught him by Mr. Giles, of taking for a time, in very moderate
+quantities, the snuff called Irish blackguard, was the result of this
+gift from his old master; but he abandoned it after some few years, and
+it was never resumed.
+
+It was in the boys' playing-ground near Clover Lane in which the school
+stood, that, according to one of his youthful memories, he had been, in
+the hay-making time, delivered from the dungeons of Seringapatam, an
+immense pile "(of haycock)," by his countrymen the victorious British
+"(boy next door and his two cousins)," and had been recognized with
+ecstasy by his affianced one "(Miss Green)," who had come all the way
+from England "(second house in the terrace)" to ransom and marry him. It
+was in this playing-field, too, as he has himself recorded, he first
+heard in confidence from one whose father was greatly connected, "being
+under government," of the existence of a terrible banditti called _the
+radicals_, whose principles were that the prince-regent wore stays, that
+nobody had a right to any salary, and that the army and navy ought to be
+put down; horrors at which he trembled in his bed, after supplicating
+that the radicals might be speedily taken and hanged. Nor was it the
+least of the disappointments of his visit in after-life to the scenes of
+his boyhood that he found this play-field had been swallowed up by a
+railway station. It was gone, with its two beautiful trees of hawthorn;
+and where the hedge, the turf, and all the buttercups and daisies had
+been, there was nothing but the stoniest of jolting roads.
+
+He was not much over nine years old when his father was recalled from
+Chatham to Somerset House, and he had to leave this good master, and the
+old place endeared to him by recollections that clung to him afterwards
+all his life long. It was here he had made the acquaintance not only of
+the famous books that David Copperfield specially names, of _Roderick
+Random_, _Peregrine Pickle_, _Humphrey Clinker_, _Tom Jones_, the _Vicar
+of Wakefield_, _Don Quixote_, _Gil Blas_, _Robinson Crusoe_, the
+_Arabian Nights_, and the _Tales of the Genii_, but also of the
+_Spectator_, the _Tatler_, the _Idler_, the _Citizen of the World_, and
+Mrs. Inchbald's _Collection of Farces_. These latter had been, as well,
+in the little library to which access was open to him; and of all of
+them his earliest remembrance was the having read them over and over at
+Chatham, not for the first, the second, or the third time. They were a
+host of friends when he had no single friend; and in leaving the place,
+I have often heard him say, he seemed to be leaving them too, and
+everything that had given his ailing little life its picturesqueness or
+sunshine. It was the birthplace of his fancy; and he hardly knew what
+store he had set by its busy varieties of change and scene, until he saw
+the falling cloud that was to hide its pictures from him forever. The
+gay bright regiments always going and coming, the continual paradings
+and firings, the successions of sham sieges and sham defenses, the plays
+got up by his cousin in the hospital, the navy-pay yacht in which he had
+sailed to Sheerness with his father, and the ships floating out in the
+Medway with their far visions of sea,--he was to lose them all. He was
+never to watch the boys at their games any more, or see them sham over
+again the sham sieges and sham defenses. He was to be taken to London
+inside the stage-coach Commodore; and Kentish woods and fields, Cobham
+park and hall, Rochester cathedral and castle, and all the wonderful
+romance together, including the red-cheeked baby he had been wildly in
+love with, were to vanish like a dream. "On the night before we came
+away," he told me, "my good master came flitting in among the
+packing-cases to give me Goldsmith's _Bee_ as a keepsake. Which I kept
+for his sake, and its own, a long time afterwards." A longer time
+afterwards he recollected the stage-coach journey, and said in one of
+his published papers that never had he forgotten, through all the
+intervening years, the smell of the damp straw in which he was packed
+and forwarded like game, carriage-paid. "There was no other inside
+passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and
+it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I expected
+to find it."
+
+The earliest impressions received and retained by him in London were of
+his father's money involvements; and now first he heard mentioned "the
+deed," representing that crisis of his father's affairs in fact which is
+ascribed in fiction to Mr. Micawber's. He knew it in later days to have
+been a composition with creditors; though at this earlier date he was
+conscious of having confounded it with parchments of a much more
+demoniacal description. One result from the awful document soon showed
+itself in enforced retrenchment. The family had to take up its abode in
+a house in Bayham Street, Camden-town.
+
+Bayham Street was about the poorest part of the London suburbs then, and
+the house was a mean small tenement, with a wretched little back-garden
+abutting on a squalid court. Here was no place for new acquaintances to
+him: no boys were near with whom he might hope to become in any way
+familiar. A washerwoman lived next door, and a Bow-Street officer lived
+over the way. Many, many times has he spoken to me of this, and how he
+seemed at once to fall into a solitary condition apart from all other
+boys of his own age, and to sink into a neglected state at home which
+had been always quite unaccountable to him. "As I thought," he said on
+one occasion very bitterly, "in the little back-garret in Bayham Street,
+of all I had lost in losing Chatham, what would I have given, if I had
+had anything to give, to have been sent back to any other school, to
+have been taught something anywhere!" He was at another school already,
+not knowing it. The self-education forced upon him was teaching him, all
+unconsciously as yet, what, for the future that awaited him, it most
+behooved him to know.
+
+That he took, from the very beginning of this Bayham-Street life, his
+first impression of that struggling poverty which is nowhere more
+vividly shown than in the commoner streets of the ordinary London
+suburb, and which enriched his earliest writings with a freshness of
+original humor and quite unstudied pathos that gave them much of their
+sudden popularity, there cannot be a doubt. "I certainly understood it,"
+he has often said to me, "quite as well then as I do now." But he was
+not conscious yet that he did so understand it, or of the influence it
+was exerting on his life even then. It seems almost too much to assert
+of a child, say at nine or ten years old, that his observation of
+everything was as close and good, or that he had as much intuitive
+understanding of the character and weaknesses of the grown-up people
+around him, as when the same keen and wonderful faculty had made him
+famous among men. But my experience of him led me to put implicit faith
+in the assertion he unvaryingly himself made, that he had never seen any
+cause to correct or change what in his boyhood was his own secret
+impression of anybody whom he had had, as a grown man, the opportunity
+of testing in later years.
+
+How it came that, being what he was, he should now have fallen into the
+misery and neglect of the time about to be described, was a subject on
+which thoughts were frequently interchanged between us; and on one
+occasion he gave me a sketch of the character of his father, which, as I
+can here repeat it in the exact words employed by him, will be the best
+preface I can make to what I feel that I have no alternative but to
+tell. "I know my father to be as kind-hearted and generous a man as
+ever lived in the world. Everything that I can remember of his conduct
+to his wife, or children, or friends, in sickness or affliction, is
+beyond all praise. By me, as a sick child, he has watched night and day,
+unweariedly and patiently, many nights and days. He never undertook any
+business, charge, or trust, that he did not zealously, conscientiously,
+punctually, honorably discharge. His industry has always been untiring.
+He was proud of me, in his way, and had a great admiration of the comic
+singing. But, in the ease of his temper, and the straitness of his
+means, he appeared to have utterly lost at this time the idea of
+educating me at all, and to have utterly put from him the notion that I
+had any claim upon him, in that regard, whatever. So I degenerated into
+cleaning his boots of a morning, and my own; and making myself useful in
+the work of the little house; and looking after my younger brothers and
+sisters (we were now six in all); and going on such poor errands as
+arose out of our poor way of living."
+
+The cousin by marriage of whom I have spoken, James Lamert, who had
+lately completed his education at Sandhurst and was waiting in hopes of
+a commission, lived now with the family in Bayham Street, and had not
+lost his taste for the stage, or his ingenuities in connection with it.
+Taking pity on the solitary lad, he made and painted a little theatre
+for him. It was the only fanciful reality of his present life; but it
+could not supply what he missed most sorely, the companionship of boys
+of his own age, with whom he might share in the advantages of school and
+contend for its prizes. His sister Fanny was at about this time elected
+as a pupil to the Royal Academy of Music; and he has told me what a
+stab to his heart it was, thinking of his own disregarded condition, to
+see her go away to begin her education, amid the tearful good wishes of
+everybody in the house.
+
+Nevertheless, as time went on, his own education still unconsciously
+went on as well, under the sternest and most potent of teachers; and,
+neglected and miserable as he was, he managed gradually to transfer to
+London all the dreaminess and all the romance with which he had invested
+Chatham. There were then at the top of Bayham Street some almshouses,
+and were still when he revisited it with me nearly twenty-seven years
+ago; and to go to this spot, he told me, and look from it over the
+dust-heaps and dock-leaves and fields (no longer there when we saw it
+together) at the cupola of St. Paul's looming through the smoke, was a
+treat that served him for hours of vague reflection afterwards. To be
+taken out for a walk into the real town, especially if it were anywhere
+about Covent Garden or the Strand, perfectly entranced him with
+pleasure. But most of all he had a profound attraction of repulsion to
+St. Giles's. If he could only induce whomsoever took him out to take him
+through Seven-Dials, he was supremely happy. "Good Heaven!" he would
+exclaim, "what wild visions of prodigies of wickedness, want, and
+beggary arose in my mind out of that place!" He was all this time, the
+reader will remember, still subject to continual attacks of illness,
+and, by reason of them, a very small boy even for his age.
+
+That part of his boyhood is now very near of which, when the days of
+fame and prosperity came to him, he felt the weight upon his memory as
+a painful burden until he could lighten it by sharing it with a friend;
+and an accident I will presently mention led him first to reveal it.
+There is, however, an interval of some months still to be described, of
+which, from conversations or letters that passed between us, after or
+because of this confidence, and that already have yielded fruit to these
+pages, I can supply some vague and desultory notices. The use thus made
+of them, it is due to myself to remark, was contemplated then; for
+though, long before his death, I had ceased to believe it likely that I
+should survive to write about him, he had never withdrawn the wish at
+this early time strongly expressed, or the confidences, not only then
+but to the very eve of his death reposed in me, that were to enable me
+to fulfill it.[4] The fulfillment indeed he had himself rendered more
+easy by partially uplifting the veil in _David Copperfield_.
+
+The visits made from Bayham Street were chiefly to two connections of
+the family, his mother's elder brother and his godfather. The latter,
+who was a rigger, and mast-, oar-, and block-maker, lived at Limehouse
+in a substantial handsome sort of way, and was kind to his godchild. It
+was always a great treat to him to go to Mr. Huffham's; and the London
+night-sights as he returned were a perpetual joy and marvel. Here, too,
+the comic-singing accomplishment was brought into play so greatly to the
+admiration of one of the godfather's guests, an honest boat-builder,
+that he pronounced the little lad to be a "progidy." The visits to the
+uncle who was at this time fellow-clerk with his father, in Somerset
+House, were nearer home. Mr. Thomas Barrow, the eldest of his mother's
+family, had broken his leg in a fall; and, while laid up with this
+illness, his lodging was in Gerrard Street, Soho, in the upper part of
+the house of a worthy gentleman then recently deceased, a bookseller
+named Manson, father to the partner in the celebrated firm of Christie &
+Manson, whose widow at this time carried on the business. Attracted by
+the look of the lad as he went up-stairs, these good people lent him
+books to amuse him; among them Miss Porter's _Scottish Chiefs_,
+Holbein's _Dance of Death_, and George Colman's _Broad Grins_. The
+latter seized his fancy very much; and he was so impressed by its
+description of Covent Garden, in the piece called "The Elder Brother,"
+that he stole down to the market by himself to compare it with the book.
+He remembered, as he said in telling me this, snuffing up the flavor of
+the faded cabbage-leaves as if it were the very breath of comic fiction.
+Nor was he far wrong, as comic fiction then and for some time after was.
+It was reserved for himself to give sweeter and fresher breath to it.
+Many years were to pass first, but he was beginning already to make the
+trial.
+
+His uncle was shaved by a very odd old barber out of Dean Street, Soho,
+who was never tired of reviewing the events of the last war, and
+especially of detecting Napoleon's mistakes, and rearranging his whole
+life for him on a plan of his own. The boy wrote a description of this
+old barber, but never had courage to show it. At about the same time,
+taking for his model the description of the canon's housekeeper in _Gil
+Blas_, he sketched a deaf old woman who waited on them in Bayham Street,
+and who made delicate hashes with walnut-ketchup. As little did he dare
+to show this, either; though he thought it, himself, extremely clever.
+
+In Bayham Street, meanwhile, affairs were going on badly; the poor boy's
+visits to his uncle, while the latter was still kept a prisoner by his
+accident, were interrupted by another attack of fever; and on his
+recovery the mysterious "deed" had again come uppermost. His father's
+resources were so low, and all his expedients so thoroughly exhausted,
+that trial was to be made whether his mother might not come to the
+rescue. The time was arrived for her to exert herself, she said; and she
+"must do something." The godfather down at Limehouse was reported to
+have an Indian connection. People in the East Indies always sent their
+children home to be educated. She would set up a school. They would all
+grow rich by it. And then, thought the sick boy, "perhaps even I might
+go to school myself."
+
+A house was soon found at number four, Gower Street north; a large brass
+plate on the door announced MRS. DICKENS'S ESTABLISHMENT; and the result
+I can give in the exact words of the then small actor in the comedy,
+whose hopes it had raised so high: "I left, at a great many other doors,
+a great many circulars calling attention to the merits of the
+establishment. Yet nobody ever came to school, nor do I recollect that
+anybody ever proposed to come, or that the least preparation was made to
+receive anybody. But I know that we got on very badly with the butcher
+and baker; that very often we had not too much for dinner; and that at
+last my father was arrested." The interval between the sponging-house
+and the prison was passed by the sorrowful lad in running errands and
+carrying messages for the prisoner, delivered with swollen eyes and
+through shining tears; and the last words said to him by his father
+before he was finally carried to the Marshalsea were to the effect that
+the sun was set upon him forever. "I really believed at the time," said
+Dickens to me, "that they had broken my heart." He took afterwards ample
+revenge for this false alarm by making all the world laugh at them in
+_David Copperfield_.
+
+The readers of Mr. Micawber's history who remember David's first visit
+to the Marshalsea prison, and how upon seeing the turnkey he recalled
+the turnkey in the blanket in _Roderick Random_, will read with curious
+interest what follows, written as a personal experience of fact two or
+three years before the fiction had even entered into his thoughts:
+
+"My father was waiting for me in the lodge, and we went up to his room
+(on the top story but one), and cried very much. And he told me, I
+remember, to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if a
+man had twenty pounds a year and spent nineteen pounds nineteen
+shillings and sixpence, he would be happy; but that a shilling spent the
+other way would make him wretched. I see the fire we sat before, now;
+with two bricks inside the rusted grate, one on each side, to prevent
+its burning too many coals. Some other debtor shared the room with him,
+who came in by-and-by; and, as the dinner was a joint-stock repast, I
+was sent up to 'Captain Porter' in the room overhead, with Mr. Dickens's
+compliments, and I was his son, and could he, Captain P., lend me a
+knife and fork?
+
+"Captain Porter lent the knife and fork, with his compliments in return.
+There was a very dirty lady in his little room; and two wan girls, his
+daughters, with shock heads of hair. I thought I should not have liked
+to borrow Captain Porter's comb. The captain himself was in the last
+extremity of shabbiness; and if I could draw at all, I would draw an
+accurate portrait of the old, old, brown great-coat he wore, with no
+other coat below it. His whiskers were large. I saw his bed rolled up in
+a corner; and what plates, and dishes, and pots he had, on a shelf; and
+I knew (God knows how) that the two girls with the shock heads were
+Captain Porter's natural children, and that the dirty lady was not
+married to Captain P. My timid, wondering station on his threshold was
+not occupied more than a couple of minutes, I dare say; but I came down
+again to the room below with all this as surely in my knowledge as the
+knife and fork were in my hand."
+
+How there was something agreeable and gipsy-like in the dinner after
+all, and how he took back the captain's knife and fork early in the
+afternoon, and how he went home to comfort his mother with an account of
+his visit, David Copperfield has also accurately told. Then, at home,
+came many miserable daily struggles that seemed to last an immense time,
+yet did not perhaps cover many weeks. Almost everything by degrees was
+sold or pawned, little Charles being the principal agent in those
+sorrowful transactions. Such of the books as had been brought from
+Chatham--_Peregrine Pickle_, _Roderick Random_, _Tom Jones_, _Humphrey
+Clinker_, and all the rest--went first. They were carried off from the
+little chiffonier, which his father called the library, to a bookseller
+in the Hampstead Road, the same that David Copperfield describes as in
+the City Road; and the account of the sales, as they actually occurred
+and were told to me long before David was born, was reproduced word for
+word in his imaginary narrative: "The keeper of this bookstall, who
+lived in a little house behind it, used to get tipsy every night, and to
+be violently scolded by his wife every morning. More than once, when I
+went there early, I had audience of him in a turn-up bedstead, with a
+cut in his forehead or a black eye bearing witness to his excesses
+overnight (I am afraid he was quarrelsome in his drink); and he, with a
+shaking hand, endeavoring to find the needful shillings in one or other
+of the pockets of his clothes, which lay upon the floor, while his wife,
+with a baby in her arms and her shoes down at heel, never left off
+rating him. Sometimes he had lost his money, and then he would ask me to
+call again; but his wife had always got some (had taken his, I dare say,
+while he was drunk), and secretly completed the bargain on the stairs,
+as we went down together."
+
+The same pawnbroker's shop, too, which was so well known to David,
+became not less familiar to Charles; and a good deal of notice was here
+taken of him by the pawnbroker, or by his principal clerk who officiated
+behind the counter, and who, while making out the duplicate, liked of
+all things to hear the lad conjugate a Latin verb and translate or
+decline his _musa_ and _dominus_. Everything to this accompaniment went
+gradually; until, at last, even of the furniture of Gower Street number
+four there was nothing left except a few chairs, a kitchen table, and
+some beds. Then they encamped, as it were, in the two parlors of the
+emptied house, and lived there night and day.
+
+All which is but the prelude to what remains to be described.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] "I shall cut this letter short, for they are playing Masaniello in
+the drawing-room, and I feel much as I used to do when I was a small
+child a few miles off, and Somebody (who, I wonder, and which way did
+_She_ go, when she died) hummed the evening hymn to me, and I cried on
+the pillow,--either with the remorseful consciousness of having kicked
+Somebody else, or because still Somebody else had hurt my feelings in
+the course of the day." From Gadshill, 24 Sept. 1857. "Being here again,
+or as much here as anywhere in particular."
+
+[2] "The mistress of the establishment holds no place in our memory;
+but, rampant on one eternal door-mat, in an eternal entry long and
+narrow, is a puffy pug-dog, with a personal animosity towards us, who
+triumphs over Time. The bark of that baleful Pug, a certain radiating
+way he had of snapping at our undefended legs, the ghastly grinning of
+his moist black muzzle and white teeth, and the insolence of his crisp
+tail curled like a pastoral crook, all live and flourish. From an
+otherwise unaccountable association of him with a fiddle, we conclude
+that he was of French extraction, and his name _Fidele_. He belonged to
+some female, chiefly inhabiting a back parlor, whose life appears to us
+to have been consumed in sniffing, and in wearing a brown beaver
+bonnet."--_Reprinted Pieces_, 287. (In such quotations as are made from
+his writings, the _Charles Dickens Edition_ will be used.)
+
+[3] "A few weeks' residence at home convinced me, who had till then been
+an only child in the house of my grandfather, that a quarrel between
+brothers was a very natural event."--Lockhart's _Life_, i. 30.
+
+[4] The reader will forgive my quoting from a letter of the date of the
+22d April, 1848. "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." "You know me better," he wrote, resuming
+the same subject on the 6th of July, 1862, "than any other man does, or
+ever will." In an entry of my diary during the interval between these
+years, I find a few words that not only mark the time when I first saw
+in its connected shape the autobiographical fragment which will form the
+substance of the second chapter of this biography, but also express his
+own feeling respecting it when written: "20 January, 1849. The
+description may make none of the impression on others that the reality
+made on him. . . . Highly probable that it may never see the light. No
+wish. Left to J. F. or others." The first number of _David Copperfield_
+appeared five months after this date; but though I knew, even before he
+adapted his fragment of autobiography to the eleventh number, that he
+had now abandoned the notion of completing it under his own name, the
+"_no wish_," or the discretion left me, was never in any way
+subsequently modified. What follows, from the same entry, refers to the
+manuscript of the fragment: "No blotting, as when writing fiction; but
+straight on, as when writing ordinary letter."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+HARD EXPERIENCES IN BOYHOOD.
+
+1822-1824.
+
+ Mr. Dilke's Half-crown--Story of Boyhood
+ told--D. C. and C. D.--Enterprise of the
+ Cousins Lamert--First Employment in
+ Life--Blacking-Warehouse--A Poor Little
+ Drudge--Bob Fagin and Poll Green--"Facilis
+ Descensus"--Crushed Hopes--The Home in Gower
+ Street--Regaling Alamode--Home broken up--At
+ Mrs. Roylance's in Camden-town--Sundays in
+ Prison--Pudding-Shops and Coffee-Shops--What
+ was and might have been--Thomas and Harry--A
+ Lodging in Lant Street--Meals in the
+ Marshalsea--C. D. and the
+ Marchioness--Originals of Garland
+ Family--Adventure with Bob
+ Fagin--Saturday-Night Shows--Appraised
+ officially--Publican and Wife at Cannon
+ Row--Marshalsea Incident in
+ _Copperfield_--Incident as it
+ occurred--Materials for _Pickwick_--Sister
+ Fanny's Musical Prize--From Hungerford Stairs
+ to Chandos Street--Father's Quarrel with James
+ Lamert--Quits the Warehouse--Bitter
+ Associations of Servitude--What became of the
+ Blacking-Business.
+
+
+THE incidents to be told now would probably never have been known to me,
+or indeed any of the occurrences of his childhood and youth, but for the
+accident of a question which I put to him one day in the March or April
+of 1847.
+
+I asked if he remembered ever having seen in his boyhood our friend the
+elder Mr. Dilke, his father's acquaintance and contemporary, who had
+been a clerk in the same office in Somerset House to which Mr. John
+Dickens belonged. Yes, he said, he recollected seeing him at a house in
+Gerrard Street, where his uncle Barrow lodged during an illness, and Mr.
+Dilke had visited him. Never at any other time. Upon which I told him
+that some one else had been intended in the mention made to me, for that
+the reference implied not merely his being met accidentally, but his
+having had some juvenile employment in a warehouse near the Strand; at
+which place Mr. Dilke, being with the elder Dickens one day, had noticed
+him, and received, in return for the gift of a half-crown, a very low
+bow. He was silent for several minutes; I felt that I had
+unintentionally touched a painful place in his memory; and to Mr. Dilke
+I never spoke of the subject again. It was not, however, then, but some
+weeks later, that Dickens made further allusion to my thus having struck
+unconsciously upon a time of which he never could lose the remembrance
+while he remembered anything, and the recollection of which, at
+intervals, haunted him and made him miserable, even to that hour.
+
+Very shortly afterwards I learnt in all their detail the incidents that
+had been so painful to him, and what then was said to me or written
+respecting them revealed the story of his boyhood. The idea of _David
+Copperfield_, which was to take all the world into his confidence, had
+not at this time occurred to him; but what it had so startled me to
+know, his readers were afterwards told with only such change or addition
+as for the time might sufficiently disguise himself under cover of his
+hero. For the poor little lad, with good ability and a most sensitive
+nature, turned at the age of ten into a "laboring hind" in the service
+of "Murdstone and Grinby," and conscious already of what made it seem
+very strange to him that he could so easily have been thrown away at
+such an age, was indeed himself. His was the secret agony of soul at
+finding himself "companion to Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes," and his
+the tears that mingled with the water in which he and they rinsed and
+washed out bottles. It had all been written, as fact, before he thought
+of any other use for it; and it was not until several months later, when
+the fancy of _David Copperfield_, itself suggested by what he had so
+written of his early troubles, began to take shape in his mind, that he
+abandoned his first intention of writing his own life. Those warehouse
+experiences fell then so aptly into the subject he had chosen, that he
+could not resist the temptation of immediately using them; and the
+manuscript recording them, which was but the first portion of what he
+had designed to write, was embodied in the substance of the eleventh and
+earlier chapters of his novel. What already had been sent to me,
+however, and proof-sheets of the novel interlined at the time, enable me
+now to separate the fact from the fiction, and to supply to the story of
+the author's childhood those passages, omitted from the book, which,
+apart from their illustration of the growth of his character, present to
+us a picture of tragical suffering, and of tender as well as humorous
+fancy, unsurpassed in even the wonders of his published writings.
+
+The person indirectly responsible for the scenes to be described was the
+young relative James Lamert, the cousin by his aunt's marriage of whom I
+have made frequent mention, who got up the plays at Chatham, and after
+passing at Sandhurst had been living with the family in Bayham Street in
+the hope of obtaining a commission in the army. This did not come until
+long afterwards, when, in consideration of his father's services, he
+received it, and relinquished it then in favor of a younger brother; but
+he had meanwhile, before the family removed from Camden-town, ceased to
+live with them. The husband of a sister of his (of the same name as
+himself, being indeed his cousin, George Lamert), a man of some
+property, had recently embarked in an odd sort of commercial
+speculation, and had taken him into his office and his house, to assist
+in it. I give now the fragment of the autobiography of Dickens:
+
+"This speculation was a rivalry of 'Warren's Blacking, 30, Strand,'--at
+that time very famous. One Jonathan Warren (the famous one was Robert),
+living at 30, Hungerford Stairs, or Market, Strand (for I forget which
+it was called then), claimed to have been the original inventor or
+proprietor of the blacking-recipe, and to have been deposed and ill used
+by his renowned relation. At last he put himself in the way of selling
+his recipe, and his name, and his 30, Hungerford Stairs, Strand (30,
+Strand, very large, and the intermediate direction very small), for an
+annuity; and he set forth by his agents that a little capital would make
+a great business of it. The man of some property was found in George
+Lamert, the cousin and brother-in-law of James. He bought this right and
+title, and went into the blacking-business and the blacking-premises.
+
+"--In an evil hour for me, as I often bitterly thought. Its chief
+manager, James Lamert, the relative who had lived with us in Bayham
+Street, seeing how I was employed from day to day, and knowing what our
+domestic circumstances then were, proposed that I should go into the
+blacking-warehouse, to be as useful as I could, at a salary, I think, of
+six shillings a week. I am not clear whether it was six or seven. I am
+inclined to believe, from my uncertainty on this head, that it was six
+at first, and seven afterwards. At any rate, the offer was accepted very
+willingly by my father and mother, and on a Monday morning I went down
+to the blacking-warehouse to begin my business life.
+
+"It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such
+an age. It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the poor
+little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion
+enough on me--a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and
+soon hurt, bodily or mentally--to suggest that something might have been
+spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common
+school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My
+father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more
+so if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school,
+and going to Cambridge.
+
+"The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the
+way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house,
+abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its
+wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old gray
+rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and
+scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of
+the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The
+counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and
+the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My
+work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of
+oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a
+string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it
+looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a
+certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection,
+I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more
+pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on
+similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap,
+on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string
+and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of
+using his name, long afterwards, in _Oliver Twist_.
+
+"Our relative had kindly arranged to teach me something in the
+dinner-hour; from twelve to one, I think it was; every day. But an
+arrangement so incompatible with counting-house business soon died away,
+from no fault of his or mine; and, for the same reason, my small
+work-table, and my grosses of pots, my papers, string, scissors,
+paste-pot, and labels, by little and little, vanished out of the recess
+in the counting-house, and kept company with the other small
+work-tables, grosses of pots, papers, string, scissors, and paste-pots,
+down-stairs. It was not long before Bob Fagin and I, and another boy
+whose name was Paul Green, but who was currently believed to have been
+christened Poll (a belief which I transferred, long afterwards again,
+to Mr. Sweedlepipe, in _Martin Chuzzlewit_), worked generally, side by
+side. Bob Fagin was an orphan, and lived with his brother-in-law, a
+waterman. Poll Green's father had the additional distinction of being a
+fireman, and was employed at Drury Lane theatre; where another relation
+of Poll's, I think his little sister, did imps in the pantomimes.
+
+"No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this
+companionship; compared these every-day associates with those of my
+happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned
+and distinguished man, crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of the
+sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt
+in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that,
+day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and
+raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never
+to be brought back any more; cannot be written. My whole nature was so
+penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that
+even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams
+that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander
+desolately back to that time of my life.
+
+"My mother and my brothers and sisters (excepting Fanny in the Royal
+Academy of Music) were still encamped, with a young servant-girl from
+Chatham workhouse, in the two parlors in the emptied house in Gower
+Street north. It was a long way to go and return within the dinner-hour,
+and usually I either carried my dinner with me, or went and bought it at
+some neighboring shop. In the latter case, it was commonly a saveloy
+and a penny loaf; sometimes, a fourpenny plate of beef from a cook's
+shop; sometimes, a plate of bread and cheese, and a glass of beer, from
+a miserable old public-house over the way: the Swan, if I remember
+right, or the Swan and something else that I have forgotten. Once, I
+remember tucking my own bread (which I had brought from home in the
+morning) under my arm, wrapped up in a piece of paper like a book, and
+going into the best dining-room in Johnson's alamode beef-house in Clare
+Court, Drury Lane, and magnificently ordering a small plate of alamode
+beef to eat with it. What the waiter thought of such a strange little
+apparition, coming in all alone, I don't know; but I can see him now,
+staring at me as I ate my dinner, and bringing up the other waiter to
+look. I gave him a halfpenny, and I wish, now, that he hadn't taken it."
+
+I lose here for a little while the fragment of direct narrative, but I
+perfectly recollect that he used to describe Saturday night as his great
+treat. It was a grand thing to walk home with six shillings in his
+pocket, and to look in at the shop-windows and think what it would buy.
+Hunt's roasted corn, as a British and patriotic substitute for coffee,
+was in great vogue just then; and the little fellow used to buy it, and
+roast it on the Sunday. There was a cheap periodical of selected pieces
+called the _Portfolio_, which he had also a great fancy for taking home
+with him. The new proposed "deed," meanwhile, had failed to propitiate
+his father's creditors; all hope of arrangement passed away; and the end
+was that his mother and her encampment in Gower Street north broke up
+and went to live in the Marshalsea. I am able at this point to resume
+his own account:
+
+"The key of the house was sent back to the landlord, who was very glad
+to get it; and I (small Cain that I was, except that I had never done
+harm to any one) was handed over as a lodger to a reduced old lady, long
+known to our family, in Little College Street, Camden-town, who took
+children in to board, and had once done so at Brighton; and who, with a
+few alterations and embellishments, unconsciously began to sit for Mrs.
+Pipchin in _Dombey_ when she took in me.
+
+"She had a little brother and sister under her care then; somebody's
+natural children, who were very irregularly paid for; and a widow's
+little son. The two boys and I slept in the same room. My own exclusive
+breakfast, of a penny cottage loaf and a penny-worth of milk, I provided
+for myself. I kept another small loaf, and a quarter of a pound of
+cheese, on a particular shelf of a particular cupboard; to make my
+supper on when I came back at night. They made a hole in the six or
+seven shillings, I know well; and I was out at the blacking-warehouse
+all day, and had to support myself upon that money all the week. I
+suppose my lodging was paid for, by my father. I certainly did not pay
+it myself; and I certainly had no other assistance whatever (the making
+of my clothes, I think, excepted), from Monday morning until Saturday
+night. No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no
+support, from any one that I can call to mind, so help me God.
+
+"Sundays, Fanny and I passed in the prison. I was at the academy in
+Tenterden Street, Hanover Square, at nine o'clock in the morning, to
+fetch her; and we walked back there together, at night.
+
+"I was so young and childish, and so little qualified--how could I be
+otherwise?--to undertake the whole charge of my own existence, that, in
+going to Hungerford Stairs of a morning, I could not resist the stale
+pastry put out at half-price on trays at the confectioners' doors in
+Tottenham Court Road; and I often spent in that the money I should have
+kept for my dinner. Then I went without my dinner, or bought a roll, or
+a slice of pudding. There were two pudding-shops between which I was
+divided, according to my finances. One was in a court close to St.
+Martin's Church (at the back of the church) which is now removed
+altogether. The pudding at that shop was made with currants, and was
+rather a special pudding, but was dear: two penn'orth not being larger
+than a penn'orth of more ordinary pudding. A good shop for the latter
+was in the Strand, somewhere near where the Lowther Arcade is now. It
+was a stout, hale pudding, heavy and flabby; with great raisins in it,
+stuck in whole, at great distances apart. It came up hot, at about noon
+every day; and many and many a day did I dine off it.
+
+"We had half an hour, I think, for tea. When I had money enough, I used
+to go to a coffee-shop, and have half a pint of coffee, and a slice of
+bread-and-butter. When I had no money, I took a turn in Covent Garden
+market, and stared at the pineapples. The coffee-shops to which I most
+resorted were, one in Maiden Lane; one in a court (non-existent now)
+close to Hungerford market; and one in St. Martin's Lane, of which I
+only recollect that it stood near the church, and that in the door
+there was an oval glass plate, with COFFEE-ROOM painted on it, addressed
+towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of
+coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and
+read it backward on the wrong side MOOR-EEFFOC (as I often used to do
+then, in a dismal reverie,) a shock goes through my blood.
+
+"I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the
+scantiness of my resources and the difficulties of my life. I know that
+if a shilling or so were given me by any one, I spent it in a dinner or
+a tea. I know that I worked, from morning to night, with common men and
+boys, a shabby child. I know that I tried, but ineffectually, not to
+anticipate my money, and to make it last the week through; by putting it
+away in a drawer I had in the counting-house, wrapped into six little
+parcels, each parcel containing the same amount and labeled with a
+different day. I know that I have lounged about the streets,
+insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that, but for the mercy
+of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a
+little robber or a little vagabond.
+
+"But I held some station at the blacking-warehouse too. Besides that my
+relative at the counting-house did what a man so occupied, and dealing
+with a thing so anomalous, could, to treat me as one upon a different
+footing from the rest, I never said, to man or boy, how it was that I
+came to be there, or gave the least indication of being sorry that I was
+there. That I suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no
+one ever knew but I. How much I suffered, it is, as I have said already,
+utterly beyond my power to tell. No man's imagination can overstep the
+reality. But I kept my own counsel, and I did my work. I knew from the
+first that, if I could not do my work as well as any of the rest, I
+could not hold myself above slight and contempt. I soon became at least
+as expeditious and as skillful with my hands as either of the other
+boys. Though perfectly familiar with them, my conduct and manners were
+different enough from theirs to place a space between us. They, and the
+men, always spoke of me as 'the young gentleman.' A certain man (a
+soldier once) named Thomas, who was the foreman, and another named
+Harry, who was the carman and wore a red jacket, used to call me
+'Charles' sometimes, in speaking to me; but I think it was mostly when
+we were very confidential, and when I had made some efforts to entertain
+them over our work with the results of some of the old readings, which
+were fast perishing out of my mind. Poll Green uprose once, and rebelled
+against the 'young gentleman' usage; but Bob Fagin settled him speedily.
+
+"My rescue from this kind of existence I considered quite hopeless, and
+abandoned as such, altogether; though I am solemnly convinced that I
+never, for one hour, was reconciled to it, or was otherwise than
+miserably unhappy. I felt keenly, however, the being so cut off from my
+parents, my brothers and sisters, and, when my day's work was done,
+going home to such a miserable blank; and _that_, I thought, might be
+corrected. One Sunday night I remonstrated with my father on this head,
+so pathetically, and with so many tears, that his kind nature gave way.
+He began to think that it was not quite right. I do believe he had
+never thought so before, or thought about it. It was the first
+remonstrance I had ever made about my lot, and perhaps it opened up a
+little more than I intended. A back-attic was found for me at the house
+of an insolvent-court agent, who lived in Lant Street in the borough,
+where Bob Sawyer lodged many years afterwards. A bed and bedding were
+sent over for me, and made up on the floor. The little window had a
+pleasant prospect of a timber-yard; and when I took possession of my new
+abode I thought it was a Paradise."
+
+There is here another blank, which it is, however, not difficult to
+supply from letters and recollections of my own. What was to him of
+course the great pleasure of his paradise of a lodging was its bringing
+him again, though after a fashion sorry enough, within the circle of
+home. From this time he used to breakfast "at home,"--in other words, in
+the Marshalsea; going to it as early as the gates were open, and for the
+most part much earlier. They had no want of bodily comforts there. His
+father's income, still going on, was amply sufficient for that; and in
+every respect indeed but elbow-room, I have heard him say, the family
+lived more comfortably in prison than they had done for a long time out
+of it. They were waited on still by the maid-of-all-work from Bayham
+Street, the orphan girl of the Chatham workhouse, from whose sharp
+little worldly and also kindly ways he took his first impression of the
+Marchioness in the _Old Curiosity Shop_. She also had a lodging in the
+neighborhood, that she might be early on the scene of her duties; and
+when Charles met her, as he would do occasionally, in his lounging-place
+by London Bridge, he would occupy the time before the gates opened by
+telling her quite astonishing fictions about the wharves and the tower.
+"But I hope I believed them myself," he would say. Besides breakfast, he
+had supper also in the prison, and got to his lodging generally at nine
+o'clock. The gates closed always at ten.
+
+I must not omit what he told me of the landlord of this little lodging.
+He was a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman. He was lame, and had a
+quiet old wife; and he had a very innocent grown-up son, who was lame
+too. They were all very kind to the boy. He was taken with one of his
+old attacks of spasm one night, and the whole three of them were about
+his bed until morning. They were all dead when he told me this; but in
+another form they still live very pleasantly as the Garland family in
+the _Old Curiosity Shop_.
+
+He had a similar illness one day in the warehouse, which I can describe
+in his own words: "Bob Fagin was very good to me on the occasion of a
+bad attack of my old disorder. I suffered such excruciating pain that
+time, that they made a temporary bed of straw in my old recess in the
+counting-house, and I rolled about on the floor, and Bob filled empty
+blacking-bottles with hot water, and applied relays of them to my side,
+half the day. I got better, and quite easy towards evening; but Bob (who
+was much bigger and older than I) did not like the idea of my going home
+alone, and took me under his protection. I was too proud to let him know
+about the prison, and, after making several efforts to get rid of him,
+to all of which Bob Fagin in his goodness was deaf, shook hands with him
+on the steps of a house near Southwark Bridge on the Surrey side,
+making believe that I lived there. As a finishing piece of reality in
+case of his looking back, I knocked at the door, I recollect, and asked,
+when the woman opened it, if that was Mr. Robert Fagin's house."
+
+The Saturday nights continued, as before, to be precious to him. "My
+usual way home was over Blackfriars Bridge, and down that turning in the
+Blackfriars Road which has Rowland Hill's chapel on one side, and the
+likeness of a golden dog licking a golden pot over a shop-door on the
+other. There are a good many little low-browed old shops in that street,
+of a wretched kind; and some are unchanged now. I looked into one a few
+weeks ago, where I used to buy boot-laces on Saturday nights, and saw
+the corner where I once sat down on a stool to have a pair of ready-made
+half-boots fitted on. I have been seduced more than once, in that street
+on a Saturday night, by a show-van at a corner; and have gone in, with a
+very motley assemblage, to see the Fat-pig, the Wild-indian, and the
+Little-lady. There were two or three hat-manufactories there then (I
+think they are there still); and among the things which, encountered
+anywhere or under any circumstances, will instantly recall that time, is
+the smell of hat-making."
+
+His father's attempts to avoid going through the court having failed,
+all needful ceremonies had to be undertaken to obtain the benefit of the
+insolvent debtors' act; and in one of these little Charles had his part
+to play. One condition of the statute was that the wearing-apparel and
+personal matters retained were not to exceed twenty pounds sterling in
+value. "It was necessary, as a matter of form, that the clothes I wore
+should be seen by the official appraiser. I had a half-holiday to
+enable me to call upon him, at his own time, at a house somewhere beyond
+the Obelisk. I recollect his coming out to look at me with his mouth
+full, and a strong smell of beer upon him, and saying good-naturedly
+that 'that would do,' and 'it was all right.' Certainly the hardest
+creditor would not have been disposed (even if he had been legally
+entitled) to avail himself of my poor white hat, little jacket, or
+corduroy trowsers. But I had a fat old silver watch in my pocket, which
+had been given me by my grandmother before the blacking-days, and I had
+entertained my doubts as I went along whether that valuable possession
+might not bring me over the twenty pounds. So I was greatly relieved,
+and made him a bow of acknowledgment as I went out."
+
+Still, the want felt most by him was the companionship of boys of his
+own age. He had no such acquaintance. Sometimes he remembered to have
+played on the coal-barges at dinner-time, with Poll Green and Bob Fagin;
+but those were rare occasions. He generally strolled alone, about the
+back streets of the Adelphi, or explored the Adelphi arches. One of his
+favorite localities was a little public-house by the water-side, called
+the Fox-under-the-hill, approached by an underground passage which we
+once missed in looking for it together; and he had a vision which he has
+mentioned in _Copperfield_ of sitting eating something on a bench
+outside, one fine evening, and looking at some coal-heavers dancing
+before the house. "I wonder what they thought of me," says David. He had
+himself already said the same in his fragment of autobiography.
+
+Another characteristic little incident he made afterwards one of
+David's experiences, but I am able to give it here without the disguises
+that adapt it to the fiction: "I was such a little fellow, with my poor
+white hat, little jacket, and corduroy trowsers, that frequently, when I
+went into the bar of a strange public-house for a glass of ale or porter
+to wash down the saveloy and the loaf I had eaten in the street, they
+didn't like to give it me. I remember, one evening (I had been somewhere
+for my father, and was going back to the borough over Westminster
+Bridge), that I went into a public-house in Parliament Street,--which is
+still there, though altered,--at the corner of the short street leading
+into Cannon Row, and said to the landlord behind the bar, 'What is your
+very best--the VERY _best_--ale, a glass?' For the occasion was a
+festive one, for some reason: I forget why. It may have been my
+birthday, or somebody else's. 'Two-pence,' says he. 'Then,' says I,
+'just draw me a glass of that, if you please, with a good head to it.'
+The landlord looked at me, in return, over the bar, from head to foot,
+with a strange smile on his face, and, instead of drawing the beer,
+looked round the screen and said something to his wife, who came out
+from behind it, with her work in her hand, and joined him in surveying
+me. Here we stand, all three, before me now, in my study in Devonshire
+Terrace. The landlord, in his shirt-sleeves, leaning against the bar
+window-frame; his wife, looking over the little half-door; and I, in
+some confusion, looking up at them from outside the partition. They
+asked me a good many questions, as what my name was, how old I was,
+where I lived, how I was employed, etc. etc. To all of which, that I
+might commit nobody, I invented appropriate answers. They served me with
+the ale, though I suspect it was not the strongest on the premises; and
+the landlord's wife, opening the little half-door and bending down, gave
+me a kiss that was half admiring and half compassionate, but all womanly
+and good, I am sure."
+
+A later, and not less characteristic, incident of the true story of this
+time found also a place, three or four years after it was written, in
+his now famous fiction. It preceded but by a short time the discharge,
+from the Marshalsea, of the elder Dickens; to whom a rather considerable
+legacy from a relative had accrued not long before ("some hundreds," I
+understood), and had been paid into court during his imprisonment. The
+scene to be described arose on the occasion of a petition drawn up by
+him before he left, praying, not for the abolition of imprisonment for
+debt, as David Copperfield relates, but for the less dignified but more
+accessible boon of a bounty to the prisoners to drink his majesty's
+health on his majesty's forthcoming birthday.
+
+"I mention the circumstance because it illustrates, to me, my early
+interest in observing people. When I went to the Marshalsea of a night,
+I was always delighted to hear from my mother what she knew about the
+histories of the different debtors in the prison; and when I heard of
+this approaching ceremony, I was so anxious to see them all come in, one
+after another (though I knew the greater part of them already, to speak
+to, and they me), that I got leave of absence on purpose, and
+established myself in a corner, near the petition. It was stretched
+out, I recollect, on a great ironing-board, under the window, which in
+another part of the room made a bedstead at night. The internal
+regulations of the place, for cleanliness and order, and for the
+government of a common room in the ale-house, where hot water and some
+means of cooking, and a good fire, were provided for all who paid a very
+small subscription, were excellently administered by a governing
+committee of debtors, of which my father was chairman for the time
+being. As many of the principal officers of this body as could be got
+into the small room without filling it up, supported him, in front of
+the petition; and my old friend Captain Porter (who had washed himself,
+to do honor to so solemn an occasion) stationed himself close to it, to
+read it to all who were unacquainted with its contents. The door was
+then thrown open, and they began to come in, in a long file; several
+waiting on the landing outside, while one entered, affixed his
+signature, and went out. To everybody in succession, Captain Porter
+said, 'Would you like to hear it read?' If he weakly showed the least
+disposition to hear it, Captain Porter, in a loud sonorous voice, gave
+him every word of it. I remember a certain luscious roll he gave to such
+words as 'Majesty--gracious Majesty--your gracious Majesty's unfortunate
+subjects--your Majesty's well-known munificence,'--as if the words were
+something real in his mouth, and delicious to taste; my poor father
+meanwhile listening with a little of an author's vanity, and
+contemplating (not severely) the spikes on the opposite wall. Whatever
+was comical in this scene, and whatever was pathetic, I sincerely
+believe I perceived in my corner, whether I demonstrated or not, quite
+as well as I should perceive it now. I made out my own little character
+and story for every man who put his name to the sheet of paper. I might
+be able to do that now, more truly: not more earnestly, or with a closer
+interest. Their different peculiarities of dress, of face, of gait, of
+manner, were written indelibly upon my memory. I would rather have seen
+it than the best play ever played; and I thought about it afterwards,
+over the pots of paste-blacking, often and often. When I looked, with my
+mind's eye, into the Fleet prison during Mr. Pickwick's incarceration, I
+wonder whether half a dozen men were wanting from the Marshalsea crowd
+that came filing in again, to the sound of Captain Porter's voice!"
+
+When the family left the Marshalsea they all went to lodge with the lady
+in Little College Street, a Mrs. Roylance, who has obtained unexpected
+immortality as Mrs. Pipchin; and they afterwards occupied a small house
+in Somers-town. But, before this time, Charles was present with some of
+them in Tenterden Street to see his sister. Fanny received one of the
+prizes given to the pupils of the Royal Academy of Music. "I could not
+bear to think of myself--beyond the reach of all such honorable
+emulation and success. The tears ran down my face. I felt as if my heart
+were rent. I prayed, when I went to bed that night, to be lifted out of
+the humiliation and neglect in which I was. I never had suffered so much
+before. There was no envy in this." There was little need that he should
+say so. Extreme enjoyment in witnessing the exercise of her talents, the
+utmost pride in every success obtained by them, he manifested always to
+a degree otherwise quite unusual with him; and on the day of her
+funeral, which we passed together, I had most affecting proof of his
+tender and grateful memory of her in these childish days. A few more
+sentences, certainly not less touching than any that have gone before,
+will bring the story of them to its close. They stand here exactly as
+written by him:
+
+"I am not sure that it was before this time, or after it, that the
+blacking-warehouse was removed to Chandos Street, Covent Garden. It is
+no matter. Next to the shop at the corner of Bedford Street in Chandos
+Street are two rather old-fashioned houses and shops adjoining one
+another. They were one then, or thrown into one, for the
+blacking-business; and had been a butter-shop. Opposite to them was, and
+is, a public-house, where I got my ale, under these new circumstances.
+The stones in the street may be smoothed by my small feet going across
+to it at dinner-time, and back again. The establishment was larger now,
+and we had one or two new boys. Bob Fagin and I had attained to great
+dexterity in tying up the pots. I forget how many we could do in five
+minutes. We worked, for the light's sake, near the second window as you
+come from Bedford Street; and we were so brisk at it that the people
+used to stop and look in. Sometimes there would be quite a little crowd
+there. I saw my father coming in at the door one day when we were very
+busy, and I wondered how he could bear it.
+
+"Now, I generally had my dinner in the warehouse. Sometimes I brought it
+from home, so I was better off. I see myself coming across Russell
+Square from Somers-town, one morning, with some cold hotch-potch in a
+small basin tied up in a handkerchief. I had the same wanderings about
+the streets as I used to have, and was just as solitary and
+self-dependent as before; but I had not the same difficulty in merely
+living. I never, however, heard a word of being taken away, or of being
+otherwise than quite provided for.
+
+"At last, one day, my father, and the relative so often mentioned,
+quarreled; quarreled by letter, for I took the letter from my father to
+him which caused the explosion, but quarreled very fiercely. It was
+about me. It may have had some backward reference, in part, for anything
+I know, to my employment at the window. All I am certain of is, that,
+soon after I had given him the letter, my cousin (he was a sort of
+cousin, by marriage) told me he was very much insulted about me, and
+that it was impossible to keep me after that. I cried very much, partly
+because it was so sudden, and partly because in his anger he was violent
+about my father, though gentle to me. Thomas, the old soldier, comforted
+me, and said he was sure it was for the best. With a relief so strange
+that it was like oppression, I went home.
+
+"My mother set herself to accommodate the quarrel, and did so next day.
+She brought home a request for me to return next morning, and a high
+character of me, which I am very sure I deserved. My father said I
+should go back no more, and should go to school. I do not write
+resentfully or angrily; for I know how all these things have worked
+together to make me what I am; but I never afterwards forgot, I never
+shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being
+sent back.
+
+"From that hour until this at which I write, no word of that part of my
+childhood which I have now gladly brought to a close has passed my lips
+to any human being. I have no idea how long it lasted; whether for a
+year, or much more, or less. From that hour until this my father and my
+mother have been stricken dumb upon it. I have never heard the least
+allusion to it, however far off and remote, from either of them. I have
+never, until I now impart it to this paper, in any burst of confidence
+with any one, my own wife not excepted, raised the curtain I then
+dropped, thank God.
+
+"Until old Hungerford market was pulled down, until old Hungerford
+Stairs were destroyed, and the very nature of the ground changed, I
+never had the courage to go back to the place where my servitude began.
+I never saw it. I could not endure to go near it. For many years, when I
+came near to Robert Warren's in the Strand, I crossed over to the
+opposite side of the way, to avoid a certain smell of the cement they
+put upon the blacking-corks, which reminded me of what I was once. It
+was a very long time before I liked to go up Chandos Street. My old way
+home by the borough made me cry, after my eldest child could speak.
+
+"In my walks at night I have walked there often, since then, and by
+degrees I have come to write this. It does not seem a tithe of what I
+might have written, or of what I meant to write."
+
+The substance of some after-talk explanatory of points in the narrative,
+of which a note was made at the time, may be briefly added. He could
+hardly have been more than twelve years old when he left the place, and
+was still unusually small for his age; much smaller, though two years
+older, than his own eldest son was at the time of these confidences. His
+mother had been in the blacking-warehouse many times; his father not
+more than once or twice. The rivalry of Robert Warren by Jonathan's
+representatives, the cousins George and James, was carried to wonderful
+extremes in the way of advertisement; and they were all very proud, he
+told me, of the cat scratching the boot, which was _their_ house's
+device. The poets in the house's regular employ he remembered, too, and
+made his first study from one of them for the poet of Mrs. Jarley's
+wax-work. The whole enterprise, however, had the usual end of such
+things. The younger cousin tired of the concern; and a Mr. Wood, the
+proprietor who took James's share and became George's partner, sold it
+ultimately to Robert Warren. It continued to be his at the time Dickens
+and myself last spoke of it together, and he had made an excellent
+bargain of it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+SCHOOL-DAYS AND START IN LIFE.
+
+1824-1830.
+
+ Outcome of Boyish Trials--Disadvantage in Later
+ Years--Advantages--Next Move in
+ Life--Wellington House Academy--Revisited and
+ Described--Letter from a Schoolfellow--C. D.'s
+ Recollections of School--Schoolfellow's
+ Recollections of C. D.--Fac-simile of Schoolboy
+ Letter--Daniel Tobin--Another Schoolfellow's
+ Recollections--Writing Tales and getting up
+ Plays--Master Beverley
+ Scene-Painter--Street-acting--The Schoolfellows
+ after Forty Years--Smallness of the World--In
+ Attorneys' Offices--At Minor Theatres--The
+ Father on the Son's Education--Studying
+ Short-hand--In British Museum Reading
+ Room--Preparing for the Gallery--D. C. for C.
+ D.--A Real Dora in 1829--The same Dora in
+ 1855--Dora changed into Flora--Ashes of Youth
+ and Hope.
+
+
+IN what way these strange experiences of his boyhood affected him
+afterwards, this narrative of his life must show; but there were
+influences that made themselves felt even on his way to manhood.
+
+What at once he brought out of the humiliation that had impressed him so
+deeply, though scarcely as yet quite consciously, was a natural dread of
+the hardships that might still be in store for him, sharpened by what he
+had gone through; and this, though in its effect for the present
+imperfectly understood, became by degrees a passionate resolve, even
+while he was yielding to circumstances, _not to be_ what circumstances
+were conspiring to make him. All that was involved in what he had
+suffered and sunk into, could not have been known to him at the time;
+but it was plain enough later, as we see; and in conversation with me
+after the revelation was made, he used to find, at extreme points in his
+life, the explanation of himself in those early trials. He had derived
+great good from them, but not without alloy. The fixed and eager
+determination, the restless and resistless energy, which opened to him
+opportunities of escape from many mean environments, not by turning off
+from any path of duty, but by resolutely rising to such excellence or
+distinction as might be attainable in it, brought with it some
+disadvantage among many noble advantages. Of this he was himself aware,
+but not to the full extent. What it was that in society made him often
+uneasy, shrinking, and over-sensitive, he knew; but all the danger he
+ran in bearing down and overmastering the feeling, he did not know. A
+too great confidence in himself, a sense that everything was possible to
+the will that would make it so, laid occasionally upon him self-imposed
+burdens greater than might be borne by any one with safety. In that
+direction there was in him, at such times, something even hard and
+aggressive; in his determinations a something that had almost the tone
+of fierceness; something in his nature that made his resolves
+insuperable, however hasty the opinions on which they had been formed.
+So rare were these manifestations, however, and so little did they
+prejudice a character as entirely open and generous as it was at all
+times ardent and impetuous, that only very infrequently, towards the
+close of the middle term of a friendship which lasted without the
+interruption of a day for more than three-and-thirty years, were they
+ever unfavorably presented to me. But there they were; and when I have
+seen strangely present, at such chance intervals, a stern and even cold
+isolation of self-reliance side by side with a susceptivity almost
+feminine and the most eager craving for sympathy, it has seemed to me as
+though his habitual impulses for everything kind and gentle had sunk,
+for the time, under a sudden hard and inexorable sense of what fate had
+dealt to him in those early years. On more than one occasion, indeed, I
+had confirmation of this. "I must entreat you," he wrote to me in June,
+1862, "to pause for an instant, and go back to what you know of my
+childish days, and to ask yourself whether it is natural that something
+of the character formed in me then, and lost under happier
+circumstances, should have reappeared in the last five years. The
+never-to-be-forgotten misery of that old time bred a certain shrinking
+sensitiveness in a certain ill-clad ill-fed child, that I have found
+come back in the never-to-be-forgotten misery of this later time."
+
+One good there was, however, altogether without drawback, and which
+claims simply to be mentioned before my narrative is resumed. The story
+of his childish misery has itself sufficiently shown that he never
+throughout it lost his precious gift of animal spirits, or his native
+capacity for humorous enjoyment; and there were positive gains to him
+from what he underwent, which were also rich and lasting. To what in the
+outset of his difficulties and trials gave the decisive bent to his
+genius, I have already made special reference; and we are to observe,
+of what followed, that with the very poor and unprosperous, out of whose
+sufferings and strugglings, and the virtues as well as vices born of
+them, his not least splendid successes were wrought, his childish
+experiences had made him actually one. They were not his clients whose
+cause he pleaded with such pathos and humor, and on whose side he got
+the laughter and tears of all the world, but in some sort his very self.
+Nor was it a small part of this manifest advantage that he should have
+obtained his experience as a child and not as a man; that only the good
+part, the flower and fruit of it, was plucked by him; and that nothing
+of the evil part, none of the earth in which the seed was planted,
+remained to soil him.
+
+His next move in life can also be given in his own language: "There was
+a school in the Hampstead Road kept by Mr. Jones, a Welshman, to which
+my father dispatched me to ask for a card of terms. The boys were at
+dinner, and Mr. Jones was carving for them with a pair of holland
+sleeves on, when I acquitted myself of this commission. He came out, and
+gave me what I wanted; and hoped I should become a pupil. I did. At
+seven o'clock one morning, very soon afterwards, I went as day-scholar
+to Mr. Jones's establishment, which was in Mornington Place, and had its
+school-room sliced away by the Birmingham Railway, when that change came
+about. The school-room, however, was not threatened by directors or
+civil engineers then, and there was a board over the door, graced with
+the words WELLINGTON HOUSE ACADEMY."
+
+At Wellington House Academy he remained nearly two years, being a little
+over fourteen years of age when he quitted it. In his minor writings as
+well as in _Copperfield_ will be found general allusions to it, and
+there is a paper among his pieces reprinted from _Household Words_ which
+purports specifically to describe it. To the account therein given of
+himself when he went to the school, as advanced enough, so safely had
+his memory retained its poor fragments of early schooling, to be put
+into _Virgil_, as getting sundry prizes, and as attaining to the eminent
+position of its first boy, one of his two schoolfellows with whom I have
+had communication makes objection; but both admit that the general
+features of the place are reproduced with wonderful accuracy, and more
+especially in those points for which the school appears to have been
+much more notable than for anything connected with the scholarship of
+its pupils.
+
+In the reprinted piece Dickens describes it as remarkable for white
+mice. He says that red-polls, linnets, and even canaries were kept by
+the boys in desks, drawers, hat-boxes, and other strange refuges for
+birds; but that white mice were the favorite stock, and that the boys
+trained the mice much better than the master trained the boys. He
+recalled in particular one white mouse who lived in the cover of a Latin
+dictionary, ran up ladders, drew Roman chariots, shouldered muskets,
+turned wheels, and even made a very creditable appearance on the stage
+as the dog of Montargis, who might have achieved greater things but for
+having had the misfortune to mistake his way in a triumphal procession
+to the Capitol, when he fell into a deep inkstand and was dyed black and
+drowned.
+
+Nevertheless he mentions the school as one also of some celebrity in
+its neighborhood, though nobody could have said why; and adds that among
+the boys the master was supposed to know nothing, and one of the ushers
+was supposed to know everything. "We are still inclined to think the
+first-named supposition perfectly correct. We went to look at the place
+only this last midsummer, and found that the railway had cut it up, root
+and branch. A great trunk line had swallowed the playground, sliced away
+the school-room, and pared off the corner of the house. Which, thus
+curtailed of its proportions, presented itself in a green stage of
+stucco, profile-wise towards the road, like a forlorn flat-iron without
+a handle, standing on end."
+
+One who knew him in those early days, Mr. Owen P. Thomas, thus writes to
+me (February, 1871): "I had the honor of being Mr. Dickens's
+schoolfellow for about two years (1824-1826), both being day-scholars,
+at Mr. Jones's 'Classical and Commercial Academy,' as then inscribed in
+front of the house, and which was situated at the corner of Granby
+Street and the Hampstead Road. The house stands now in its original
+state, but the school and large playground behind disappeared on the
+formation of the London and Northwestern Railway, which at this point
+runs in a slanting direction from Euston Square underneath the Hampstead
+Road. We were all companions and playmates when out of school, as well
+as fellow-students therein." (Mr. Thomas includes in this remark the
+names of Henry Danson, now a physician in practice in London; of Daniel
+Tobin, whom I remember to have been frequently assisted by his old
+schoolfellow in later years; and of Richard Bray.) "You will find a
+graphic sketch of the school by Mr. Dickens himself in _Household
+Words_ of 11th October, 1851. The article is entitled Our School. The
+names of course are feigned; but, allowing for slight coloring, the
+persons and incidents described are all true to life, and easily
+recognizable by any one who attended the school at the time. The Latin
+master was Mr. Manville, or Mandeville, who for many years was well
+known at the library of the British Museum. The academy, after the
+railroad overthrew it, was removed to another house in the neighborhood,
+but Mr. Jones and two at least of his assistant masters have long ago
+departed this life."
+
+One of the latter was the usher believed to know everything, who was
+writing-master, mathematical master, English master, divided the little
+boys with the Latin master, made out the bills, mended the pens, and
+always called at parents' houses to inquire after sick boys, because he
+had gentlemanly manners. This picture my correspondent recognized; as
+well as those of the fat little dancing-master who taught them
+hornpipes, of the Latin master who stuffed his ears with onions for his
+deafness, of the gruff serving-man who nursed the boys in scarlet fever,
+and of the principal himself, who was always ruling ciphering-books with
+a bloated mahogany ruler, smiting the palms of offenders with the same
+diabolical instrument, or viciously drawing a pair of pantaloons tight
+with one of his large hands and caning the wearer with the other.
+
+"My recollection of Dickens whilst at school," Mr. Thomas continues, "is
+that of a healthy-looking boy, small but well built, with a more than
+usual flow of spirits, inducing to harmless fun, seldom or never I
+think to mischief, to which so many lads at that age are prone. I cannot
+recall anything that then indicated he would hereafter become a literary
+celebrity; but perhaps he was too young then. He usually held his head
+more erect than lads ordinarily do, and there was a general smartness
+about him. His weekday dress of jacket and trowsers, I can clearly
+remember, was what is called pepper-and-salt; and, instead of the frill
+that most boys of his age wore then, he had a turn-down collar, so that
+he looked less youthful in consequence. He invented what we termed a
+'lingo,' produced by the addition of a few letters of the same sound to
+every word; and it was our ambition, walking and talking thus along the
+street, to be considered foreigners. As an alternate amusement the
+present writer well remembers extemporizing tales of some sort, and
+reciting them offhand, with Dickens and Danson or Tobin walking on
+either side of him. I inclose you a copy of a note I received from him
+when he was between thirteen and fourteen years of age, perhaps one of
+the earliest productions of his pen. The Leg referred to was the Legend
+of something, a pamphlet romance I had lent him; the Clavis was of
+course the Latin school-book so named."
+
+There is some underlying whim or fun in the "Leg" allusions which Mr.
+Thomas appears to have overlooked, and certainly fails to explain; but
+the note, which is here given in fac-simile, may be left to speak for
+itself; and in the signature the reader will be amused to see the first
+faint beginning of a flourish afterwards famous.
+
+"After a lapse of years," Mr. Thomas continues, "I recognized the
+celebrated writer as the individual I had known so well as a boy, from
+having preserved this note; and upon Mr. Dickens visiting Reading in
+December, 1854, to give one of his earliest readings for the benefit of
+the literary institute, of which he had become president on Mr. Justice
+Talfourd's death, I took the opportunity of showing it to him, when he
+was much diverted therewith. On the same occasion we conversed about
+mutual schoolfellows, and among others Daniel Tobin was referred to,
+whom I remembered to have been Dickens's _most_ intimate companion in
+the school-days (1824 to 1826). His reply was that Tobin either was
+then, or had previously been, assisting him in the capacity of
+amanuensis; but there is a subsequent mystery about Tobin, in connection
+with his friend and patron, which I have never been able to comprehend;
+for I understood shortly afterwards that there was entire separation
+between them, and it must have been an offense of some gravity to have
+sundered an acquaintance formed in early youth, and which had endured,
+greatly to Tobin's advantage, so long. He resided in our school-days in
+one of the now old and grimy-looking stone-fronted houses in George
+Street, Euston Road, a few doors from the Orange-tree tavern. It is the
+opinion of the other schoolfellow with whom we were intimate, Doctor
+Danson, that upon leaving school Mr. Dickens and Tobin entered the same
+solicitor's office, and this he thinks was either in or near Lincoln's
+Inn Fields."
+
+[Illustration: Handwritten note: Punctuation and capitalization,
+retained:
+
+ Tim/
+
+ I am quite ashamed I have not returned your Leg
+ but you shall have it by Harry to-morrow If you
+ would like to purchase my Clavis you shall have
+ it at a very ~reduced price~ Cheaper in
+ comparison than a Leg.
+
+ Yours &c
+ ~C Dickens.~
+
+ PS. I suppose all this time you have had ~a
+ wooden~ leg. I have weighed yours every saturday
+ Night
+
+(No date, but was written in latter part of 1825.)]
+
+The offense of Tobin went no deeper than the having at last worn out
+even Dickens's patience and kindness. His applications for relief were
+so incessantly repeated, that to cut him and them adrift altogether was
+the only way of escape from what had become an intolerable nuisance. To
+Mr. Thomas's letter the reader will thank me for adding one not less
+interesting with which Dr. Henry Danson has favored me. We have here,
+with the same fun and animal spirits, a little of the proneness to
+mischief which his other schoolfellow says he was free from; but the
+mischief is all of the harmless kind, and might perhaps have been better
+described as but part of an irrepressible vivacity:
+
+"My impression is that I was a schoolfellow of Dickens for nearly two
+years: he left before me, I think at about fifteen years of age. Mr.
+Jones's school, called the Wellington Academy, was in the Hampstead
+Road, at the northeast corner of Granby Street. The school-house was
+afterwards removed for the London and Northwestern Railway. It was
+considered at the time a very superior sort of school,--one of the best,
+indeed, in that part of London; but it was most shamefully mismanaged,
+and the boys made but very little progress. The proprietor, Mr. Jones,
+was a Welshman; a most ignorant fellow, and a mere tyrant; whose chief
+employment was to scourge the boys. Dickens has given a very lively
+account of this place in his paper entitled Our School, but it is very
+mythical in many respects, and more especially in the compliment he pays
+in it to himself. I do not remember that Dickens distinguished himself
+in any way, or carried off any prizes. My belief is that he did not
+learn Greek or Latin there; and you will remember there is no allusion
+to the classics in any of his writings. He was a handsome, curly-headed
+lad, full of animation and animal spirits, and probably was connected
+with every mischievous prank in the school. I do not think he came in
+for any of Mr. Jones's scourging propensity: in fact, together with
+myself, he was only a day-pupil, and with these there was a wholesome
+fear of tales being carried home to the parents. His personal appearance
+at that time is vividly brought home to me in the portrait of him taken
+a few years later by Mr. Lawrence. He resided with his friends in a very
+small house in a street leading out of Seymour Street, north of Mr.
+Judkin's chapel.
+
+"Depend on it, he was quite a self-made man, and his wonderful knowledge
+and command of the English language must have been acquired by long and
+patient study after leaving his last school.
+
+"I have no recollection of the boy you name. His chief associates were,
+I think, Tobin, Mr. Thomas, Bray, and myself. The first-named was his
+chief ally, and his acquaintance with him appears to have continued many
+years afterwards. At about that time Penny and Saturday Magazines were
+published weekly, and were greedily read by us. We kept bees, white
+mice, and other living things clandestinely in our desks; and the
+mechanical arts were a good deal cultivated, in the shape of
+coach-building, and making pumps and boats, the motive power of which
+was the white mice.
+
+"I think at that time Dickens took to writing small tales, and we had a
+sort of club for lending and circulating them. Dickens was also very
+strong in using a sort of lingo, which made us quite unintelligible to
+bystanders. We were very strong, too, in theatricals. We mounted small
+theatres, and got up very gorgeous scenery to illustrate the _Miller and
+his Men_ and _Cherry and Fair Star_. I remember the present Mr.
+Beverley, the scene-painter, assisted us in this. Dickens was always a
+leader at these plays, which were occasionally presented with much
+solemnity before an audience of boys and in the presence of the ushers.
+My brother, assisted by Dickens, got up the _Miller and his Men_, in a
+very gorgeous form. Master Beverley constructed the mill for us in such
+a way that it could tumble to pieces with the assistance of crackers. At
+one representation the fireworks in the last scene, ending with the
+destruction of the mill, were so very real that the police interfered
+and knocked violently at the doors. Dickens's after-taste for
+theatricals might have had its origin in these small affairs.
+
+"I quite remember Dickens on one occasion heading us in Drummond Street
+in pretending to be poor boys, and asking the passers-by for
+charity,--especially old ladies, one of whom told us she 'had no money
+for beggar-boys.' On these adventures, when the old ladies were quite
+staggered by the impudence of the demand, Dickens would explode with
+laughter and take to his heels.
+
+"I met him one Sunday morning shortly after he left the school, and we
+very piously attended the morning service at Seymour Street Chapel. I am
+sorry to say Master Dickens did not attend in the slightest degree to
+the service, but incited me to laughter by declaring his dinner was
+ready and the potatoes would be spoiled, and in fact behaved in such a
+manner that it was lucky for us we were not ejected from the chapel.
+
+"I heard of him some time after from Tobin, whom I met carrying a
+foaming pot of London particular in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and I then
+understood that Dickens was in the same or some neighboring office.
+
+"Many years elapsed after this before I became aware, from accidentally
+reading Our School, that the brilliant and now famous Dickens was my old
+schoolfellow. I didn't like to intrude myself upon him; and it was not
+until three or four years ago, when he presided at the University
+College dinner at Willis's rooms, and made a most brilliant and
+effective speech, that I sent him a congratulatory note reminding him of
+our former fellowship. To this he sent me a kind note in reply, and
+which I value very much. I send you copies of these."[5]
+
+From Dickens himself I never heard much allusion to the school thus
+described; but I knew that, besides being the subject dealt with in
+_Household Words_, it had supplied some of the lighter traits of Salem
+House for _Copperfield_; and that to the fact of one of its tutors being
+afterwards engaged to teach a boy of Macready's, our common friend,
+Dickens used to point for one of the illustrations of his favorite
+theory as to the smallness of the world, and how things and persons
+apparently the most unlikely to meet were continually knocking up
+against each other. The employment as his amanuensis of his schoolfellow
+Tobin dates as early as his Doctors'-Commons days, but both my
+correspondents are mistaken in the impression they appear to have
+received that Tobin had been previously his fellow-clerk in the same
+attorney's office. I had thought him more likely to have been
+accompanied there by another of his boyish acquaintances who became
+afterwards a solicitor, Mr. Mitton, not recollected by either of my
+correspondents in connection with the school, but whom I frequently met
+with him in later years, and for whom he had the regard arising out of
+such early associations. In this, however, I have since discovered my
+own mistake: the truth being that it was this gentleman's connection,
+not with the Wellington Academy, but with a school kept by Mr. Dawson in
+Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, where the brothers of Dickens were
+subsequently placed, which led to their early knowledge of each other. I
+fancy that they were together also, for a short time, at Mr. Molloy's in
+New Square, Lincoln's Inn; but, whether or not this was so, Dickens
+certainly had not quitted school many months before his father had made
+sufficient interest with an attorney of Gray's Inn, Mr. Edward
+Blackmore, to obtain him regular employment in his office. In this
+capacity of clerk, our only trustworthy glimpse of him we owe to the
+last-named gentleman, who has described briefly, and I do not doubt
+authentically, the services so rendered by him to the law. It cannot be
+said that they were noteworthy, though it might be difficult to find a
+more distinguished person who has borne the title, unless we make
+exception for the very father of literature himself, whom Chaucer, with
+amusing illustration of the way in which words change their meanings,
+calls "that conceited clerke Homere."
+
+"I was well acquainted," writes Mr. Edward Blackmore of Alresford, "with
+his parents, and, being then in practice in Gray's Inn, they asked me if
+I could find employment for him. He was a bright, clever-looking youth,
+and I took him as a clerk. He came to me in May, 1827, and left in
+November, 1828; and I have now an account-book which he used to keep of
+petty disbursements in the office, in which he charged himself with the
+modest salary first of thirteen shillings and sixpence, and afterwards
+of fifteen shillings, a week. Several incidents took place in the office
+of which he must have been a keen observer, as I recognized some of them
+in his _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_; and I am much mistaken if some of his
+characters had not their originals in persons I well remember. His taste
+for theatricals was much promoted by a fellow-clerk named Potter, since
+dead, with whom he chiefly associated. They took every opportunity, then
+unknown to me, of going together to a minor theatre, where (I afterwards
+heard) they not unfrequently engaged in parts. After he left me I saw
+him at times in the lord chancellor's court, taking notes of cases as a
+reporter. I then lost sight of him until his _Pickwick_ made its
+appearance." This letter indicates the position he held at Mr.
+Blackmore's; and we have but to turn to the passage in _Pickwick_ which
+describes the several grades of attorney's clerk, to understand it more
+clearly. He was very far below the articled clerk, who has paid a
+premium and is attorney in perspective. He was not so high as the
+salaried clerk, with nearly the whole of his weekly thirty shillings
+spent on his personal pleasures. He was not even on the level with his
+middle-aged copying-clerk, always needy and uniformly shabby. He was
+simply among, however his own nature may have lifted him above, the
+"office-lads in their first surtouts, who feel a befitting contempt for
+boys at day-schools, club as they go home at night for saveloys and
+porter, and think there's nothing like life." Thus far, not more or
+less, had he now reached. He was one of the office-lads, and probably in
+his first surtout.
+
+But, even thus, the process of education went on, defying what seemed to
+interrupt it; and in the amount of his present equipment for his needs
+of life, what he brought from the Wellington House Academy can have
+borne but the smallest proportion to his acquirement at Mr. Blackmore's.
+Yet to seek to identify, without help from himself, any passages in his
+books with those boyish law-experiences, would be idle and hopeless
+enough. In the earliest of his writings, and down to the very latest, he
+worked exhaustively the field which is opened by an attorney's office to
+a student of life and manners; but we have not now to deal with his
+numerous varieties of the _genus_ clerk drawn thus for the amusement of
+others, but with the acquisitions which at present he was storing up for
+himself from the opportunities such offices opened to him. Nor would it
+be possible to have better illustrative comment on all these years than
+is furnished by his father's reply to a friend it was now hoped to
+interest on his behalf, which more than once I have heard him
+whimsically, but good-humoredly, imitate. "Pray, Mr. Dickens, where was
+your son educated?" "Why, indeed, sir--ha! ha!--he may be said to have
+educated himself!" Of the two kinds of education which Gibbon says that
+all men who rise above the common level receive,--the first, that of his
+teachers, and the second, more personal and more important, _his
+own_,--he had the advantage only of the last. It nevertheless sufficed
+for him.
+
+Very nearly another eighteen months were now to be spent mainly in
+practical preparation for what he was, at this time, led finally to
+choose as an employment from which a fair income was certain with such
+talents as he possessed; his father already having taken to it, in these
+latter years, in aid of the family resources. In his father's house,
+which was at Hampstead through the first portion of the Mornington
+Street school time, then in the house out of Seymour Street mentioned by
+Dr. Danson, and afterwards, upon the elder Dickens going into the
+gallery, in Bentinck Street, Manchester Square, Charles had continued to
+live; and, influenced doubtless by the example before him, he took
+sudden determination to qualify himself thoroughly for what his father
+was lately become, a newspaper parliamentary reporter. He set
+resolutely, therefore, to the study of short-hand; and, for the
+additional help of such general information about books as a
+fairly-educated youth might be expected to have, as well as to satisfy
+some higher personal cravings, he became an assiduous attendant in the
+British Museum reading-room. He would frequently refer to these days as
+decidedly the usefulest to himself he had ever passed; and, judging from
+the results, they must have been so. No man who knew him in later years,
+and talked to him familiarly of books and things, would have suspected
+his education in boyhood, almost entirely self-acquired as it was, to
+have been so rambling or hap-hazard as I have here described it. The
+secret consisted in this, that, whatever for the time he had to do, he
+lifted himself, there and then, to the level of, and at no time
+disregarded the rules that guided the hero of his novel. "Whatever I
+have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well.
+What I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely.
+Never to put one hand to anything on which I could throw my whole self,
+and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was, I find now
+to have been my golden rules."
+
+Of the difficulties that beset his short-hand studies, as well as of
+what first turned his mind to them, he has told also something in
+_Copperfield_. He had heard that many men distinguished in various
+pursuits had begun life by reporting the debates in parliament, and he
+was not deterred by a friend's warning that the mere mechanical
+accomplishment for excellence in it might take a few years to master
+thoroughly; "a perfect and entire command of the mystery of short-hand
+writing and reading being about equal in difficulty to the mastery of
+six languages." Undaunted, he plunged into it, self-teaching in this as
+in graver things, and, having bought Mr. Gurney's half-guinea book,
+worked steadily his way through its distractions. "The changes that were
+rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such
+another position something else entirely different; the wonderful
+vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences
+that resulted from marks like flies' legs; the tremendous effects of a
+curve in a wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but
+reappeared before me in my sleep. When I had groped my way, blindly,
+through these difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, there then
+appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters; the
+most despotic characters I have ever known; who insisted, for instance,
+that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb meant expectation, and that
+a pen-and-ink sky-rocket stood for disadvantageous. When I had fixed
+these wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else
+out of it; then, beginning again, I forgot them; while I was picking
+them up, I dropped the other fragments of the system: in short, it was
+almost heart-breaking."
+
+What it was that made it not quite heart-breaking to the hero of the
+fiction, its readers know; and something of the same kind was now to
+enter into the actual experience of its writer. First let me say,
+however, that after subduing to his wants in marvelously quick time this
+unruly and unaccommodating servant of stenography, what he most desired
+was still not open to him. "There never _was_ such a short-hand writer,"
+has been often said to me by Mr. Beard, the friend he first made in that
+line when he entered the gallery, and with whom to the close of his life
+he maintained the friendliest intercourse. But there was no opening for
+him in the gallery yet. He had to pass nearly two years as a reporter
+for one of the offices in Doctors' Commons, practicing in this and the
+other law courts, before he became a sharer in parliamentary toils and
+triumphs; and what sustained his young hero through something of the
+same sort of trial was also his own support. He too had his Dora, at
+apparently the same hopeless elevation; striven for as the one only
+thing to be attained, and even more unattainable, for neither did he
+succeed nor happily did she die; but the one idol, like the other,
+supplying a motive to exertion for the time, and otherwise opening out
+to the idolater, both in fact and fiction, a highly unsubstantial,
+happy, foolish time. I used to laugh and tell him I had no belief in any
+but the book Dora, until the incident of a sudden reappearance of the
+real one in his life, nearly six years after _Copperfield_ was written,
+convinced me there had been a more actual foundation for those chapters
+of his book than I was ready to suppose. Still, I would hardly admit it,
+and, that the matter could possibly affect him then, persisted in a
+stout refusal to believe. His reply (1855) throws a little light on this
+juvenile part of his career, and I therefore venture to preserve it:
+
+"I don't quite apprehend what you mean by my overrating the strength of
+the feeling of five-and-twenty years ago. If you mean of my own feeling,
+and will only think what the desperate intensity of my nature is, and
+that this began when I was Charley's age; that it excluded every other
+idea from my mind for four years, at a time of life when four years are
+equal to four times four; and that I went at it with a determination to
+overcome all the difficulties, which fairly lifted me up into that
+newspaper life, and floated me away over a hundred men's heads; then you
+are wrong, because nothing can exaggerate that. I have positively stood
+amazed at myself ever since!--And so I suffered, and so worked, and so
+beat and hammered away at the maddest romances that ever got into any
+boy's head and stayed there, that to see the mere cause of it all, now,
+loosens my hold upon myself. Without for a moment sincerely believing
+that it would have been better if we had never got separated, I cannot
+see the occasion of so much emotion as I should see any one else. No
+one can imagine in the most distant degree what pain the recollection
+gave me in _Copperfield_. And, just as I can never open that book as I
+open any other book, I cannot see the face (even at four-and-forty), or
+hear the voice, without going wandering away over the ashes of all that
+youth and hope in the wildest manner." More and more plainly seen,
+however, in the light of four-and-forty, the romance glided visibly
+away, its work being fairly done; and at the close of the month
+following that in which this letter was written, during which he had
+very quietly made a formal call with his wife at his youthful Dora's
+house, and contemplated with a calm equanimity, in the hall, her stuffed
+favorite Jip, he began the fiction in which there was a Flora to set
+against its predecessor's Dora, both derived from the same original. The
+fancy had a comic humor in it he found it impossible to resist, but it
+was kindly and pleasant to the last;[6] and if the later picture showed
+him plenty to laugh at in this retrospect of his youth, there was
+nothing he thought of more tenderly than the earlier, as long as he was
+conscious of anything.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] The reader will probably think them worth subjoining. Dr. Danson
+wrote: "_April, 1864._ DEAR SIR, On the recent occasion of the U. C. H.
+dinner, you would probably have been amused and somewhat surprised to
+learn that one of those whom you addressed had often accompanied you
+over that 'field of forty footsteps' to which you so aptly and amusingly
+alluded. It is now some years since I was accidentally reading a paper
+written by yourself in the _Household Words_, when I was first impressed
+with the idea that the writer described scenes and persons with which I
+was once familiar, and that he must necessarily be the veritable Charles
+Dickens of 'our school,'--the school of Jones! I did not then, however,
+like to intrude myself upon you, for I could hardly hope that you would
+retain any recollection of myself; indeed, it was only barely possible
+you should do so, however vividly _I_ might recall you in many scenes of
+fun and frolic of my school-days. I happened to be present at the dinner
+of Tuesday last (being interested as an old student in the school of the
+hospital), and was seated very near you; I was tempted during the
+evening to introduce myself to you, but feared lest an explanation such
+as this in a public room might attract attention and be disagreeable to
+yourself. A man who has attained a position and celebrity such as yours
+will probably have many early associates and acquaintances claiming his
+notice. I beg of you to believe that such is not my object, but that
+having so recently met you I feel myself unable to repress the desire to
+assure you that no one in the room could appreciate the fame and rank
+you have so fairly won, or could wish you more sincerely long life and
+happiness to enjoy them, than, Dear Sir, your old schoolfellow, HENRY
+DANSON." To this Dickens replied: "GADSHILL PLACE, _Thursday, 5th May,
+1864_. DEAR SIR, I should have assured you before now that the receipt
+of your letter gave me great pleasure, had I not been too much occupied
+to have leisure for correspondence. I perfectly recollect your name as
+that of an old schoolfellow, and distinctly remember your appearance and
+dress as a boy, and believe you had a brother who was unfortunately
+drowned in the Serpentine. If you had made yourself personally known to
+me at the dinner, I should have been well pleased; though in that case I
+should have lost your modest and manly letter. Faithfully yours, CHARLES
+DICKENS."
+
+[6] I take other fanciful allusions to the lady from two of his
+occasional writings. The first from his visit to the city churches
+(written during the Dombey time, when he had to select a church for the
+marriage of Florence): "Its drowsy cadence soon lulls the three old
+women asleep, and the unmarried tradesman sits looking out at window,
+and the married tradesman sits looking at his wife's bonnet, and the
+lovers sit looking at one another, so superlatively happy, that I mind
+when I, turned of eighteen, went with my Angelica to a city church on
+account of a shower (by this special coincidence that it was in Huggin
+Lane), and when I said to my Angelica, 'Let the blessed event, Angelica,
+occur at no altar but this!' and when my Angelica consented that it
+should occur at no other--which it certainly never did, for it never
+occurred anywhere. And O, Angelica, what has become of you, this present
+Sunday morning when I can't attend to the sermon? and, more difficult
+question than that, what has become of Me as I was when I sat by your
+side?" The second, from his pleasant paper on birthdays: "I gave a party
+on the occasion. She was there. It is unnecessary to name Her, more
+particularly; She was older than I, and had pervaded every chink and
+crevice of my mind for three or four years. I had held volumes of
+Imaginary Conversations with her mother on the subject of our union, and
+I had written letters more in number than Horace Walpole's, to that
+discreet woman, soliciting her daughter's hand in marriage. I had never
+had the remotest intention of sending any of those letters; but to write
+them, and after a few days tear them up, had been a sublime occupation."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+REPORTERS' GALLERY AND NEWSPAPER LITERATURE.
+
+1831-1835.
+
+ Reporting for _True Sun_--First seen by
+ me--Reporting for _Mirror_ and
+ _Chronicle_--First Published Piece--Discipline
+ and Experiences of Reporting--Life as a
+ Reporter--John Black--Mr. Thomas Beard--A
+ Letter to his Editor--Incident of Reporting
+ Days--The same more correctly told--Origin of
+ "Boz"--Captain Holland--Mr. George
+ Hogarth--Sketches in _Evening Chronicle_--C.
+ D.'s First Hearty Appreciator.
+
+
+DICKENS was nineteen years old when at last he entered the gallery. His
+father, with whom he still lived in Bentinck Street, had already, as we
+have seen, joined the gallery as a reporter for one of the morning
+papers, and was now in the more comfortable circumstances derived from
+the addition to his official pension which this praiseworthy labor
+insured; but his own engagement on the _Chronicle_ dates somewhat later.
+His first parliamentary service was given to the _True Sun_, a journal
+which had then on its editorial staff some dear friends of mine, through
+whom I became myself a contributor to it, and afterwards, in common with
+all concerned, whether in its writing, reporting, printing, or
+publishing, a sharer in its difficulties. The most formidable of these
+arrived one day in a general strike of the reporters; and I well
+remember noticing at this dread time, on the staircase of the
+magnificent mansion we were lodged in, a young man of my own age, whose
+keen animation of look would have arrested attention anywhere, and whose
+name, upon inquiry, I then for the first time heard. It was coupled with
+the fact, which gave it interest even then, that "young Dickens" had
+been spokesman for the recalcitrant reporters, and conducted their case
+triumphantly. He was afterwards during two sessions engaged for the
+_Mirror of Parliament_, which one of his uncles by the mother's side
+originated and conducted; and finally, in his twenty-third year, he
+became a reporter for the _Morning Chronicle_.
+
+A step far more momentous to him (though then he did not know it) he had
+taken shortly before. In the December number for 1833 of what then was
+called the _Old Monthly Magazine_, his first published piece of writing
+had seen the light. He has described himself dropping this paper (Mr.
+Minns and his Cousin, as he afterwards entitled it, but which appeared
+in the magazine as A Dinner at Poplar Walk) stealthily one evening at
+twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter-box in a dark
+office up a dark court in Fleet Street; and he has told his agitation
+when it appeared in all the glory of print: "On which occasion I walked
+down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half an hour, because
+my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride that they could not bear the
+street, and were not fit to be seen there." He had purchased the
+magazine at a shop in the Strand; and exactly two years afterwards, in
+the younger member of a publishing firm who had called, at the chambers
+in Furnival's Inn to which he had moved soon after entering the
+gallery, with the proposal that originated _Pickwick_, he recognized the
+person he had bought that magazine from, and whom before or since he had
+never seen.
+
+This interval of two years more than comprised what remained of his
+career in the gallery and the engagements connected with it; but that
+this occupation was of the utmost importance in its influence on his
+life, in the discipline of his powers as well as of his character, there
+can be no doubt whatever. "To the wholesome training of severe newspaper
+work, when I was a very young man, I constantly refer my first
+successes," he said to the New York editors when he last took leave of
+them. It opened to him a wide and varied range of experience, which his
+wonderful observation, exact as it was humorous, made entirely his own.
+He saw the last of the old coaching-days, and of the old inns that were
+a part of them; but it will be long before the readers of his living
+page see the last of the life of either. "There never was," he once
+wrote to me (in 1845), "anybody connected with newspapers who, in the
+same space of time, had so much express and post-chaise experience as I.
+And what gentlemen they were to serve, in such things, at the old
+_Morning Chronicle_! Great or small it did not matter. I have had to
+charge for half a dozen break-downs in half a dozen times as many miles.
+I have had to charge for the damage of a great-coat from the drippings
+of a blazing wax candle, in writing through the smallest hours of the
+night in a swift-flying carriage-and-pair. I have had to charge for all
+sorts of breakages fifty times in a journey without question, such being
+the ordinary results of the pace which we went at. I have charged for
+broken hats, broken luggage, broken chaises, broken harness--everything
+but a broken head, which is the only thing they would have grumbled to
+pay for."
+
+Something to the same effect he said publicly twenty years later, on the
+occasion of his presiding, in May, 1865, at the second annual dinner of
+the Newspaper Press Fund, when he condensed within the compass of his
+speech a summary of the whole of his reporting life. "I am not here," he
+said, "advocating the case of a mere ordinary client of whom I have
+little or no knowledge. I hold a brief to-night for my brothers. I went
+into the gallery of the House of Commons as a parliamentary reporter
+when I was a boy, and I left it--I can hardly believe the inexorable
+truth--nigh thirty years ago. I have pursued the calling of a reporter
+under circumstances of which many of my brethren here can form no
+adequate conception. 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. The very last time I was at Exeter, I strolled
+into the castle-yard there, to identify, for the amusement of a friend,
+the spot on which I once 'took,' as we used to call it, an
+election-speech of Lord John Russell at the Devon contest, in the midst
+of a lively fight maintained by all the vagabonds in that division of
+the county, and under such a pelting rain that I remember two
+good-natured colleagues, who chanced to be at leisure, held a
+pocket-handkerchief over my note-book, after the manner of a state
+canopy in an ecclesiastical procession. 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 exciting 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. These trivial things I mention as an assurance to you that
+I never have forgotten the fascination of that old pursuit. The pleasure
+that I used to feel in the rapidity and dexterity of its exercise has
+never faded out of my breast. Whatever little cunning of hand or head I
+took to it, or acquired in it, I have so retained as that I fully
+believe I could resume it to-morrow, very little the worse from long
+disuse. To this present year of my life, when I sit in this hall, or
+where not, hearing a dull speech (the phenomenon does occur), I
+sometimes beguile the tedium of the moment by mentally following the
+speaker in the old, old way; and sometimes, if you can believe me, I
+even find my hand going on the table-cloth, taking an imaginary note of
+it all." The latter I have known him do frequently. It was indeed a
+quite ordinary habit with him.
+
+Mr. James Grant, a writer who was himself in the gallery with Dickens,
+and who states that among its eighty or ninety reporters he occupied the
+very highest rank, not merely for accuracy in reporting but for
+marvelous quickness in transcribing, has lately also told us that while
+there he was exceedingly reserved in his manners, and that, though
+showing the usual courtesies to all he was concerned with in his duties,
+the only personal intimacy he formed was with Mr. Thomas Beard, then too
+reporting for the _Morning Chronicle_. I have already mentioned the
+friendly and familiar relations maintained with this gentleman to the
+close of his life; and in confirmation of Mr. Grant's statement I can
+further say that the only other associate of these early reporting days
+to whom I ever heard him refer with special regard was the late Mr.
+Vincent Dowling, many years editor of _Bell's Life_, with whom he did
+not continue much personal intercourse, but of whose character as well
+as talents he had formed a very high opinion. Nor is there anything to
+add to the notice of these days which the reader's fancy may not easily
+supply. A letter has been kept as written by him while engaged on one of
+his "expresses;" but it is less for its saying anything new, than for
+its confirming with a pleasant vividness what has been said already,
+that its contents will justify mention here.
+
+He writes, on a "Tuesday morning" in May, 1835, from the Bush Inn,
+Bristol; the occasion that has taken him to the west, connected with a
+reporting party, being Lord John Russell's Devonshire contest above
+named, and his associate-chief being Mr. Beard, intrusted with command
+for the _Chronicle_ in this particular express. He expects to forward
+"the conclusion of Russell's dinner" by Cooper's company's coach leaving
+the Bush at half-past six next morning; and by the first Ball's coach on
+Thursday morning he will forward the report of the Bath dinner,
+indorsing the parcel for immediate delivery, with extra rewards for the
+porter. Beard is to go over to Bath next morning. He is himself to come
+back by the mail from Marlborough; he has no doubt, if Lord John makes a
+speech of any ordinary dimensions, it can be done by the time
+Marlborough is reached; "and taking into consideration the immense
+importance of having the addition of saddle-horses from thence, it is,
+beyond all doubt, worth an effort. . . . I need not say," he continues,
+"that it will be sharp work and will require two of us; for we shall
+both be up the whole of the previous night, and shall have to sit up all
+night again to get it off in time." He adds that as soon as they have
+had a little sleep they will return to town as quickly as they can; but
+they have, if the express succeeds, to stop at sundry places along the
+road to pay money and notify satisfaction. And so, for himself and
+Beard, he is his editor's very sincerely.
+
+Another anecdote of these reporting days, with its sequel, may be added
+from his own alleged relation, in which, however, mistakes occur that it
+seems strange he should have made. The story, as told, is that the late
+Lord Derby, when Mr. Stanley, had on some important occasion made a
+speech which all the reporters found it necessary greatly to abridge;
+that its essential points had nevertheless been so well given in the
+_Chronicle_ that Mr. Stanley, having need of it for himself in greater
+detail, had sent a request to the reporter to meet him in Carlton House
+Terrace and take down the entire speech; that Dickens attended and did
+the work accordingly, much to Mr. Stanley's satisfaction; and that, on
+his dining with Mr. Gladstone in recent years, and finding the aspect of
+the dining-room strangely familiar, he discovered afterwards on inquiry
+that it was there he had taken the speech. The story, as it actually
+occurred, is connected with the brief life of the _Mirror of
+Parliament_. It was not at any special desire of Mr. Stanley's, but for
+that new record of the debates, which had been started by one of the
+uncles of Dickens and professed to excel _Hansard_ in giving verbatim
+reports, that the famous speech against O'Connell was taken as
+described. The young reporter went to the room in Carlton Terrace
+because the work of his uncle Barrow's publication required to be done
+there; and if, in later years, the great author was in the same room as
+the guest of the prime minister, it must have been but a month or two
+before he died, when for the first time he visited and breakfasted with
+Mr. Gladstone.
+
+The mention of his career in the gallery may close with the incident. I
+will only add that his observation while there had not led him to form
+any high opinion of the House of Commons or its heroes, and that of the
+Pickwickian sense which so often takes the place of common sense in our
+legislature he omitted no opportunity of declaring his contempt at
+every part of his life.
+
+The other occupation had meanwhile not been lost sight of, and for this
+we are to go back a little. Since the first sketch appeared in the
+_Monthly Magazine_, nine others have enlivened the pages of later
+numbers of the same magazine, the last in February, 1835, and that which
+appeared in the preceding August having first had the signature of Boz.
+This was the nickname of a pet child, his youngest brother Augustus,
+whom in honor of the _Vicar of Wakefield_ he had dubbed Moses, which
+being facetiously pronounced through the nose became Boses, and being
+shortened became Boz. "Boz was a very familiar household word to me,
+long before I was an author, and so I came to adopt it." Thus had he
+fully invented his Sketches by Boz before they were even so called, or
+any one was ready to give much attention to them; and the next invention
+needful to himself was some kind of payment in return for them. The
+magazine was owned as well as conducted at this time by a Mr. Holland,
+who had come back from Bolivar's South American campaigns with the rank
+of captain, and had hoped to make it a popular mouthpiece for his ardent
+liberalism. But this hope, as well as his own health, quite failed; and
+he had sorrowfully to decline receiving any more of the sketches when
+they had to cease as voluntary offerings. I do not think that either he
+or the magazine lived many weeks after an evening I passed with him in
+Doughty Street in 1837, when he spoke in a very touching way of the
+failure of this and other enterprises of his life, and of the help that
+Dickens had been to him.
+
+Nothing thus being forthcoming from the _Monthly_, it was of course but
+natural the sketches too should cease to be forthcoming; and, even
+before the above-named February number appeared, a new opening had been
+found for them. An evening offshoot to the _Morning Chronicle_ had been
+lately in hand; and to a countryman of Black's engaged in the
+preparations for it, Mr. George Hogarth, Dickens was communicating from
+his rooms in Furnival's Inn, on the evening of Tuesday, the 20th of
+January, 1835, certain hopes and fancies he had formed. This was the
+beginning of his knowledge of an accomplished and kindly man, with whose
+family his relations were soon to become so intimate as to have an
+influence on all his future career. Mr. Hogarth had asked him, as a
+favor to himself, to write an original sketch for the first number of
+the enterprise, and in writing back to say with what readiness he should
+comply, and how anxiously he should desire to do his best for the person
+who had made the request, he mentioned what had arisen in his mind. It
+had occurred to him that he might not be unreasonably or improperly
+trespassing farther on Mr. Hogarth if, trusting to his kindness to refer
+the application to the proper quarter, he begged to ask whether it was
+probable, if he commenced a regular series of articles under some
+attractive title for the _Evening Chronicle_, its conductors would think
+he had any claim to _some_ additional remuneration (of course, of no
+great amount) for doing so. In short, he wished to put it to the
+proprietors--first, whether a continuation of some chapters of light
+papers in the style of his street-sketches would be considered of use to
+the new journal; and secondly, if so, whether they would not think it
+fair and reasonable that, taking his share of the ordinary reporting
+business of the _Chronicle_ besides, he should receive something for the
+papers beyond his ordinary salary as a reporter. The request was thought
+fair, he began the sketches, and his salary was raised from five to
+seven guineas a week.
+
+They went on, with undiminished spirit and freshness, throughout the
+year; and, much as they were talked of outside as well as in the world
+of newspapers, nothing in connection with them delighted the writer half
+so much as the hearty praise of his own editor. Mr. Black is one of the
+men who has passed without recognition out of a world his labors largely
+benefited, but with those who knew him no man was so popular, as well
+for his broad kindly humor as for his honest great-hearted enjoyment of
+whatever was excellent in others. Dickens to the last remembered that it
+was most of all the cordial help of this good old mirth-loving man which
+had started him joyfully on his career of letters. "It was John Black
+that flung the slipper after me," he would often say. "Dear old Black!
+my first hearty out-and-out appreciator," is an expression in one of his
+letters written to me in the year he died.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+FIRST BOOK, AND ORIGIN OF PICKWICK.
+
+1836.
+
+ _Sketches by Boz_--Fancy-piece by N. P. Willis:
+ a Poor English Author--Start of
+ _Pickwick_--Marriage to Miss Hogarth--First
+ Connection with Chapman & Hall--Mr. Seymour's
+ Part in _Pickwick_--Letters relating
+ thereto--C. D.'s own Account--False Claims
+ refuted--Pickwick's Original, his Figure and
+ his Name--First Sprightly Runnings of
+ Genius--The _Sketches_ characterized--Mr.
+ Seymour's Death--New Illustrator chosen--Mr.
+ Hablot K. Browne--C. D. leaves the
+ Gallery--_Strange Gentleman_ and _Village
+ Coquettes_.
+
+
+THE opening of 1836 found him collecting into two volumes the first
+series of _Sketches by Boz_, of which he had sold the copyright for a
+conditional payment of (I think) a hundred and fifty pounds to a young
+publisher named Macrone, whose acquaintance he had made through Mr.
+Ainsworth a few weeks before.[7] At this time also, we are told in a
+letter before quoted, the editorship of the _Monthly Magazine_ having
+come into Mr. James Grant's hands, this gentleman, applying to him
+through its previous editor to know if he would again contribute to it,
+learned two things: the first, that he was going to be married; and the
+second, that, having entered into an arrangement to write a monthly
+serial, his duties in future would leave him small spare time. Both
+pieces of news were soon confirmed. The _Times_ of the 26th of March,
+1836, gave notice that on the 31st would be published the first shilling
+number of the _Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, edited by Boz_;
+and the same journal of a few days later announced that on the 2d of
+April Mr. Charles Dickens had married Catherine, the eldest daughter of
+Mr. George Hogarth, whom already we have met as his fellow-worker on the
+_Chronicle_. The honeymoon was passed in the neighborhood to which at
+all times of interest in his life he turned with a strange recurring
+fondness; and while the young couple are at the quiet little village of
+Chalk, on the road between Gravesend and Rochester, I will relate
+exactly the origin of the ever-memorable Mr. Pickwick.
+
+A young publishing-house had started recently, among other enterprises
+ingenious rather than important, a Library of Fiction; among the authors
+they wished to enlist in it was the writer of the sketches in the
+_Monthly_; and, to the extent of one paper during the past year, they
+had effected this through their editor, Mr. Charles Whitehead, a very
+ingenious and very unfortunate man. "I was not aware," wrote the elder
+member of the firm to Dickens, thirteen years later, in a letter to
+which reference was made[8] in the preface to _Pickwick_ in one of his
+later editions, "that you were writing in the _Chronicle_, or what your
+name was; but Whitehead, who was an old _Monthly_ man, recollected it,
+and got you to write The Tuggs's at Ramsgate."
+
+And now comes another person on the scene. "In November, 1835,"
+continues Mr. Chapman, "we published a little book called the _Squib
+Annual_, with plates by Seymour; and it was during my visit to him to
+see after them that he said he should like to do a series of
+cockney-sporting plates of a superior sort to those he had already
+published. I said I thought they might do, if accompanied by
+letter-press and published in monthly parts; and, this being agreed to,
+we wrote to the author of _Three Courses and a Dessert_, and proposed
+it; but, receiving no answer, the scheme dropped for some months, till
+Seymour said he wished us to decide, as another job had offered which
+would fully occupy his time; and it was on this we decided to ask you to
+do it. Having opened already a connection with you for our Library of
+Fiction, we naturally applied to you to do the _Pickwick_; but I do not
+think we even mentioned our intention to Mr. Seymour, and I am quite
+sure that from the beginning to the end nobody but yourself had anything
+whatever to do with it. Our prospectus was out at the end of February,
+and it had all been arranged before that date."
+
+The member of the firm who carried the application to him in Furnival's
+Inn was not the writer of this letter, but Mr. Hall, who had sold him
+two years before, not knowing that he was the purchaser, the magazine in
+which his first effusion was printed; and he has himself described what
+passed at the interview: "The idea propounded to me was that the monthly
+something should be a vehicle for certain plates to be executed by Mr.
+Seymour; and there was a notion, either on the part of that admirable
+humorous artist, or of my visitor, that a NIMROD CLUB, the members of
+which were to go out shooting, fishing, and so forth, and getting
+themselves into difficulties through their want of dexterity, would be
+the best means of introducing these. I objected, on consideration that,
+although born and partly bred in the country, I was no great sportsman,
+except in regard to all kinds of locomotion; that the idea was not
+novel, and had already been much used; that it would be infinitely
+better for the plates to arise naturally out of the text; and that I
+would like to take my own way, with a freer range of English scenes and
+people, and was afraid I should ultimately do so in any case, whatever
+course I might prescribe to myself at starting. My views being deferred
+to, I thought of Mr. Pickwick, and wrote the first number; from the
+proof-sheets of which Mr. Seymour made his drawing of the club and his
+happy portrait of its founder. I connected Mr. Pickwick with a club,
+because of the original suggestion; and I put in Mr. Winkle expressly
+for the use of Mr. Seymour."
+
+Mr. Hall was dead when this statement was first made, in the preface to
+the cheap edition in 1847; but Mr. Chapman clearly recollected his
+partner's account of the interview, and confirmed every part of it, in
+his letter of 1849,[9] with one exception. In giving Mr. Seymour credit
+for the figure by which all the habitable globe knows Mr. Pickwick, and
+which certainly at the outset helped to make him a reality, it had given
+the artist too much. The reader will hardly be so startled as I was on
+coming to the closing line of Mr. Chapman's confirmatory letter: "As
+this letter is to be historical, I may as well claim what little belongs
+to me in the matter, and that is the figure of Pickwick. Seymour's first
+sketch was of a long, thin man. The present immortal one he made from my
+description of a friend of mine at Richmond, a fat old beau, who would
+wear, in spite of the ladies' protests, drab tights and black gaiters.
+His name was John Foster."
+
+On the coincidences, resemblances, and surprises of life, Dickens liked
+especially to dwell, and few things moved his fancy so pleasantly. The
+world, he would say, was so much smaller than we thought it; we were all
+so connected by fate without knowing it; people supposed to be far apart
+were so constantly elbowing each other; and to-morrow bore so close a
+resemblance to nothing half so much as to yesterday. Here were the only
+two leading incidents of his own life before I knew him, his marriage
+and the first appearance of his Pickwick; and it turned out after all
+that I had some shadowy association with both. He was married on the
+anniversary of my birthday, and the original of the figure of Mr.
+Pickwick bore my name.[10]
+
+The first number had not yet appeared when his _Sketches by Boz,
+Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People_, came forth in two
+duodecimos with some capital cuts by Cruikshank, and with a preface in
+which he spoke of the nervousness he should have had in venturing alone
+before the public, and of his delight in getting the help of Cruikshank,
+who had frequently contributed to the success, though his well-earned
+reputation rendered it impossible for him ever to have shared the
+hazard, of similar undertakings. It very soon became apparent that there
+was no hazard here. The _Sketches_ were much more talked about than the
+first two or three numbers of _Pickwick_, and I remember still with what
+hearty praise the book was first named to me by my dear friend Albany
+Fonblanque, as keen and clear a judge as ever lived either of books or
+men. Richly did it merit all the praise it had, and more, I will add,
+than he was ever disposed to give to it himself. He decidedly underrated
+it. He gave, in subsequent writings, so much more perfect form and
+fullness to everything it contained, that he did not care to credit
+himself with the marvel of having yet so early anticipated so much. But
+the first sprightly runnings of his genius are undoubtedly here. Mr.
+Bumble is in the parish sketches, and Mr. Dawkins the dodger in the Old
+Bailey scenes. There is laughter and fun to excess, never misapplied;
+there are the minute points and shades of character, with all the
+discrimination and nicety of detail, afterwards so famous; there is
+everywhere the most perfect ease and skill of handling. The observation
+shown throughout is nothing short of wonderful. Things are painted
+literally as they are, and, whatever the picture, whether of every-day
+vulgar, shabby-genteel, or downright low, with neither the condescending
+air which is affectation, nor the too familiar one which is slang. The
+book altogether is a perfectly unaffected, unpretentious, honest
+performance. Under its manly, sensible, straightforward vein of talk
+there is running at the same time a natural flow of sentiment never
+sentimental, of humor always easy and unforced, and of pathos for the
+most part dramatic or picturesque, under which lay the germ of what his
+mature genius took afterwards most delight in. Of course there are
+inequalities in it, and some things that would have been better away;
+but it is a book that might have stood its ground, even if it had stood
+alone, as containing unusually truthful observation of a sort of life
+between the middle class and the low, which, having few attractions for
+bookish observers, was quite unhackneyed ground. It had otherwise also
+the very special merit of being in no respect bookish or commonplace in
+its descriptions of the old city with which its writer was so familiar.
+It was a picture of every-day London at its best and worst, in its
+humors and enjoyments as well as its sufferings and sins, pervaded
+everywhere not only with the absolute reality of the things depicted,
+but also with that subtle sense and mastery of feeling which gives to
+the reader's sympathies invariably right direction, and awakens
+consideration, tenderness, and kindness precisely for those who most
+need such help.
+
+Between the first and the second numbers of _Pickwick_, the artist, Mr.
+Seymour, died by his own hand; and the number came out with three
+instead of four illustrations. Dickens had seen the unhappy man only
+once, forty-eight hours before his death; when he went to Furnival's Inn
+with an etching for the "stroller's tale" in that number, which, altered
+at Dickens's suggestion, he brought away again for the few further
+touches that occupied him to a late hour of the night before he
+destroyed himself. A notice attached to the number informed the public
+of this latter fact. There was at first a little difficulty in replacing
+him, and for a single number Mr. Buss was interposed. But before the
+fourth number a choice had been made, which as time went on was so
+thoroughly justified, that through the greater part of the wonderful
+career which was then beginning the connection was kept up, and Mr.
+Hablot Browne's name is not unworthily associated with the masterpieces
+of Dickens's genius. An incident which I heard related by Mr. Thackeray
+at one of the Royal Academy dinners belongs to this time: "I can
+remember when Mr. Dickens was a very young man, and had commenced
+delighting the world with some charming humorous works in covers which
+were colored light green and came out once a month, that this young man
+wanted an artist to illustrate his writings; and I recollect walking up
+to his chambers in Furnival's Inn, with two or three drawings in my
+hand, which, strange to say, he did not find suitable." Dickens has
+himself described another change now made in the publication: "We
+started with a number of twenty-four pages and four illustrations. Mr.
+Seymour's sudden and lamented death before the second number was
+published, brought about a quick decision upon a point already in
+agitation: the number became one of thirty-two pages with only two
+illustrations, and remained so to the end."
+
+The Session of 1836 terminated his connection with the gallery, and some
+fruits of his increased leisure showed themselves before the close of
+the year. His eldest sister's musical attainments and connections had
+introduced him to many cultivators and professors of that art; he was
+led to take much interest in Mr. Braham's enterprise at the St. James's
+theatre; and in aid of it he wrote a farce for Mr. Harley, founded upon
+one of his sketches, and the story and songs for an opera composed by
+his friend Mr. Hullah. Both the _Strange Gentleman_, acted in September,
+and the _Village Coquettes_, produced in December, 1836, had a good
+success; and the last is memorable to me for having brought me first
+into personal communication with Dickens.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[7] To this date belongs a visit paid him at Furnival's Inn in Mr.
+Macrone's company by the notorious Mr. N. P. Willis, who calls him "a
+young paragraphist for the _Morning Chronicle_," and thus sketches his
+residence and himself: "In the most crowded part of Holborn, within a
+door or two of the Bull-and-Mouth Inn, we pulled up at the entrance of a
+large building used for lawyers' chambers. I followed by a long flight
+of stairs to an upper story, and was ushered into an uncarpeted and
+bleak-looking room, with a deal table, two or three chairs and a few
+books, a small boy and Mr. Dickens, for the contents. I was only struck
+at first with one thing (and I made a memorandum of it that evening as
+the strongest instance I had seen of English obsequiousness to
+employers), the degree to which the poor author was overpowered with the
+honor of his publisher's visit! I remember saying to myself, as I sat
+down on a rickety chair, 'My good fellow, if you were in America with
+that fine face and your ready quill, you would have no need to be
+condescended to by a publisher.' Dickens was dressed very much as he has
+since described Dick Swiveller, _minus_ the swell look. His hair was
+cropped close to his head, his clothes scant, though jauntily cut, and,
+after changing a ragged office-coat for a shabby blue, he stood by the
+door, collarless and buttoned up, the very personification, I thought,
+of a close sailer to the wind." I remember, while my friend lived, our
+laughing heartily at this description, hardly a word of which is true;
+and I give it now as no unfair specimen of the kind of garbage that
+since his death also has been served up only too plentifully by some of
+his own as well as by others of Mr. Willis's countrymen.
+
+[8] Not quoted in detail, on that or any other occasion; though referred
+to. It was, however, placed in my hands, for use if occasion should
+arise, when Dickens went to America in 1867. The letter bears date the
+7th July, 1849, and was Mr. Chapman's answer to the question Dickens had
+asked him, whether the account of the origin of _Pickwick_ which he had
+given in the preface to the cheap edition in 1847 was not strictly
+correct. "It is so correctly described," was Mr. Chapman's opening
+remark, "that I can throw but little additional light on it." The name
+of his hero, I may add, Dickens took from that of a celebrated
+coach-proprietor of Bath.
+
+[9] The appeal was then made to him because of recent foolish statements
+by members of Mr. Seymour's family, which Dickens thus contradicted: "It
+is with great unwillingness that I notice some intangible and incoherent
+assertions which have been made, professedly on behalf of Mr. Seymour,
+to the effect that he had some share in the invention of this book, or
+of anything in it, not faithfully described in the foregoing paragraph.
+With the moderation that is due equally to my respect for the memory of
+a brother-artist, and to my self-respect, I confine myself to placing on
+record here the facts--That Mr. Seymour never originated or suggested an
+incident, a phrase, or a word, to be found in this book. That Mr.
+Seymour died when only twenty-four pages of this book were published,
+and when assuredly not forty-eight were written. That I believe I never
+saw Mr. Seymour's handwriting in my life. That I never saw Mr. Seymour
+but once in my life, and that was on the night but one before his death,
+when he certainly offered no suggestion whatsoever. That I saw him then
+in the presence of two persons, both living, perfectly acquainted with
+all these facts, and whose written testimony to them I possess. Lastly,
+that Mr. Edward Chapman (the survivor of the original firm of Chapman &
+Hall) has set down in writing, for similar preservation, his personal
+knowledge of the origin and progress of this book, of the monstrosity of
+the baseless assertions in question, and (tested by details) even of the
+self-evident impossibility of there being any truth in them." The
+"written testimony" alluded to is also in my possession, having been
+inclosed to me by Dickens, in 1867, with Mr. Chapman's letter here
+referred to.
+
+[10] Whether Mr. Chapman spelt the name correctly, or has unconsciously
+deprived his fat beau of the letter "r," I cannot say; but experience
+tells me that the latter is probable. I have been trying all my life to
+get my own name spelt correctly, and have only very imperfectly
+succeeded.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+WRITING THE PICKWICK PAPERS.
+
+1837.
+
+ First Letter from him--As he was Thirty-five
+ Years ago--Mrs. Carlyle and Leigh Hunt--Birth
+ of Eldest Son--From Furnival's Inn to Doughty
+ Street--A Long-Remembered Sorrow--I visit
+ him--Hasty Compacts with Publishers--Self-sold
+ into Quasi-Bondage--Agreements for Editorship
+ and Writing--Mr. Macrone's Scheme to reissue
+ _Sketches_--Attempts to prevent it--Exorbitant
+ Demand--Impatience of Suspense--Purchase
+ advised--_Oliver Twist_--Characters real to
+ himself--Sense of Responsibility for his
+ Writings--Criticism that satisfied him--Help
+ given with his Proofs--Writing _Pickwick_, Nos.
+ 14 and 15--Scenes in a Debtors' Prison--A
+ Recollection of Smollett--Reception of
+ _Pickwick_--A Popular Rage--Mr. Carlyle's
+ "Dreadful" Story--Secrets of
+ Success--_Pickwick_ inferior to Later
+ Books--Exception for Sam Weller and Mr.
+ Pickwick--Personal Habits of C. D.--Reliefs
+ after Writing--Natural Discontents--The Early
+ Agreements--Tale to follow _Oliver
+ Twist_--Compromise with Mr. Bentley--Trip to
+ Flanders--First Visit to Broadstairs--Piracies
+ of _Pickwick_--A Sufferer from
+ Agreements--First Visit to Brighton--What he is
+ doing with _Oliver Twist_--Reading De Foe--"No
+ Thoroughfare"--Proposed Help to Macready.
+
+
+THE first letter I had from him was at the close of 1836, from
+Furnival's Inn, when he sent me the book of his opera of the _Village
+Coquettes_, which had been published by Mr. Bentley; and this was
+followed, two months later, by his collected _Sketches_, both first and
+second series; which he desired me to receive "as a very small testimony
+of the donor's regard and obligations, as well as of his desire to
+cultivate and avail himself of a friendship which has been so pleasantly
+thrown in his way. . . . In short, if you will receive them for my sake and
+not for their own, you will very greatly oblige me." I had met him in
+the interval at the house of our common friend Mr. Ainsworth, and I
+remember vividly the impression then made upon me.
+
+Very different was his face in those days from that which photography
+has made familiar to the present generation. A look of youthfulness
+first attracted you, and then a candor and openness of expression which
+made you sure of the qualities within. The features were very good. He
+had a capital forehead, a firm nose with full wide nostril, eyes
+wonderfully beaming with intellect and running over with humor and
+cheerfulness, and a rather prominent mouth strongly marked with
+sensibility. The head was altogether well formed and symmetrical, and
+the air and carriage of it were extremely spirited. The hair so scant
+and grizzled in later days was then of a rich brown and most luxuriant
+abundance, and the bearded face of his last two decades had hardly a
+vestige of hair or whisker; but there was that in the face as I first
+recollect it which no time could change, and which remained implanted on
+it unalterably to the last. This was the quickness, keenness, and
+practical power, the eager, restless, energetic outlook on each several
+feature, that seemed to tell so little of a student or writer of books,
+and so much of a man of action and business in the world. Light and
+motion flashed from every part of it. _It was as if made of steel_, was
+said of it, four or five years after the time to which I am referring,
+by a most original and delicate observer, the late Mrs. Carlyle. "What
+a face is his to meet in a drawing-room!" wrote Leigh Hunt to me, the
+morning after I made them known to each other. "It has the life and soul
+in it of fifty human beings." In such sayings are expressed not alone
+the restless and resistless vivacity and force of which I have spoken,
+but that also which lay beneath them of steadiness and hard endurance.
+
+Several unsuccessful efforts were made by each to get the other to his
+house before the door of either was opened at last. A son had been born
+to him on Twelfth-day (the 6th January, 1837), and before the close of
+the following month he and his wife were in the lodgings at Chalk they
+had occupied after their marriage. Early in March there is a letter from
+him accounting for the failure of a promise to call on me because of "a
+crew of house-agents and attorneys" through whom he had nearly missed
+his conveyance to Chalk, and been made "more than half wild besides."
+This was his last letter from Furnival's Inn. In that same month he went
+to 48, Doughty Street; and in his first letter to me from that address,
+dated at the close of the month, there is this passage: "We only called
+upon you a second time in the hope of getting you to dine with us, and
+were much disappointed not to find you. I have delayed writing a reply
+to your note, meaning to call upon you. I have been so much engaged,
+however, in the pleasant occupation of 'moving' that I have not had
+time; and I am obliged at last to write and say that I have been long
+engaged to the _Pickwick_ publishers to a dinner in honor of that hero
+which comes off to-morrow. I am consequently unable to accept your kind
+invite, which I frankly own I should have liked much better."
+
+That Saturday's celebration of his twelfth number, the anniversary of
+the birth of _Pickwick_, preceded by but a few weeks a personal sorrow
+which profoundly moved him. His wife's next younger sister, Mary, who
+lived with them, and by sweetness of nature even more than by graces of
+person had made herself the ideal of his life, died with a terrible
+suddenness that for the time completely bore him down.[11] His grief and
+suffering were intense, and affected him, as will be seen, through many
+after-years. The publication of _Pickwick_ was interrupted for two
+months, the effort of writing it not being possible to him. He moved for
+change of scene to Hampstead, and here, at the close of May, I visited
+him, and became first his guest. More than ordinarily susceptible at the
+moment to all kindliest impressions, his heart opened itself to mine. I
+left him as much his friend, and as entirely in his confidence, as if I
+had known him for years. Nor had many weeks passed before he addressed
+to me from Doughty Street words which it is my sorrowful pride to
+remember have had literal fulfillment: "I look back with unmingled
+pleasure to every link which each ensuing week has added to the chain of
+our attachment. It shall go hard, I hope, ere anything but Death impairs
+the toughness of a bond now so firmly riveted." It remained unweakened
+till death came.
+
+There were circumstances that drew us at once into frequent and close
+communication. What the sudden popularity of his writings implied, was
+known to others some time before it was known to himself; and he was
+only now becoming gradually conscious of all the disadvantage this had
+placed him at. He would have laughed if, at this outset of his wonderful
+fortune in literature, his genius acknowledged by all without misgiving,
+young, popular, and prosperous, any one had compared him to the luckless
+men of letters of former days, whose common fate was to be sold into a
+slavery which their later lives were passed in vain endeavors to escape
+from. Not so was his fate to be, yet something of it he was doomed to
+experience. He had unwittingly sold himself into a quasi-bondage, and
+had to purchase his liberty at a heavy cost, after considerable
+suffering.
+
+It was not until the fourth or fifth number of _Pickwick_ (in the latter
+Sam Weller made his first appearance) that its importance began to be
+understood by "the trade," and on the eve of the issue of its sixth
+number, the 22d August, 1836, he had signed an agreement with Mr.
+Bentley to undertake the editorship of a monthly magazine to be started
+the following January, to which he was to supply a serial story; and
+soon afterwards he had agreed with the same publisher to write two other
+tales, the first at a specified early date; the expressed remuneration
+in each case being certainly quite inadequate to the claims of a writer
+of any marked popularity. Under these Bentley agreements he was now
+writing, month by month, the first half of _Oliver Twist_, and, under
+his Chapman & Hall agreement, the last half of _Pickwick_, not even by a
+week in advance of the printer with either; when a circumstance became
+known to him of which he thus wrote to me:
+
+"I heard half an hour ago, on authority which leaves me in no doubt
+about the matter (from the binder of _Pickwick_, in fact), that Macrone
+intends publishing a new issue of my _Sketches_ in monthly parts of
+nearly the same size and in just the same form as the _Pickwick Papers_.
+I need not tell you that this is calculated to injure me most seriously,
+or that I have a very natural and most decided objection to being
+supposed to presume upon the success of the _Pickwick_, and thus foist
+this old work upon the public in its new dress for the mere purpose of
+putting money in my own pocket. Neither need I say that the fact of my
+name being before the town, attached to three publications at the same
+time, must prove seriously prejudicial to my reputation. As you are
+acquainted with the circumstances under which these copyrights were
+disposed of, and as I know I may rely on your kind help, may I beg you
+to see Macrone, and to state in the strongest and most emphatic manner
+my feeling on this point? I wish him to be reminded of the sums he paid
+for those books; of the sale he has had for them; of the extent to which
+he has already pushed them; and of the very great profits he must
+necessarily have acquired from them. I wish him also to be reminded that
+no intention of publishing them in this form was in the remotest manner
+hinted to me, by him or on his behalf, when he obtained possession of
+the copyright. I then wish you to put it to his feelings of common
+honesty and fair dealing whether after this communication he will
+persevere in his intention." What else the letter contained need not be
+quoted, but it strongly moved me to do my best.
+
+I found Mr. Macrone inaccessible to all arguments of persuasion,
+however. That he had bought the book for a small sum at a time when the
+smallest was not unimportant to the writer, shortly before his marriage,
+and that he had since made very considerable profits by it, in no way
+disturbed his position that he had a right to make as much as he could
+of what was his, without regard to how it had become so. There was
+nothing for it but to change front, and, admitting it might be a less
+evil to the unlucky author to repurchase than to let the monthly issue
+proceed, to ask what further gain was looked for; but so wide a mouth
+was opened at this that I would have no part in the costly process of
+filling it. I told Dickens so, and strongly counseled him to keep quiet
+for a time.
+
+But the worry and vexation were too great with all the work he had in
+hand, and I was hardly surprised next day to receive the letter sent me;
+which yet should be prefaced with the remark that suspense of any kind
+was at all times intolerable to the writer. The interval between the
+accomplishment of anything, and "its first motion," Dickens never could
+endure, and he was too ready to make any sacrifice to abridge or end it.
+This did not belong to the strong side of his character, and advantage
+was frequently taken of the fact. "I sent down just now to know whether
+you were at home (two o'clock), as Chapman & Hall were with me, and, the
+case being urgent, I wished to have the further benefit of your kind
+advice and assistance. Macrone and H---- (arcades ambo) waited on them
+this morning, and after a long discussion peremptorily refused to take
+one farthing less than the two thousand pounds. H---- repeated the
+statement of figures which he made to you yesterday, and put it to Hall
+whether he could say from his knowledge of such matters that the
+estimate of probable profit was exorbitant. Hall, whose judgment may be
+relied on in such matters, could not dispute the justice of the
+calculation. And so the matter stood. In this dilemma it occurred to
+them (my _Pickwick_ men), whether, if the _Sketches_ _must_ appear in
+monthly numbers, it would not be better for them to appear for their
+benefit and mine conjointly than for Macrone's sole use and behoof;
+whether they, having all the _Pickwick_ machinery in full operation,
+could not obtain for them a much larger sale than Macrone could ever
+get; and whether, even at this large price of two thousand pounds, we
+might not, besides retaining the copyright, reasonably hope for a good
+profit on the outlay. These suggestions having presented themselves,
+they came straight to me (having obtained a few hours' respite) and
+proposed that we should purchase the copyrights between us for the two
+thousand pounds, and publish them in monthly parts. I need not say that
+no other form of publication would repay the expenditure; and they wish
+me to explain by an address that _they_, who may be fairly put forward
+as the parties, have been driven into that mode of publication, or the
+copyrights would have been lost. I considered the matter in every
+possible way. I sent for you, but you were out. I thought of"--what need
+not be repeated, now that all is past and gone--"and consented. Was I
+right? I think you will say yes." I could not say no, though I was glad
+to have been no party to a price so exorbitant; which yet profited
+extremely little the person who received it. He died in hardly more than
+two years; and if Dickens had enjoyed the most liberal treatment at his
+hands, he could not have exerted himself more generously for the widow
+and children.
+
+His new story was now beginning largely to share attention with his
+_Pickwick Papers_, and it was delightful to see how real all its people
+became to him. What I had most, indeed, to notice in him, at the very
+outset of his career, was his indifference to any praise of his
+performances on the merely literary side, compared with the higher
+recognition of them as bits of actual life, with the meaning and purpose
+on their part, and the responsibility on his, of realities rather than
+creatures of fancy. The exception that might be drawn from _Pickwick_ is
+rather in seeming than substance. A first book has its immunities, and
+the distinction of this from the rest of the writings appears in what
+has been said of its origin. The plan of it was simply to amuse. It was
+to string together whimsical sketches of the pencil by entertaining
+sketches of the pen; and, at its beginning, where or how it was to end
+was as little known to himself as to any of its readers. But genius is a
+master as well as a servant, and when the laughter and fun were at their
+highest something graver made its appearance. He had to defend himself
+for this; and he said that, though the mere oddity of a new acquaintance
+was apt to impress one at first, the more serious qualities were
+discovered when we became friends with the man. In other words he might
+have said that the change was become necessary for his own
+satisfaction. The book itself, in teaching him what his power was, had
+made him more conscious of what would be expected from its use; and this
+never afterwards quitted him. In what he was to do hereafter, as in all
+he was doing now, with _Pickwick_ still to finish and _Oliver_ only
+beginning, it constantly attended him. Nor could it well be otherwise,
+with all those fanciful creations so real, to a nature in itself so
+practical and earnest; and in this spirit I had well understood the
+letter accompanying what had been published of _Oliver_ since its
+commencement the preceding February, which reached me the day after I
+visited him. Something to the effect of what has just been said, I had
+remarked publicly of the portion of the story sent to me; and his
+instant warm-hearted acknowledgment, of which I permit myself to quote a
+line or two, showed me in what perfect agreement we were: "How can I
+thank you? Can I do better than by saying that the sense of poor
+Oliver's reality, which I know you have had from the first, has been the
+highest of all praise to me? None that has been lavished upon me have I
+felt half so much as that appreciation of my intent and meaning. You
+know I have ever done so, for it was your feeling for me and mine for
+you that first brought us together, and I hope will keep us so till
+death do us part. Your notices make me grateful, but very proud: so have
+a care of them."
+
+There was nothing written by him after this date which I did not see
+before the world did, either in manuscript or proofs; and in connection
+with the latter I shortly began to give him the help which he publicly
+mentioned twenty years later in dedicating his collected writings to me.
+One of his letters reminds me when these corrections began, and they
+were continued very nearly to the last. They lightened for him a labor
+of which he had more than enough imposed upon him at this time by
+others, and they were never anything but an enjoyment to me. "I have,"
+he wrote, "so many sheets of the _Miscellany_ to correct before I can
+begin _Oliver_, that I fear I shall not be able to leave home this
+morning. I therefore send your revise of the _Pickwick_ by Fred, who is
+on his way with it to the printers. You will see that my alterations are
+very slight, but I think for the better." This was the fourteenth number
+of the _Pickwick Papers_. Fred was his next younger brother, who lived
+with him at the time.
+
+The number following this was the famous one in which the hero finds
+himself in the Fleet; and another of his letters will show what
+enjoyment the writing of it had given to himself. I had sent to ask him
+where we were to meet for a proposed ride that day. "HERE," was his
+reply. "I am slippered and jacketed, and, like that same starling who is
+so very seldom quoted, can't get out. I am getting on, thank Heaven,
+like 'a house o' fire,' and think the next _Pickwick_ will bang all the
+others. I shall expect you at one, and we will walk to the stable
+together. If you know anybody at Saint Paul's, I wish you'd send round
+and ask them not to ring the bell so. I can hardly hear my own ideas as
+they come into my head, and say what they mean."
+
+The exulting tone of confidence in what he had thus been writing was
+indeed well justified. He had as yet done nothing so remarkable, in
+blending humor with tragedy, as his picture of what the poor side of a
+debtors' prison was in the days of which we have seen that he had
+himself had bitter experience; and we have but to recall, as it rises
+sharply to the memory, what is contained in this portion of a work that
+was not only among his earliest but his least considered as to plan, to
+understand what it was that not alone had given him his fame so early,
+but that in itself held the germ of the future that awaited him. Every
+point was a telling one, and the truthfulness of the whole unerring. The
+dreadful restlessness of the place, undefined yet unceasing,
+unsatisfying and terrible, was pictured throughout with De Foe's minute
+reality; while points of character were handled in that greater style
+which connects with the richest oddities of humor an insight into
+principles of character universal as nature itself. When he resolved
+that Sam Weller should be occupant of the prison with Mr. Pickwick, he
+was perhaps thinking of his favorite Smollett, and how, when Peregrine
+Pickle was inmate of the Fleet, Hatchway and Pipes refused to leave him;
+but Fielding himself might have envied his way of setting about it. Nor
+is any portion of his picture less admirable than this. The comedy
+gradually deepening into tragedy; the shabby vagabonds who are the
+growth of debtors' prisons, contrasting with the poor simple creatures
+who are their sacrifices and victims; Mr. Mivins and Mr. Smangle side by
+side with the cobbler ruined by his legacy, who sleeps under the table
+to remind himself of his old four-poster; Mr. Pickwick's first night in
+the marshal's room, Sam Weller entertaining Stiggins in the snuggery,
+Jingle in decline, and the chancery prisoner dying; in all these scenes
+there was writing of the first order, a deep feeling of character, that
+delicate form of humor which has a quaintly pathetic turn in it as well,
+comedy of the richest and broadest kind, and the easy handling
+throughout of a master in his art. We place the picture by the side of
+those of the great writers of this style, of fiction in our language,
+and it does not fall by the comparison.
+
+Of what the reception of the book had been up to this time, and of the
+popularity Dickens had won as its author, this also will be the proper
+place to speak. For its kind, its extent, and the absence of everything
+unreal or factitious in the causes that contributed to it, it is
+unexampled in literature. Here was a series of sketches, without the
+pretense to such interest as attends a well-constructed story; put forth
+in a form apparently ephemeral as its purpose; having none that seemed
+higher than to exhibit some studies of cockney manners with help from a
+comic artist; and after four or five parts had appeared, without
+newspaper notice or puffing, and itself not subserving in the public
+anything false or unworthy, it sprang into a popularity that each part
+carried higher and higher, until people at this time talked of nothing
+else, tradesmen recommended their goods by using its name, and its sale,
+outstripping at a bound that of all the most famous books of the
+century, had reached to an almost fabulous number. Of part one, the
+binder prepared four hundred; and of part fifteen, his order was for
+more than forty thousand. Every class, the high equally with the low,
+was attracted to it. The charm of its gayety and good humor, its
+inexhaustible fun, its riotous overflow of animal spirits, its
+brightness and keenness of observation, and, above all, the incomparable
+ease of its many varieties of enjoyment, fascinated everybody. Judges on
+the bench and boys in the street, gravity and folly, the young and the
+old, those who were entering life and those who were quitting it, alike
+found it to be irresistible. "An archdeacon," wrote Mr. Carlyle
+afterwards to me, "with his own venerable lips, repeated to me, the
+other night, a strange profane story: of a solemn clergyman who had been
+administering ghostly consolation to a sick person; having finished,
+satisfactorily as he thought, and got out of the room, he heard the sick
+person ejaculate, 'Well, thank God, _Pickwick_ will be out in ten days
+any way!'--This is dreadful."
+
+Let me add that there was something more in it all than the
+gratification of mere fun and laughter, more even than the rarer
+pleasure that underlies the outbreak of all forms of genuine humor.
+Another chord had been struck. Over and above the lively painting of
+manners which at first had been so attractive, there was something that
+left deeper mark. Genial and irrepressible enjoyment, affectionate
+heartiness of tone, unrestrained exuberance of mirth, these are not more
+delightful than they are fleeting and perishable qualities; but the
+attention eagerly excited by the charm of them in _Pickwick_ found
+itself retained by something more permanent. We had all become suddenly
+conscious, in the very thick of the extravaganza of adventure and fun
+set before us, that here were real people. It was not somebody talking
+humorously about them, but they were there themselves. That a number of
+persons belonging to the middle and lower ranks of life (Wardles,
+Winkles, Wellers, Tupmans, Bardells, Snubbinses, Perkers, Bob Sawyers,
+Dodsons, and Foggs) had been somehow added to his intimate and familiar
+acquaintance, the ordinary reader knew before half a dozen numbers were
+out; and it took not many more to make clear to the intelligent reader
+that a new and original genius in the walk of Smollett and Fielding had
+arisen in England.
+
+I do not, for reasons to be hereafter stated, think the _Pickwick
+Papers_ comparable to the later books; but, apart from the new vein of
+humor it opened, its wonderful freshness and its unflagging animal
+spirits, it has two characters that will probably continue to attract to
+it an unfading popularity. Its pre-eminent achievement is of course Sam
+Weller,--one of those people that take their place among the supreme
+successes of fiction, as one that nobody ever saw but everybody
+recognizes, at once perfectly natural and intensely original. Who is
+there that has ever thought him tedious? Who is so familiar with him as
+not still to be finding something new in him? Who is so amazed by his
+inexhaustible resources, or so amused by his inextinguishable laughter,
+as to doubt of his being as ordinary and perfect a reality,
+nevertheless, as anything in the London streets? When indeed the relish
+has been dulled that makes such humor natural and appreciable, and not
+his native fun only, his ready and rich illustration, his imperturbable
+self-possession, but his devotion to his master, his chivalry and his
+gallantry, are no longer discovered, or believed no longer to exist, in
+the ranks of life to which he belongs, it will be worse for all of us
+than for the fame of his creator. Nor, when faith is lost in that
+possible combination of eccentricities and benevolences, shrewdness and
+simplicity, good sense and folly, all that suggests the ludicrous and
+nothing that suggests contempt for it, which form the delightful oddity
+of Pickwick, will the mistake committed be one merely of critical
+misjudgment. But of this there is small fear. Sam Weller and Mr.
+Pickwick are the Sancho and the Quixote of Londoners, and as little
+likely to pass away as the old city itself.
+
+Dickens was very fond of riding in these early years, and there was no
+recreation he so much indulged, or with such profit to himself, in the
+intervals of his hardest work. I was his companion oftener than I could
+well afford the time for, the distances being great and nothing else to
+be done for the day; but when a note would unexpectedly arrive while I
+knew him to be hunted hard by one of his printers, telling me he had
+been sticking to work so closely that he must have rest, and, by way of
+getting it, proposing we should start together that morning at eleven
+o'clock for "a fifteen-mile ride out, ditto in, and a lunch on the road"
+with a wind-up of six o'clock dinner in Doughty Street, I could not
+resist the good fellowship. His notion of finding rest from mental
+exertion in as much bodily exertion of equal severity, continued with
+him to the last; taking in the later years what I always thought the too
+great strain of as many miles in walking as he now took in the saddle,
+and too often indulging it at night; for, though he was always
+passionately fond of walking, he observed as yet a moderation in it,
+even accepting as sufficient my seven or eight miles' companionship.
+"What a brilliant morning for a country walk!" he would write, with not
+another word in his dispatch. Or, "Is it possible that you can't,
+oughtn't, shouldn't, mustn't, _won't_ be tempted, this gorgeous day?"
+Or, "I start precisely--precisely, mind--at half-past one. Come, come,
+_come_, and walk in the green lanes. You will work the better for it all
+the week. Come! I shall expect you." Or, "You don't feel disposed, do
+you, to muffle yourself up and start off with me for a good brisk walk
+over Hampstead Heath? I knows a good 'ous there where we can have a
+red-hot chop for dinner, and a glass of good wine:" which led to our
+first experience of Jack Straw's Castle, memorable for many happy
+meetings in coming years. But the rides were most popular and frequent.
+"I think," he would write, "Richmond and Twickenham, thro' the park, out
+at Knightsbridge, and over Barnes Common, would make a beautiful ride."
+Or, "Do you know, I shouldn't object to an early chop at some village
+inn?" Or, "Not knowing whether my head was off or on, it became so
+addled with work, I have gone riding the old road, and should be truly
+delighted to meet or be overtaken by you." Or, "Where shall it be--_oh,
+where_--Hampstead, Greenwich, Windsor? WHERE?????? while the day is
+bright, not when it has dwindled away to nothing! For who can be of any
+use whatsomdever such a day as this, excepting out of doors?" Or it
+might be interrogatory summons to "A hard trot of three hours?" or
+intimation as laconic "To be heard of at Eel-pie House, Twickenham!"
+When first I knew him, I may add, his carriage for his wife's use was a
+small chaise with a smaller pair of ponies, which, having a habit of
+making sudden rushes up by-streets in the day and peremptory standstills
+in ditches by night, were changed in the following year for a more
+suitable equipage.
+
+To this mention of his habits while at work when our friendship began, I
+have to add what will complete the relation already given, in connection
+with his _Sketches_, of the uneasy sense accompanying his labor that it
+was yielding insufficient for himself while it enriched others, which is
+a needful part of his story at this time. At midsummer, 1837, replying
+to some inquiries, and sending his agreement with Mr. Bentley for the
+_Miscellany_ under which he was writing _Oliver_, he went on: "It is a
+very extraordinary fact (I forgot it on Sunday) that I have NEVER HAD
+from him a copy of the agreement respecting the novel, which I never saw
+before or since I signed it at his house one morning long ago. Shall I
+ask him for a copy or no? I have looked at some memoranda I made at the
+time, and I _fear_ he has my second novel on the same terms, under the
+same agreement. This is a bad lookout, but we must try and mend it. You
+will tell me you are very much surprised at my doing business in this
+way. So am I, for in most matters of labor and application I am
+punctuality itself. The truth is (though you do not need I should
+explain the matter to you, my dear fellow), that if I had allowed myself
+to be worried by these things, I could never have done as much as I
+have. But I much fear, in my desire to avoid present vexations, I have
+laid up a bitter store for the future." The second novel, which he had
+promised in a complete form for a very early date, and had already
+selected subject and title for, was published four years later as
+_Barnaby Rudge_; but of the third he at present knew nothing but that he
+was expected to begin it, if not in the magazine, somewhere or other
+independently within a specified time.
+
+The first appeal made, in taking action upon his letter, had reference
+to the immediate pressure of the _Barnaby_ novel; but it also opened up
+the question of the great change of circumstances since these various
+agreements had been precipitately signed by him, the very different
+situation brought about by the extraordinary increase in the popularity
+of his writings, and the advantage it would be to both Mr. Bentley and
+himself to make more equitable adjustment of their relations. Some
+misunderstandings followed, but were closed by a compromise in
+September, 1837; by which the third novel was abandoned[12] on certain
+conditions, and _Barnaby_ was undertaken to be finished by November,
+1838. This involved a completion of the new story during the progress of
+_Oliver_, whatever might be required to follow on the close of
+_Pickwick_; and I doubted its wisdom. But it was accepted for the time.
+
+He had meanwhile taken his wife abroad for a ten days' summer holiday,
+accompanied by the shrewd observant young artist, Mr. Hablot Browne,
+whose admirable illustrations to _Pickwick_ had more than supplied Mr.
+Seymour's loss; and I had a letter from him on their landing at Calais
+on the 2d of July:
+
+"We have arranged for a post-coach to take us to Ghent, Brussels,
+Antwerp, and a hundred other places, that I cannot recollect now and
+couldn't spell if I did. We went this afternoon in a barouche to some
+gardens where the people dance, and where they were footing it most
+heartily,--especially the women, who in their short petticoats and light
+caps look uncommonly agreeable. A gentleman in a blue surtout and silken
+berlins accompanied us from the hotel, and acted as curator. He even
+waltzed with a very smart lady (just to show us, condescendingly, how it
+ought to be done), and waltzed elegantly, too. We rang for slippers
+after we came back, and it turned out that this gentleman was the
+Boots."
+
+His later sea-side holiday was passed at Broadstairs, as were those of
+many subsequent years, and the little watering-place has been made
+memorable by his pleasant sketch of it. From his letters to myself a few
+lines may be given of his first doings and impressions there.
+
+Writing on the 3d of September, he reports himself just risen from an
+attack of illness. "I am much better, and hope to begin _Pickwick No.
+18_ to-morrow. You will imagine how queer I must have been when I tell
+you that I have been compelled for four-and-twenty mortal hours to
+abstain from porter or other malt liquor!!! I have done it
+though--really. . . . I have discovered that the landlord of the Albion has
+delicious hollands (but what is that to _you_? for you cannot sympathize
+with my feelings), and that a cobbler who lives opposite to my bedroom
+window is a Roman Catholic, and gives an hour and a half to his
+devotions every morning behind his counter. I have walked upon the
+sands at low-water from this place to Ramsgate, and sat upon the same at
+high-ditto till I have been flayed with the cold. I have seen ladies and
+gentlemen walking upon the earth in slippers of buff, and pickling
+themselves in the sea in complete suits of the same. I have seen stout
+gentlemen looking at nothing through powerful telescopes for hours, and,
+when at last they saw a cloud of smoke, fancying a steamer behind it,
+and going home comfortable and happy. I have found out that our next
+neighbor has a wife and something else under the same roof with the rest
+of his furniture,--the wife deaf and blind, and the something else given
+to drinking. And if you ever get to the end of this letter _you_ will
+find out that I subscribe myself on paper, as on everything else (some
+atonement perhaps for its length and absurdity)," etc. etc.
+
+In his next letter (from 12, High Street, Broadstairs, on the 7th) there
+is allusion to one of the many piracies of _Pickwick_, which had
+distinguished itself beyond the rest by a preface abusive of the writer
+plundered: "I recollect this 'member of the Dramatic Authors' Society'
+bringing an action once against Chapman who rented the City theatre, in
+which it was proved that he had undertaken to write under special
+agreement seven melodramas for five pounds, to enable him to do which a
+room had been hired in a gin-shop close by. The defendant's plea was
+that the plaintiff was always drunk, and had not fulfilled his contract.
+Well, if the _Pickwick_ has been the means of putting a few shillings in
+the vermin-eaten pockets of so miserable a creature, and has saved him
+from a workhouse or a jail, let him empty out his little pot of filth
+and welcome. I am quite content to have been the means of relieving him.
+Besides, he seems to have suffered by agreements!"
+
+His own troubles in that way were compromised for the time, as already
+hinted, at the close of this September month; and at the end of the
+month following, after finishing _Pickwick_ and resuming _Oliver_, the
+latter having been suspended by him during the recent disputes, he made
+his first visit to Brighton. The opening of his letter of Friday the 3d
+of November is full of regrets that I had been unable to join them
+there: "It is a beautiful day, and we have been taking advantage of it,
+but the wind until to-day has been so high and the weather so stormy
+that Kate has been scarcely able to peep out of doors. On Wednesday it
+blew a perfect hurricane, breaking windows, knocking down shutters,
+carrying people off their legs, blowing the fires out, and causing
+universal consternation. The air was for some hours darkened with a
+shower of black hats (second-hand), which are supposed to have been
+blown off the heads of unwary passengers in remote parts of the town,
+and have been industriously picked up by the fishermen. Charles Kean was
+advertised for _Othello_ 'for the benefit of Mrs. Sefton, having most
+kindly postponed for this one day his departure for London.' I have not
+heard whether he got to the theatre, but I am sure nobody else did. They
+do _The Honeymoon_ to-night, on which occasion I mean to patronize the
+drayma. We have a beautiful bay-windowed sitting-room here, fronting the
+sea, but I have seen nothing of B.'s brother who was to have shown me
+the lions, and my notions of the place are consequently somewhat
+confined: being limited to the pavilion, the chain-pier, and the sea.
+The last is quite enough for me, and, unless I am joined by some male
+companion (_do you think I shall be?_), is most probably all I shall
+make acquaintance with. I am glad you like _Oliver_ this month:
+especially glad that you particularize the first chapter. I hope to do
+great things with Nancy. If I can only work out the idea I have formed
+of her, and of the female who is to contrast with her, I think I may
+defy Mr. ---- and all his works.[13] I have had great difficulty in
+keeping my hands off Fagin and the rest of them in the evenings; but, as
+I came down for rest, I have resisted the temptation, and steadily
+applied myself to the labor of being idle. Did you ever read (of course
+you have, though) De Foe's _History of the Devil_? What a capital thing
+it is! I bought it for a couple of shillings yesterday morning, and have
+been quite absorbed in it ever since. We must have been jolter-headed
+geniuses not to have anticipated M.'s reply. My best remembrances to
+him. I see H. at this moment. I must be present at a rehearsal of that
+opera. It will be better than any comedy that was ever played. Talking
+of comedies, I still see NO THOROUGHFARE staring me in the face, every
+time I look down that road. I have taken places for Tuesday next. We
+shall be at home at six o'clock, and I shall hope at least to see you
+that evening. I am afraid you will find this letter extremely dear at
+eightpence, but if the warmest assurances of friendship and attachment,
+and anxious lookings-forward to the pleasure of your society, be worth
+anything, throw them into the balance, together with a hundred good
+wishes and one hearty assurance that I am," etc. etc. "CHARLES DICKENS.
+No room for the flourish--I'll finish it the next time I write to you."
+
+The flourish that accompanied his signature is familiar to every one.
+The allusion to the comedy expresses a fancy he at this time had of
+being able to contribute some such achievement in aid of Macready's
+gallant efforts at Covent Garden to bring back to the stage its higher
+associations of good literature and intellectual enjoyment. It connects
+curiously now that unrealized hope with the exact title of the only
+story he ever helped himself to dramatize, and which Mr. Fechter played
+at the Adelphi three years before his death.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[11] Her epitaph, written by him, remains upon a gravestone in the
+cemetery at Kensal Green: "Young, beautiful, and good, God numbered her
+among his angels at the early age of seventeen."
+
+[12] I have a memorandum in Dickens's writing that five hundred pounds
+was to have been given for it, and an additional two hundred and fifty
+pounds on its sale reaching three thousand copies; but I feel certain it
+was surrendered on more favorable terms.
+
+[13] The allusion was to the supposed author of a paper in the
+_Quarterly Review_ (Oct. 1837), in the course of which there was much
+high praise, but where the writer said at the close, "Indications are
+not wanting that the particular vein of humor which has hitherto yielded
+so much attractive metal is worked out. . . . The fact is, Mr. Dickens
+writes too often and too fast. . . . If he persists much longer in this
+course, it requires no gift of prophecy to foretell his fate:--he has
+risen like a rocket, and he will come down like the stick."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+BETWEEN PICKWICK AND NICKLEBY.
+
+1837-1838.
+
+ Edits _Life of Grimaldi_--His Own Opinion of
+ it--An Objection answered--His Recollections of
+ 1823--Completion of _Pickwick_--A Purpose long
+ entertained--Relations with Chapman &
+ Hall--Payments made for _Pickwick_--Agreement
+ for _Nicholas Nickleby_--_Oliver Twist_
+ characterized--Reasons for Acceptance with
+ every Class--Nightmare of an Agreement--Letter
+ to Mr. Bentley--Proposal as to _Barnaby
+ Rudge_--Result of it--Birth of Eldest
+ Daughter--_Young Gentlemen and Young
+ Couples_--First Number of _Nicholas
+ Nickleby_--2d of April, 1838.
+
+
+NOT remotely bearing on the stage, nevertheless, was the employment on
+which I found him busy at his return from Brighton; one result of his
+more satisfactory relations with Mr. Bentley having led to a promise to
+edit for him a life of the celebrated clown Grimaldi. The manuscript had
+been prepared from autobiographical notes by a Mr. Egerton Wilks, and
+contained one or two stories told so badly, and so well worth better
+telling, that the hope of enlivening their dullness at the cost of very
+little labor constituted a sort of attraction for him. Except the
+preface, he did not write a line of this biography, such modifications
+or additions as he made having been dictated by him to his father; whom
+I found often in the supreme enjoyment of the office of amanuensis. He
+had also a most indifferent opinion of the mass of material which in
+general composed it, describing it to me as "twaddle," and his own
+modest estimate of the book, on its completion, may be guessed from the
+number of notes of admiration (no less than thirty) which accompanied
+his written mention to me of the sale with which it started in the first
+week of its publication: "Seventeen hundred _Grimaldis_ have been
+already sold, and the demand increases daily!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
+
+It was not to have all its own way, however. A great many critical
+faults were found; and one point in particular was urged against his
+handling such a subject, that he could never himself even have seen
+Grimaldi. To this last objection he was moved to reply, and had prepared
+a letter for the _Miscellany_, "from editor to sub-editor," which it was
+thought best to suppress, but of which the opening remark may now be not
+unamusing: "I understand that a gentleman unknown is going about this
+town privately informing all ladies and gentlemen of discontented
+natures, that, on a comparison of dates and putting together of many
+little circumstances which occur to his great sagacity, he has made the
+profound discovery that I can never have seen Grimaldi whose life I have
+edited, and that the book must therefore of necessity be bad. Now, sir,
+although I was brought up from remote country parts in the dark ages of
+1819 and 1820 to behold the splendor of Christmas pantomimes and the
+humor of Joe, in whose honor I am informed I clapped my hands with great
+precocity, and although I even saw him act in the remote times of 1823,
+yet as I had not then aspired to the dignity of a tail-coat, though
+forced by a relentless parent into my first pair of boots, I am
+willing, with the view of saving this honest gentleman further time and
+trouble, to concede that I had not arrived at man's estate when Grimaldi
+left the stage, and that my recollections of his acting are, to my loss,
+but shadowy and imperfect. Which confession I now make publickly, and
+without mental qualification or reserve, to all whom it may concern. But
+the deduction of this pleasant gentleman that therefore the Grimaldi
+book must be bad, I must take leave to doubt. I don't think that to edit
+a man's biography from his own notes it is essential you should have
+known him, and I don't believe that Lord Braybrooke had more than the
+very slightest acquaintance with Mr. Pepys, whose memoirs he edited two
+centuries after he died."
+
+Enormous meanwhile, and without objection audible on any side, had been
+the success of the completed _Pickwick_, which we celebrated by a
+dinner, with himself in the chair and Talfourd in the vice-chair,
+everybody in hearty good humor with every other body; and a copy of
+which I received from him on the 11th of December in the most luxurious
+of Hayday's bindings, with a note worth preserving for its closing
+allusion. The passage referred to in it was a comment, in delicately
+chosen words, that Leigh Hunt had made on the inscription at the grave
+in Kensal Green:[14] "Chapman & Hall have just sent me, with a copy of
+our deed, three 'extra-super' bound copies of _Pickwick_, as per
+specimen inclosed. The first I forward to you, the second I have
+presented to our good friend Ainsworth, and the third Kate has retained
+for herself. Accept your copy with one sincere and most comprehensive
+expression of my warmest friendship and esteem; and a hearty renewal, if
+there need be any renewal when there has been no interruption, of all
+those assurances of affectionate regard which our close friendship and
+communion for a long time back has every day implied. . . . That beautiful
+passage you were so kind and considerate as to send me, has given me the
+only feeling akin to pleasure (sorrowful pleasure it is) that I have yet
+had, connected with the loss of my dear young friend and companion; for
+whom my love and attachment will never diminish, and by whose side, if
+it please God to leave me in possession of sense to signify my wishes,
+my bones, whenever or wherever I die, will one day be laid. Tell Leigh
+Hunt when you have an opportunity how much he has affected me, and how
+deeply I thank him for what he has done. You cannot say it too
+strongly."
+
+The "deed" mentioned was one executed in the previous month to restore
+to him a third ownership in the book which had thus far enriched all
+concerned but himself. The original understanding respecting it Mr.
+Edward Chapman thus describes for me: "There was no agreement about
+_Pickwick_ except a verbal one. Each number was to consist of a sheet
+and a half, for which we were to pay fifteen guineas; and we paid him
+for the first two numbers at once, as he required the money to go and
+get married with. We were also to pay more according to the sale, and I
+think _Pickwick_ altogether cost us three thousand pounds." Adjustment
+to the sale would have cost four times as much, and of the actual
+payments I have myself no note; but, as far as my memory serves, they
+are overstated by Mr. Chapman. My impression is that, above and beyond
+the first sum due for each of the twenty numbers (making no allowance
+for their extension after the first to thirty-two pages), successive
+checks were given, as the work went steadily on to the enormous sale it
+reached, which brought up the entire sum received to two thousand five
+hundred pounds. I had, however, always pressed so strongly the
+importance to him of some share in the copyright, that this at last was
+conceded in the deed above mentioned, though five years were to elapse
+before the right should accrue; and it was only yielded as part
+consideration for a further agreement entered into at the same date (the
+19th of November, 1837), whereby Dickens engaged to "write a new work,
+the title whereof shall be determined by him, of a similar character and
+of the same extent as the _Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club_," the
+first number of which was to be delivered on the 15th of the following
+March, and each of the numbers on the same day of each of the successive
+nineteen months; which was also to be the date of the payment to him, by
+Messrs. Chapman & Hall, of twenty several sums of one hundred and fifty
+pounds each for five years' use of the copyright, the entire ownership
+in which was then to revert to Dickens. The name of this new book, as
+all the world knows, was _The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby_;
+and between April, 1838, and October, 1839, it was begun and finished
+accordingly.
+
+All through the interval of these arrangements _Oliver Twist_ had been
+steadily continued. Month by month, for many months, it had run its
+opening course with the close of _Pickwick_, as we shall see it close
+with the opening of _Nickleby_; and the expectations of those who had
+built most confidently on the young novelist were more than confirmed.
+Here was the interest of a story simply but well constructed; and
+characters with the same impress of reality upon them, but more
+carefully and skillfully drawn. Nothing could be meaner than the
+subject, the progress of a parish or workhouse boy, nothing less so than
+its treatment. As each number appeared, his readers generally became
+more and more conscious of what already, as we have seen, had revealed
+itself amid even the riotous fun of _Pickwick_, that the purpose was not
+solely to amuse; and, far more decisively than its predecessor, the new
+story further showed what were the not least potent elements in the
+still increasing popularity that was gathering around the writer. His
+qualities could be appreciated as well as felt in an almost equal degree
+by all classes of his various readers. Thousands were attracted to him
+because he placed them in the midst of scenes and characters with which
+they were already themselves acquainted; and thousands were reading him
+with no less avidity because he introduced them to passages of nature
+and life of which they before knew nothing, but of the truth of which
+their own habits and senses sufficed to assure them. Only to genius are
+so revealed the affinities and sympathies of high and low, in regard to
+the customs and usages of life; and only a writer of the first rank can
+bear the application of such a test. For it is by the alliance of
+common habits, quite as much as by the bonds of a common humanity, that
+we are all of us linked together; and the result of being above the
+necessity of depending on other people's opinions, and that of being
+below it, are pretty much the same. It would equally startle both high
+and low to be conscious of the whole that is implied in this close
+approximation; but for the common enjoyment of which I speak such
+consciousness is not required; and for the present Fagin may be left
+undisturbed in his school of practical ethics with only the Dodger,
+Charley Bates, and his other promising scholars.
+
+With such work as this in hand, it will hardly seem surprising that as
+the time for beginning _Nickleby_ came on, and as he thought of his
+promise for November, he should have the sense of "something hanging
+over him like a hideous nightmare." He felt that he could not complete
+the _Barnaby Rudge_ novel by the November of that year, as promised, and
+that the engagement he would have to break was unfitting him for
+engagements he might otherwise fulfill. He had undertaken what, in
+truth, was impossible. The labor of at once editing the _Miscellany_ and
+supplying it with monthly portions of _Oliver_ more than occupied all
+the time left him by other labors absolutely necessary. "I no sooner get
+myself up," he wrote, "high and dry, to attack _Oliver_ manfully, than
+up come the waves of each month's work, and drive me back again into a
+sea of manuscript." There was nothing for it but that he should make
+further appeal to Mr. Bentley. "I have recently," he wrote to him on the
+11th of February, 1838, "been thinking a great deal about _Barnaby
+Rudge_. _Grimaldi_ has occupied so much of the short interval I had
+between the completion of the _Pickwick_ and the commencement of the new
+work, that I see it will be wholly impossible for me to produce it by
+the time I had hoped, with justice to myself or profit to you. What I
+wish you to consider is this: would it not be far more to your interest,
+as well as within the scope of my ability, if _Barnaby Rudge_ began in
+the _Miscellany_ immediately on the conclusion of _Oliver Twist_, and
+were continued there for the same time, and then published in three
+volumes? Take these simple facts into consideration. If the _Miscellany_
+is to keep its ground, it _must_ have some continuous tale from me when
+_Oliver_ stops. If I sat down to _Barnaby Rudge_, writing a little of it
+when I could (and with all my other engagements it would necessarily be
+a very long time before I could hope to finish it that way), it would be
+clearly impossible for me to begin a new series of papers in the
+_Miscellany_. The conduct of three different stories at the same time,
+and the production of a large portion of each, every month, would have
+been beyond Scott himself. Whereas, having _Barnaby_ for the
+_Miscellany_, we could at once supply the gap which the cessation of
+_Oliver_ must create, and you would have all the advantage of that
+prestige in favor of the work which is certain to enhance the value of
+_Oliver Twist_ considerably. Just think of this at your leisure. I am
+really anxious to do the best I can for you as well as for myself, and
+in this case the pecuniary advantage must be all on your side." This
+letter nevertheless, which had also requested an overdue account of the
+sales of the _Miscellany_, led to differences which were only adjusted
+after six months' wrangling; and I was party to the understanding then
+arrived at, by which, among other things, _Barnaby_ was placed upon the
+footing desired, and was to begin when _Oliver_ closed.
+
+Of the progress of his _Oliver_, and his habits of writing at the time,
+it may perhaps be worth giving some additional glimpses from his letters
+of 1838. "I was thinking about _Oliver_ till dinner-time yesterday," he
+wrote on the 9th of March,[15] "and, just as I had fallen upon him tooth
+and nail, was called away to sit with Kate. I did eight slips, however,
+and hope to make them fifteen this morning." Three days before, a little
+daughter had been born to him, who became a little god-daughter to me;
+on which occasion (having closed his announcement with a postscript of
+"I can do nothing this morning. What time will you ride? The sooner the
+better, for a good long spell"), we rode out fifteen miles on the great
+north road, and, after dining at the Red Lion in Barnet on our way home,
+distinguished the already memorable day by bringing in both hacks dead
+lame.
+
+On that day week, Monday, the 13th, after describing himself "sitting
+patiently at home waiting for _Oliver Twist_ who has not yet arrived,"
+which was his pleasant form of saying that his fancy had fallen into
+sluggishness that morning, he made addition not less pleasant as to some
+piece of painful news I had sent him, now forgotten: "I have not yet
+seen the paper, and you throw me into a fever. The comfort is, that all
+the strange and terrible things come uppermost, and that the good and
+pleasant things are mixed up with every moment of our existence so
+plentifully that we scarcely heed them." At the close of the month Mrs.
+Dickens was well enough to accompany him to Richmond, for now the time
+was come to start _Nickleby_; and, having been away from town when
+_Pickwick's_ first number came out, he made it a superstition to be
+absent at all future similar times. The magazine-day of that April
+month, I remember, fell upon a Saturday, and the previous evening had
+brought me a peremptory summons: "Meet me at the Shakspeare on Saturday
+night at eight; order your horse at midnight, and ride back with me."
+Which was done accordingly. The smallest hour was sounding from St.
+Paul's into the night before we started, and the night was none of the
+pleasantest; but we carried news that lightened every part of the road,
+for the sale of _Nickleby_ had reached that day the astonishing number
+of nearly fifty thousand! I left him working with unusual cheerfulness
+at _Oliver Twist_ when I left the Star and Garter on the next day but
+one, after celebrating with both friends on the previous evening an
+anniversary[16] which concerned us all (their second and my
+twenty-sixth), and which we kept always in future at the same place,
+except when they were living out of England, for twenty successive
+years. It was a part of his love of regularity and order, as well as of
+his kindliness of nature, to place such friendly meetings as these under
+rules of habit and continuance.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[14] See _ante_, p. 120.
+
+[15] There is an earlier allusion I may quote, from a letter in January,
+for its mention of a small piece written by him at this time, but not
+included in his acknowledged writings: "I am as badly off as you. I have
+not done the _Young Gentlemen_, nor written the preface to _Grimaldi_,
+nor thought of _Oliver Twist_, or even supplied a subject for the
+plate." The _Young Gentlemen_ was a small book of sketches which he
+wrote anonymously as the companion to a similar half-crown volume of
+_Young Ladies_ (not written by him), for Messrs. Chapman & Hall. He
+added subsequently a like volume of _Young Couples_, also without his
+name.
+
+[16] See _ante_, p. 113.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+OLIVER TWIST.
+
+1838.
+
+ Interest in Characters at Close of
+ _Oliver_--Writing of the Last
+ Chapter--Cruikshank Illustrations--Etchings for
+ Last Volume--How executed--Slander respecting
+ them exposed--Falsehood ascribed to the
+ Artist--Reputation of the New Tale--Its
+ Workmanship--Social Evils passed away--Living
+ only in what destroyed them--Chief Design of
+ the Story--Its Principal Figures--Comedy and
+ Tragedy of Crime--Reply to Attacks--Le Sage,
+ Gay, and Fielding--Likeness to them--Again the
+ Shadow of _Barnaby_--Appeal to Mr. Bentley for
+ Delay--A Very Old Story--"Sic Vos non
+ Vobis"--_Barnaby_ given up by Mr.
+ Bentley--Resignation of _Miscellany_--Parent
+ parting from Child.
+
+
+THE whole of his time not occupied by _Nickleby_ was now given to
+_Oliver_, and as the story shaped itself to its close it took
+extraordinary hold of him. I never knew him work so frequently after
+dinner, or to such late hours (a practice he afterwards abhorred), as
+during the final months of this task; which it was now his hope to
+complete before October, though its close in the magazine would not be
+due until the following March. "I worked pretty well last night," he
+writes, referring to it in May, "very well indeed; but, although I did
+eleven close slips before half-past twelve, I have four to write to
+complete the chapter; and, as I foolishly left them till this morning,
+have the steam to get up afresh." A month later he writes, "I got to
+the sixteenth slip last night, and shall try hard to get to the
+thirtieth before I go to bed."[17] Then, on a "Tuesday night," at the
+opening of August, he wrote, "Hard at work still. Nancy is no more. I
+showed what I have done to Kate last night, who was in an unspeakable
+'_state_:' from which and my own impression I augur well. When I have
+sent Sikes to the devil, I must have yours." "No, no," he wrote, in the
+following month: "don't, don't let us ride till to-morrow, not having
+yet disposed of the Jew, who is such an out-and-outer that I don't know
+what to make of him." No small difficulty to an inventor, where the
+creatures of his invention are found to be as real as himself; but this
+also was mastered; and then there remained but the closing quiet chapter
+to tell the fortunes of those who had figured in the tale. To this he
+summoned me in the first week of September, replying to a request of
+mine that he'd give me a call that day: "Come and give _me_ a call, and
+let us have 'a bit o' talk' before we have a bit o' som'at else. My
+missis is going out to dinner, and I ought to go, but I have got a bad
+cold. So do you come, and sit here, and read, or work, or do something,
+while I write the LAST chapter of _Oliver_, which will be arter a lamb
+chop." How well I remember that evening! and our talk of what should be
+the fate of Charley Bates, on behalf of whom (as indeed for the Dodger
+too) Talfourd had pleaded as earnestly in mitigation of judgment as
+ever at the bar for any client he had most respected.
+
+The publication had been announced for October, but the third-volume
+illustrations intercepted it a little. This part of the story, as we
+have seen, had been written in anticipation of the magazine, and the
+designs for it, having to be executed "in a lump," were necessarily done
+somewhat hastily. The matter supplied in advance of the monthly portions
+in the magazine formed the bulk of the last volume as published in the
+book; and for this the plates had to be prepared by Cruikshank also in
+advance of the magazine, to furnish them in time for the separate
+publication: Sikes and his dog, Fagin in the cell, and Rose Maylie and
+Oliver, being the three last. None of these Dickens had seen until he
+saw them in the book on the eve of its publication; when he so strongly
+objected to one of them that it had to be canceled. "I returned suddenly
+to town yesterday afternoon," he wrote to the artist at the end of
+October, "to look at the latter pages of _Oliver Twist_ before it was
+delivered to the booksellers, when I saw the majority of the plates in
+the last volume for the first time. With reference to the last
+one,--Rose Maylie and Oliver,--without entering into the question of
+great haste, or any other cause, which may have led to its being what it
+is, I am quite sure there can be little difference of opinion between us
+with respect to the result. May I ask you whether you will object to
+designing this plate afresh, and doing so _at once_, in order that as
+few impressions as possible of the present one may go forth? I feel
+confident you know me too well to feel hurt by this inquiry, and with
+equal confidence in you I have lost no time in preferring it." This
+letter, printed from a copy in Dickens's handwriting fortunately
+committed to my keeping, entirely disposes of a wonderful story[18]
+originally promulgated in America with a minute particularity of detail
+that might have raised the reputation of Sir Benjamin Backbite himself.
+Whether all Sir Benjamin's laurels, however, should fall to the person
+by whom the tale is told,[19] or whether any part belongs to the
+authority alleged for it, is unfortunately not quite clear. There would
+hardly have been a doubt, if the fable had been confined to the other
+side of the Atlantic; but it has been reproduced and widely circulated
+on this side also; and the distinguished artist whom it calumniates by
+attributing the invention to him has been left undefended from its
+slander. Dickens's letter spares me the necessity of characterizing, by
+the only word which would have been applicable to it, a tale of such
+incredible and monstrous absurdity as that one of the masterpieces of
+its author's genius had been merely an illustration of etchings by Mr.
+Cruikshank!
+
+The completed _Oliver Twist_ found a circle of admirers, not so wide in
+its range as those of others of his books, but of a character and mark
+that made their honest liking for it, and steady advocacy of it,
+important to his fame; and the book has held its ground in the first
+class of his writings. It deserves that place. The admitted
+exaggerations in _Pickwick_ are incident to its club's extravaganza of
+adventure, of which they are part, and are easily separable from the
+reality of its wit and humor, and its incomparable freshness; but no
+such allowances were needed here. Make what deduction the too scrupulous
+reader of _Oliver_ might please for "lowness" in the subject, the
+precision and the unexaggerated force of the delineation were not to be
+disputed. The art of copying from nature as it really exists in the
+common walks had not been carried by any one to greater perfection, or
+to better results in the way of combination. Such was his handling of
+the piece of solid, existing, every-day life, which he made here the
+groundwork of his wit and tenderness, that the book which did much to
+help out of the world the social evils it portrayed will probably
+preserve longest the picture of them as they then were. Thus far,
+indeed, he had written nothing to which in a greater or less degree this
+felicity did not belong. At the time of which I am speaking, the
+debtors' prisons described in _Pickwick_, the parochial management
+denounced in _Oliver_, and the Yorkshire schools exposed in _Nickleby_,
+were all actual existences,--which now have no vivider existence than in
+the forms he thus gave to them. With wiser purposes, he superseded the
+old petrifying process of the magician in the Arabian tale, and struck
+the prisons and parish abuses of his country, and its schools of neglect
+and crime, into palpable life forever. A portion of the truth of the
+past, of the character and very history of the moral abuses of his time,
+will thus remain always in his writings; and it will be remembered that
+with only the light arms of humor and laughter, and the gentle ones of
+pathos and sadness, he carried cleansing and reform into those Augean
+stables.
+
+Not that such intentions are in any degree ever intruded by this least
+didactic of writers. It is the fact that teaches, and not any
+sermonizing drawn from it. _Oliver Twist_ is the history of a child born
+in a workhouse and brought up by parish overseers, and there is nothing
+introduced that is out of keeping with the design. It is a series of
+pictures from the tragi-comedy of lower life, worked out by perfectly
+natural agencies, from the dying mother and the starved wretches of the
+first volume, through the scenes and gradations of crime, careless or
+deliberate, which have a frightful consummation in the last volume, but
+are never without the reliefs and self-assertions of humanity even in
+scenes and among characters so debased. It is indeed the primary purpose
+of the tale to show its little hero, jostled as he is in the miserable
+crowd, preserved everywhere from the vice of its pollution by an
+exquisite delicacy of natural sentiment which clings to him under every
+disadvantage. There is not a more masterly touch in fiction, and it is
+by such that this delightful fancy is consistently worked out to the
+last, than Oliver's agony of childish grief on being brought away from
+the branch-workhouse, the wretched home associated only with suffering
+and starvation, and with no kind word or look, but containing still his
+little companions in misery.
+
+Of the figures the book has made familiar to every one it is not my
+purpose to speak. To name one or two will be enough. Bumble and his
+wife; Charley Bates and the Artful Dodger; the cowardly charity-boy,
+Noah Claypole, whose _Such agony, please, sir_, puts the whole of a
+school-life into one phrase; the so-called merry old Jew, supple and
+black-hearted Fagin; and Bill Sikes, the bolder-faced bulky-legged
+ruffian, with his white hat and white shaggy dog,--who does not know
+them all, even to the least points of dress, look, and walk, and all the
+small peculiarities that express great points of character? I have
+omitted poor wretched Nancy; yet it is to be said of her, with such
+honest truthfulness her strength and weakness are shown, in the virtue
+that lies neighbored in her nature so closely by vice, that the people
+meant to be entirely virtuous show poorly beside her. But, though Rose
+and her lover are trivial enough beside Bill and his mistress, being
+indeed the weak part of the story, it is the book's pre-eminent merit
+that vice is nowhere made attractive in it. Crime is not more intensely
+odious, all through, than it is also most wretched and most unhappy. Not
+merely when its exposure comes, when the latent recesses of guilt are
+laid bare, and all the agonies of remorse are witnessed; not in the
+great scenes only, but in those lighter passages where no such aim might
+seem to have guided the apparently careless hand, this is emphatically
+so. Whether it be the comedy or the tragedy of crime, terror and
+retribution dog closely at its heels. They are as plainly visible when
+Fagin is first shown in his den, boiling the coffee in the saucepan and
+stopping every now and then to listen when there is the least noise
+below,--the villainous confidence of habit never extinguishing in him
+the anxious watchings and listenings of crime,--as when we see him at
+the last in the condemned cell, like a poisoned human rat in a hole.
+
+A word may be added upon the attacks directed against the subject of the
+book, to which Dickens made reply in one of his later editions,
+declaring his belief that he had tried to do a service to society, and
+had certainly done no disservice, in depicting a knot of such associates
+in crime in all their deformity and squalid wretchedness, skulking
+uneasily through a miserable life to a painful and shameful death. It
+is, indeed, never the subject that can be objectionable, if the
+treatment is not so, as we may see by much popular writing since, where
+subjects unimpeachably high are brought low by degrading sensualism.
+When the object of a writer is to exhibit the vulgarity of vice, and not
+its pretensions to heroism or cravings for sympathy, he may measure his
+subject with the highest. We meet with a succession of swindlers and
+thieves in _Gil Blas_; we shake hands with highwaymen and housebreakers
+all round in the _Beggars' Opera_; we pack cards with La Ruse or pick
+pockets with Jonathan in Fielding's _Mr. Wild the Great_; we follow
+cruelty and vice from its least beginning to its grossest ends in the
+prints of Hogarth; but our morals stand none the looser for any of them.
+As the spirit of the Frenchman was pure enjoyment, the strength of the
+Englishmen lay in wisdom and satire. The low was set forth to pull down
+the false pretensions of the high. And though for the most part they
+differ in manner and design from Dickens in this tale, desiring less to
+discover the soul of goodness in things evil than to brand the stamp of
+evil on things apt to pass for good, their objects and results are
+substantially the same. Familiar with the lowest kind of abasement of
+life, the knowledge is used, by both him and them, to teach what
+constitutes its essential elevation; and by the very coarseness and
+vulgarity of the materials employed we measure the gentlemanliness and
+beauty of the work that is done. The quack in morality will always call
+such writing immoral, and the impostors will continue to complain of its
+treatment of imposture, but for the rest of the world it will still
+teach the invaluable lesson of what men ought to be from what they are.
+We cannot learn it more than enough. We cannot too often be told that as
+the pride and grandeur of mere external circumstance is the falsest of
+earthly things, so the truth of virtue in the heart is the most lovely
+and lasting; and from the pages of _Oliver Twist_ this teaching is once
+again to be taken by all who will look for it there.
+
+And now, while _Oliver_ was running a great career of popularity and
+success, the shadow of the tale of _Barnaby Rudge_, which he was to
+write on similar terms, and to begin in the _Miscellany_ when the other
+should have ended, began to darken everything around him. We had much
+discussion respecting it, and I had no small difficulty in restraining
+him from throwing up the agreement altogether; but the real hardship of
+his position, and the considerate construction to be placed on every
+effort made by him to escape from obligations incurred in ignorance of
+the sacrifices implied by them, will be best understood from his own
+frank and honest statement. On the 21st of January, 1839, inclosing me
+the copy of a letter which he proposed to send to Mr. Bentley the
+following morning, he thus wrote: "From what I have already said to you,
+you will have been led to expect that I entertained some such
+intention. I know you will not endeavor to dissuade me from sending it.
+Go it MUST. It is no fiction to say that at present I _cannot_ write
+this tale. The immense profits which _Oliver_ has realized to its
+publisher and is still realizing; the paltry, wretched, miserable sum it
+brought to me (not equal to what is every day paid for a novel that
+sells fifteen hundred copies at most); the recollection of this, and the
+consciousness that I have still the slavery and drudgery of another work
+on the same journeyman-terms; the consciousness that my books are
+enriching everybody connected with them but myself, and that I, with
+such a popularity as I have acquired, am struggling in old toils, and
+wasting my energies in the very height and freshness of my fame, and the
+best part of my life, to fill the pockets of others, while for those who
+are nearest and dearest to me I can realize little more than a genteel
+subsistence: all this puts me out of heart and spirits. And I
+cannot--cannot and will not--under such circumstances that keep me down
+with an iron hand, distress myself by beginning this tale until I have
+had time to breathe, and until the intervention of the summer, and some
+cheerful days in the country, shall have restored me to a more genial
+and composed state of feeling. There--for six months _Barnaby Rudge_
+stands over. And but for you, it should stand over altogether. For I do
+most solemnly declare that morally, before God and man, I hold myself
+released from such hard bargains as these, after I have done so much for
+those who drove them. This net that has been wound about me so chafes
+me, so exasperates and irritates my mind, that to break it at whatever
+cost--_that_ I should care nothing for--is my constant impulse. But I
+have not yielded to it. I merely declare that I must have a postponement
+very common in all literary agreements; and for the time I have
+mentioned--six months from the conclusion of _Oliver_ in the
+_Miscellany_--I wash my hands of any fresh accumulation of labor, and
+resolve to proceed as cheerfully as I can with that which already
+presses upon me."[20]
+
+To describe what followed upon this is not necessary. It will suffice to
+state the results. Upon the appearance in the _Miscellany_, in the early
+months of 1839, of the last portion of _Oliver Twist_, its author,
+having been relieved altogether from his engagement to the magazine,
+handed over, in a familiar epistle from a parent to his child, the
+editorship to Mr. Ainsworth; and the still subsisting agreement to write
+_Barnaby Rudge_ was, upon the overture of Mr. Bentley himself in June of
+the following year, 1840, also put an end to, on payment by Dickens, for
+the copyright of _Oliver Twist_ and such printed stock as remained of
+the edition then on hand, of two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds.
+What was further incident to this transaction will be told hereafter;
+and a few words may meanwhile be taken, not without significance in
+regard to it, from the parent's familiar epistle. It describes the child
+as aged two years and two months (so long had he watched over it); gives
+sundry pieces of advice concerning its circulation, and the importance
+thereto of light and pleasant articles of food; and concludes, after
+some general moralizing on the shiftings and changes of this world
+having taken so wonderful a turn that mail-coach guards were become no
+longer judges of horse-flesh, "I reap no gain or profit by parting from
+you, nor will any conveyance of your property be required, for in this
+respect you have always been literally Bentley's Miscellany and never
+mine."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[17] Here is another of the same month: "All day I have been at work on
+_Oliver_, and hope to finish the chapter by bedtime. I wish you'd let me
+know what Sir Francis Burdett has been saying about him at some
+Birmingham meeting. B. has just sent me the _Courier_ containing some
+reference to his speech; but the speech I haven't seen."
+
+[18] Reproduced as below, in large type, and without a word of
+contradiction or even doubt, in a biography of Mr. Dickens put forth by
+Mr. Hotten: "Dr. Shelton McKenzie, in the American _Round Table_,
+relates this anecdote of _Oliver Twist_: In London I was intimate with
+the brothers Cruikshank, Robert and George, but more particularly with
+the latter. Having called upon him one day at his house (it was then in
+Myddelton Terrace, Pentonville), I had to wait while he was finishing an
+etching, for which a printer's boy was waiting. To while away the time,
+I gladly complied with his suggestion that I should look over a
+portfolio crowded with etchings, proofs, and drawings, which lay upon
+the sofa. Among these, carelessly tied together in a wrap of brown
+paper, was a series of some twenty-five or thirty drawings, very
+carefully finished, through most of which were carried the well-known
+portraits of Fagin, Bill Sikes and his dog, Nancy, the Artful Dodger,
+and Master Charles Bates--all well known to the readers of _Oliver
+Twist_. There was no mistake about it; and when Cruikshank turned round,
+his work finished, I said as much. He told me that it had long been in
+his mind to show the life of a London thief by a series of drawings
+engraved by himself, in which, without a single line of letter-press,
+the story would be strikingly and clearly told. 'Dickens,' he continued,
+'dropped in here one day, just as you have done, and, while waiting
+until I could speak with him, took up that identical portfolio, and
+ferreted out that bundle of drawings. When he came to that one which
+represents Fagin in the condemned cell, he studied it for half an hour,
+and told me that he was tempted to change the whole plot of his story;
+not to carry Oliver Twist through adventures in the country, but to take
+him up into the thieves' den in London, show what their life was, and
+bring Oliver through it without sin or shame. I consented to let him
+write up to as many of the designs as he thought would suit his purpose;
+and that was the way in which Fagin, Sikes, and Nancy were created. My
+drawings suggested them, rather than his strong individuality suggested
+my drawings.'"
+
+[19] This question has been partly solved, since my last edition, by Mr.
+Cruikshank's announcement in the _Times_, that, though Dr. Mackenzie had
+"confused some circumstances with respect to Mr. Dickens looking over
+some drawings and sketches," the substance of his information as to who
+it was that originated _Oliver Twist_, and all its characters, had been
+derived from Mr. Cruikshank himself. The worst part of the foregoing
+fable, therefore, has not Dr. Mackenzie for its author; and Mr.
+Cruikshank is to be congratulated on the prudence of his rigid silence
+respecting it as long as Mr. Dickens lived.
+
+[20] Upon receiving this letter I gently reminded him that I had made
+objection at the time to the arrangement on the failure of which he
+empowered me to bring about the settlement it was now proposed to
+supersede. I cannot give his reply, as it would be unbecoming to repeat
+the warmth of its expression to myself, but I preserve its first few
+lines to guard against any possible future misstatement: "If you suppose
+that anything in my letter could by the utmost latitude of construction
+imply the smallest dissatisfaction on my part, for God's sake dismiss
+such a thought from your mind. I have never had a momentary approach to
+doubt or discontent where you have been mediating for me. . . . I could say
+more, but you would think me foolish and rhapsodical; and such feeling
+as I have for you is better kept within one's own breast than vented in
+imperfect and inexpressive words."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.
+
+1838-1839.
+
+ Doubts of Success dispelled--Realities of
+ English Life--Characters self-revealed--Miss
+ Bates and Mrs. Nickleby--Smike and Dotheboys--A
+ Favorite Type of Humanity--Sydney Smith and
+ Newman Noggs--Kindliness and Breadth of
+ Humor--Goldsmith and Smollett--Early and Later
+ Books--Biographical not
+ critical--Characteristics--Materials for the
+ Book--Birthday Letter--A Difficulty at
+ Starting--Never in Advance with
+ _Nickleby_--Always with Later Books--Enjoying a
+ Play--At the Adelphi--Writing Mrs. Nickleby's
+ Love-scene--Sydney Smith vanquished--Winding up
+ the Story--Parting from Creatures of his
+ Fancy--The Nickleby Dinner--Persons
+ present--The Maclise Portrait.
+
+
+I WELL recollect the doubt there was, mixed with the eager expectation
+which the announcement of his second serial story had awakened, whether
+the event would justify all that interest, and if indeed it were
+possible that the young writer could continue to walk steadily under the
+burden of the popularity laid upon him. The first number dispersed this
+cloud of a question in a burst of sunshine; and as much of the gayety of
+nations as had been eclipsed by old Mr. Pickwick's voluntary exile to
+Dulwich was restored by the cheerful confidence with which young Mr.
+Nicholas Nickleby stepped into his shoes. Everything that had given
+charm to the first book was here, with more attention to the important
+requisite of a story, and more wealth as well as truth of character.
+
+How this was poured forth in each successive number, it hardly needs
+that I should tell. To recall it now, is to talk of what since has so
+interwoven itself with common speech and thought as to have become
+almost part of the daily life of us all. It was well said of him, soon
+after his death, in mentioning how largely his compositions had
+furnished one of the chief sources of intellectual enjoyment to this
+generation, that his language had become part of the language of every
+class and rank of his countrymen, and his characters were a portion of
+our contemporaries. "It seems scarcely possible," continued this
+otherwise not too indulgent commentator, "to believe that there never
+were any such persons as Mr. Pickwick and Mrs. Nickleby and Mrs. Gamp.
+They are to us not only types of English life, but types actually
+existing. They at once revealed the existence of such people, and made
+them thoroughly comprehensible. They were not studies of persons, but
+persons. And yet they were idealized in the sense that the reader did
+not think that they were drawn from the life. They were alive; they were
+themselves." The writer might have added that this is proper to all true
+masters of fiction who work in the higher regions of their calling.
+
+Nothing certainly could express better what the new book was at this
+time making manifest to its thousands of readers; not simply an
+astonishing variety in the creations of character, but what it was that
+made these creations so real; not merely the writer's wealth of genius,
+but the secret and form of his art. There never was any one who had
+less need to talk about his characters, because never were characters so
+surely revealed by themselves; and it was thus their reality made itself
+felt at once. They talked so well that everybody took to repeating what
+they said, as the writer just quoted has pointed out; and the sayings
+being the constituent elements of the characters, these also of
+themselves became part of the public. This, which must always be a
+novelist's highest achievement, was the art carried to exquisite
+perfection on a more limited stage by Miss Austen; and, under widely
+different conditions both of art and work, it was pre-eminently that of
+Dickens. I told him, on reading the first dialogue of Mrs. Nickleby and
+Miss Knag, that he had been lately reading Miss Bates in _Emma_, but I
+found that he had not at this time made the acquaintance of that fine
+writer.
+
+Who that recollects the numbers of _Nickleby_ as they appeared can have
+forgotten how each number added to the general enjoyment? All that had
+given _Pickwick_ its vast popularity, the overflowing mirth, hearty
+exuberance of humor, and genial kindliness of satire, had here the
+advantage of a better-laid design, more connected incidents, and greater
+precision of character. Everybody seemed immediately to know the
+Nickleby family as well as his own. Dotheboys, with all that rendered
+it, like a piece by Hogarth, both ludicrous and terrible, became a
+household word. Successive groups of Mantalinis, Kenwigses, Crummleses,
+introduced each its little world of reality, lighted up everywhere with
+truth and life, with capital observation, the quaintest drollery, and
+quite boundless mirth and fun. The brothers Cheeryble brought with them
+all the charities. With Smike came the first of those pathetic pictures
+that filled the world with pity for what cruelty, ignorance, or neglect
+may inflict upon the young. And Newman Noggs ushered in that class of
+the creatures of his fancy in which he took himself perhaps the most
+delight, and which the oftener he dealt with the more he seemed to know
+how to vary and render attractive: gentlemen by nature, however shocking
+bad their hats or ungenteel their dialects; philosophers of modest
+endurance, and needy but most respectable coats; a sort of humble angels
+of sympathy and self-denial, though without a particle of splendor or
+even good looks about them, except what an eye as fine as their own
+feelings might discern. "My friends," wrote Sydney Smith, describing to
+Dickens the anxiety of some ladies of his acquaintance to meet him at
+dinner, "have not the smallest objection to be put into a number, but on
+the contrary would be proud of the distinction; and Lady Charlotte, in
+particular, you may marry to Newman Noggs." Lady Charlotte was not a
+more real person to Sydney than Newman Noggs; and all the world that
+Dickens attracted to his books could draw from them the same advantage
+as the man of wit and genius. It has been lately objected that humanity
+is not seen in them in its highest or noblest types, and the assertion
+may hereafter be worth considering; but what is very certain is, that
+they have inculcated humanity in familiar and engaging forms to
+thousands and tens of thousands of their readers, who can hardly have
+failed each to make his little world around him somewhat the better for
+their teaching. From first to last they were never for a moment alien
+to either the sympathies or the understandings of any class; and there
+were crowds of people at this time that could not have told you what
+imagination meant, who were adding month by month to their limited
+stores the boundless gains of imagination.
+
+One other kindliest product of humor in _Nickleby_, not to be passed
+over in even thus briefly recalling a few first impressions of it, was
+the good little miniature-painter Miss La Creevy, living by herself,
+overflowing with affections she has nobody to bestow on, but always
+cheerful by dint of industry and good-heartedness. When she is
+disappointed in the character of a woman she has been to see, she eases
+her mind by saying a very cutting thing at her expense _in a soliloquy_:
+and thereby illustrates one of the advantages of having lived alone so
+long, that she made always a confidante of herself; was as sarcastic as
+she could be, by herself, on people who offended her; pleased herself,
+and did no harm. Here was one of those touches, made afterwards familiar
+to the readers of Dickens by innumerable similar fancies, which added
+affection to their admiration for the writer, and enabled them to
+anticipate the feeling with which posterity would regard him as indeed
+the worthy companion of the Goldsmiths and Fieldings. There was a piece
+of writing, too, within not many pages of it, of which Leigh Hunt
+exclaimed on reading it that it surpassed the best things of the kind in
+Smollett that he was able to call to mind. This was the letter of Miss
+Squeers to Ralph Nickleby, giving him her version of the chastisement
+inflicted by Nicholas on the schoolmaster: "My pa requests me to write
+to you, the doctors considering it doubtful whether he will ever
+recuvver the use of his legs which prevents his holding a pen. We are in
+a state of mind beyond everything, and my pa is one mask of brooses both
+blue and green likewise two forms are steepled in his Goar. . . . Me and my
+brother were then the victims of his feury since which we have suffered
+very much which leads us to the arrowing belief that we have received
+some injury in our insides, especially as no marks of violence are
+visible externally. I am screaming out loud all the time I write and so
+is my brother which takes off my attention rather and I hope will excuse
+mistakes". . . .
+
+Thus rapidly may be indicated some elements that contributed to the
+sudden and astonishingly wide popularity of these books. I purposely
+reserve from my present notices of them, which are biographical rather
+than critical, any statement of the reasons for which I think them
+inferior in imagination and fancy to some of the later works; but there
+was continued and steady growth in them on the side of humor,
+observation, and character, while freshness and raciness of style
+continued to be an important help. There are faults of occasional
+exaggeration in the writing, but none that do not spring from animal
+spirits and good humor, or a pardonable excess, here and there, on the
+side of earnestness; and it has the rare virtue, whether gay or grave,
+of being always thoroughly intelligible and for the most part thoroughly
+natural, of suiting itself without effort to every change of mood, as
+quick, warm, and comprehensive as the sympathies it is taxed to express.
+The tone also is excellent. We are never repelled by egotism or
+conceit, and misplaced ridicule never disgusts us. When good is going
+on, we are sure to see all the beauty of it; and when there is evil, we
+are in no danger of mistaking it for good. No one can paint more
+picturesquely by an apposite epithet, or illustrate more happily by a
+choice allusion. Whatever he knows or feels, too, is always at his
+fingers' ends, and is present through whatever he is doing. What Rebecca
+says to Ivanhoe of the black knight's mode of fighting would not be
+wholly inapplicable to Dickens's manner of writing: "There is more than
+mere strength, there seems as if the whole soul and spirit of the
+champion were given to every blow he deals." This, when a man deals his
+blows with a pen, is the sort of handling that freshens with new life
+the oldest facts, and breathes into thoughts the most familiar an
+emotion not felt before. There seemed to be not much to add to our
+knowledge of London until his books came upon us, but each in this
+respect outstripped the other in its marvels. In _Nickleby_ the old city
+reappears under every aspect; and whether warmth and light are playing
+over what is good and cheerful in it, or the veil is uplifted from its
+darker scenes, it is at all times our privilege to see and feel it as it
+absolutely is. Its interior hidden life becomes familiar as its
+commonest outward forms, and we discover that we hardly knew anything of
+the places we supposed that we knew the best.
+
+Of such notices as his letters give of his progress with _Nickleby_,
+which occupied him from February, 1838, to October, 1839, something may
+now be said. Soon after the agreement for it was signed, before the
+Christmas of 1837 was over, he went down into Yorkshire with Mr. Hablot
+Browne to look up the Cheap Schools in that county to which public
+attention had been painfully drawn by a law-case in the previous year;
+which had before been notorious for cruelties committed in them, whereof
+he had heard as early as in his childish days;[21] and which he was bent
+upon destroying if he could. I soon heard the result of his journey; and
+the substance of that letter, returned to him for the purpose, is in his
+preface to the story written for the collected edition. He came back
+confirmed in his design, and in February set to work upon his first
+chapter. On his birthday he wrote to me, "I _have_ begun! I wrote four
+slips last night, so you see the beginning is made. And what is more, I
+can go on: so I hope the book is in training at last." "The first
+chapter of _Nicholas_ is done," he wrote two days later. "It took time,
+but I think answers the purpose as well as it could." Then, after a
+dozen days more, "I wrote twenty slips of _Nicholas_ yesterday, left
+only four to do this morning (up at 8 o'clock too!), and have ordered my
+horse at one." I joined him as he expected, and we read together at
+dinner that day the first number of _Nicholas Nickleby_.
+
+In the following number there was a difficulty which it was marvelous
+should not oftener have occurred to him in this form of publication. "I
+could not write a line till three o'clock," he says, describing the
+close of that number, "and have yet five slips to finish, and don't know
+what to put in them, for I have reached the point I meant to leave off
+with." He found easy remedy for such a miscalculation at his outset, and
+it was nearly his last as well as first misadventure of the kind: his
+difficulty in _Pickwick_, as he once told me, having always been, not
+the running short, but the running over: not the whip, but the drag,
+that was wanted. Sufflaminandus erat, as Ben Jonson said of Shakspeare.
+And in future works, with such marvelous nicety could he do always what
+he had planned, strictly within the space available, that only another
+similar instance is remembered by me. The third number introduced the
+school; and "I remain dissatisfied until you have seen and read number
+three," was his way of announcing to me his own satisfaction with that
+first handling of Dotheboys Hall. Nor had it the least part in my
+admiration of his powers at this time that he never wrote without the
+printer at his heels; that, always in his later works two or three
+numbers in advance, he was never a single number in advance with this
+story; that the more urgent the call upon him the more readily he rose
+to it; and that his astonishing animal spirits never failed him. As late
+in the November month of 1838 as the 20th, he thus wrote to me: "I have
+just begun my second chapter; cannot go out to-night; must get on; think
+there _will_ be a _Nickleby_ at the end of this month now (I doubted it
+before); and want to make a start towards it if I possibly can." That
+was on Tuesday; and on Friday morning in the same week, explaining to me
+the failure of something that had been promised the previous day, he
+tells me, "I was writing incessantly until it was time to dress; and
+have not yet got the subject of my last chapter, which _must be_
+finished to-night."
+
+But this was not all. Between that Tuesday and Friday an indecent
+assault had been committed on his book by a theatrical adapter named
+Stirling, who seized upon it without leave while yet only a third of it
+was written; hacked, cut, and garbled its dialogue to the shape of one
+or two farcical actors; invented for it a plot and an ending of his own,
+and produced it at the Adelphi; where the outraged author, hard pressed
+as he was with an unfinished number, had seen it in the interval between
+the two letters I have quoted. He would not have run such a risk in
+later years, but he threw off lightly at present even such offenses to
+his art; and though I was with him at a representation of his _Oliver
+Twist_ the following month at the Surrey theatre, when in the middle of
+the first scene he laid himself down upon the floor in a corner of the
+box and never rose from it until the drop-scene fell, he had been able
+to sit through _Nickleby_ and to see a kind of merit in some of the
+actors. Mr. Yates had a sufficiently humorous meaning in his wildest
+extravagance, and Mr. O. Smith could put into his queer angular oddities
+enough of a hard dry pathos, to conjure up shadows at least of Mantalini
+and Newman Noggs; of Ralph Nickleby there was indeed nothing visible
+save a wig, a spencer, and a pair of boots; but there was a quaint actor
+named Wilkinson who proved equal to the drollery though not to the
+fierce brutality of Squeers; and even Dickens, in the letter that amazed
+me by telling me of his visit to the theatre, was able to praise "the
+skillful management and dressing of the boys, the capital manner and
+speech of Fanny Squeers, the dramatic representation of her card-party
+in Squeers's parlor, the careful making-up of all the people, and the
+exceedingly good tableaux formed from Browne's sketches. . . . Mrs.
+Keeley's first appearance beside the fire (see wollum), and all the rest
+of Smike, was excellent; bating sundry choice sentiments and rubbish
+regarding the little robins in the fields which have been put in the
+boy's mouth by Mr. Stirling the adapter." His toleration could hardly be
+extended to the robins, and their author he very properly punished by
+introducing and denouncing him at Mr. Crummles's farewell supper.
+
+The story was well in hand at the next letter to be quoted, for I limit
+myself to those only with allusions that are characteristic or
+illustrative. "I must be alone in my glory to-day," he wrote, "and see
+what I can do. I perpetrated a great amount of work yesterday, and have
+every day indeed since Monday, but I must buckle-to again and endeavor
+to get the steam up. If this were to go on long, I should 'bust' the
+boiler. I think Mrs. Nickleby's love-scene will come out rather unique."
+The steam doubtless rose dangerously high when such happy inspiration
+came. It was but a few numbers earlier than this, while that eccentric
+lady was imparting her confidences to Miss Knag, that Sydney Smith
+confessed himself vanquished by a humor against which his own had long
+striven to hold out. "_Nickleby_ is _very good_," he wrote to Sir George
+Phillips after the sixth number. "I stood out against Mr. Dickens as
+long as I could, but he has conquered me."[22]
+
+The close of the story was written at Broadstairs, from which (he had
+taken a house "two doors from the Albion Hotel, where we had that merry
+night two years ago") he wrote to me on the 9th September, 1839, "I am
+hard at it, but these windings-up wind slowly, and I shall think I have
+done great things if I have entirely finished by the 20th. Chapman &
+Hall came down yesterday with Browne's sketches, and dined here. They
+imparted their intentions as to a Nicklebeian fete which will make you
+laugh heartily--so I reserve them till you come. It has been blowing
+great guns for the last three days, and last night (I wish you could
+have seen it!) there was such a sea! I staggered down to the pier, and,
+creeping under the lee of a large boat which was high and dry, watched
+it breaking for nearly an hour. Of course I came back wet through." On
+the afternoon of Wednesday, the 18th, he wrote again: "I shall not
+finish entirely before Friday, sending Hicks the last twenty pages of
+manuscript by the night-coach. I have had pretty stiff work, as you may
+suppose, and I have taken great pains. The discovery is made, Ralph is
+dead, the loves have come all right, Tim Linkinwater has proposed, and I
+have now only to break up Dotheboys and the book together. I am very
+anxious that you should see this conclusion before it leaves my hands,
+and I plainly see therefore that I must come to town myself on Saturday
+if I would not endanger the appearance of the number. So I have written
+to Hicks to send proofs to your chambers as soon as he can that evening;
+and, if you don't object, I will dine with you any time after five, and
+we will devote the night to a careful reading. I have not written to
+Macready, for they have not yet sent me the title-page of dedication,
+which is merely 'To W. C. Macready, Esq., the following pages are
+inscribed, as a slight token of admiration and regard, by his friend the
+Author.' Meanwhile will you let him know that I have fixed the Nickleby
+dinner for Saturday, the 5th of October? Place, the Albion in Aldersgate
+Street. Time, six for half-past exactly. . . . I shall be more glad than I
+can tell you to see you again, and I look forward to Saturday, and the
+evenings that are to follow it, with most joyful anticipation. I have
+had a good notion for _Barnaby_, of which more anon."
+
+The shadow from the old quarter, we see, the unwritten _Barnaby_ tale,
+intrudes itself still; though hardly, as of old, making other pleasanter
+anticipations less joyful. Such, indeed, at this time was his buoyancy
+of spirit that it cost him little, compared with the suffering it gave
+him at all subsequent similar times, to separate from the people who for
+twenty months had been a part of himself. The increased success they had
+achieved left no present room but for gladness and well-won pride; and
+so, to welcome them into the immortal family of the English novel, and
+open cheerily to their author "fresh woods and pastures new," we had the
+dinner celebration. But there is small need now to speak of what has
+left, to one of the few survivors, only the sadness of remembering that
+all who made the happiness of it are passed away. There was Talfourd,
+facile and fluent of kindliest speech, with whom we were in constant and
+cordial intercourse, and to whom, grateful for his copyright exertions
+in the House of Commons, he had dedicated _Pickwick_; there was Maclise,
+dear and familiar friend to us both, whose lately-painted portrait of
+Dickens hung in the room;[23] and there was the painter of the Rent-day,
+who made a speech as good as his pictures, rich in color and quaint with
+homely allusion, all about the reality of Dickens's genius, and how
+there had been nothing like him issuing his novels part by part since
+Richardson issued his novels volume by volume, and how in both cases
+people talked about the characters as if they were next-door neighbors
+or friends; and as many letters were written to the author of _Nickleby_
+to implore him not to kill poor Smike, as had been sent by young ladies
+to the author of _Clarissa_ to "save Lovelace's soul alive." These and
+others are gone. Of those who survive, only three arise to my
+memory,--Macready, who spoke his sense of the honor done him by the
+dedication in English as good as his delivery of it, Mr. Edward Chapman,
+and Mr. Thomas Beard.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[21] "I cannot call to mind now how I came to hear about Yorkshire
+schools when I was a not very robust child, sitting in by-places near
+Rochester castle, with a head full of Partridge, Strap, Tom Pipes, and
+Sancho Panza; but I know that my first impressions of them were picked
+up at that time."
+
+[22] Moore, in his _Diary_ (April, 1837), describes Sydney crying down
+Dickens at a dinner in the Row, "and evidently without having given him
+a fair trial."
+
+[23] This portrait was given to Dickens by his publishers, for whom it
+was painted with a view to an engraving for _Nickleby_, which, however,
+was poorly executed, and of a size too small to do the original any kind
+of justice. To the courtesy of its present possessor, the Rev. Sir
+Edward Repps Joddrell, and to the careful art of Mr. Robert Graves,
+A.R.A., I owe the illustration at the opening of this volume, in which
+the head is for the first time worthily expressed. In some sort to help
+also the reader's fancy to a complete impression, Maclise having caught
+as happily the figure as the face, a skillful outline of the painting
+has been executed for the present page by Mr. Jeens. "As a likeness,"
+said Mr. Thackeray of the work, and no higher praise could be given to
+it, "it is perfectly amazing. A looking-glass could not render a better
+fac-simile. We have here the real identical man Dickens, the inward as
+well as the outward of him."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+DURING AND AFTER NICKLEBY.
+
+1838-1839.
+
+ The Cottage at Twickenham--Daniel
+ Maclise--Ainsworth and other Friends--Mr.
+ Stanley of Alderley--Petersham
+ Cottage--Childish Enjoyments--Writes a Farce
+ for Covent Garden--Entered at the Middle
+ Temple--We see Wainewright in Newgate--_Oliver
+ Twist_ and the _Quarterly_--Hood's _Up the
+ Rhine_--Shakspeare Society--Birth of Second
+ Daughter--House-Hunting--_Barnaby_ at his Tenth
+ Page--Letter from Exeter--A Landlady and her
+ Friends--A Home for his Father and
+ Mother--Autobiographical--Visit to an
+ Upholsterer--Visit from the Same.
+
+
+THE name of his old gallery-companion may carry me back from the days to
+which the close of _Nickleby_ had led me to those when it was only
+beginning. "This snow will take away the cold weather," he had written,
+in that birthday letter of 1838 already quoted, "and then for
+Twickenham." Here a cottage was taken, nearly all the summer was passed,
+and a familiar face there was Mr. Beard's. There, with Talfourd and with
+Thackeray and Jerrold, we had many friendly days, too; and the social
+charm of Maclise was seldom wanting. Nor was there anything that
+exercised a greater fascination over Dickens than the grand enjoyment of
+idleness, the ready self-abandonment to the luxury of laziness, which we
+both so laughed at in Maclise, under whose easy swing of indifference,
+always the most amusing at the most aggravating events and times, we
+knew that there was artist-work as eager, energy as unwearying, and
+observation almost as penetrating as Dickens's own. A greater enjoyment
+than the fellowship of Maclise at this period it would indeed be
+difficult to imagine. Dickens hardly saw more than he did, while yet he
+seemed to be seeing nothing; and the small esteem in which this rare
+faculty was held by himself, a quaint oddity that gave to shrewdness
+itself in him an air of Irish simplicity, his unquestionable turn for
+literature, and a varied knowledge of it not always connected with such
+intense love and such unwearied practice of one special and absorbing
+art, combined to render him attractive far beyond the common. His fine
+genius and his handsome person, of neither of which at any time he
+seemed himself to be in the slightest degree conscious, completed the
+charm. Edwin Landseer, all the world's favorite, and the excellent
+Stanfield, came a few months later, in the Devonshire-Terrace days; but
+another painter-friend was George Cattermole, who had then enough and to
+spare of fun as well as fancy to supply ordinary artists and humorists
+by the dozen, and wanted only a little more ballast and steadiness to
+have had all that could give attraction to good-fellowship. A friend now
+especially welcome, too, was the novelist Mr. Ainsworth, who shared with
+us incessantly for the three following years in the companionship which
+began at his house; with whom we visited, during two of those years,
+friends of art and letters in his native Manchester, from among whom
+Dickens brought away his Brothers Cheeryble, and to whose sympathy in
+tastes and pursuits, accomplishments in literature, open-hearted
+generous ways, and cordial hospitality, many of the pleasures of later
+years were due. Frederick Dickens, to whom soon after this a treasury
+clerkship was handsomely given, on Dickens's application, by Mr. Stanley
+of Alderley, known in and before those Manchester days, was for the
+present again living with his father, but passed much time in his
+brother's home; and another familiar face was that of Mr. Thomas Mitton,
+who had known him when himself a law-clerk in Lincoln's Inn, through
+whom there was introduction of the relatives of a friend and partner,
+Mr. Smithson, the gentleman connected with Yorkshire mentioned in his
+preface to _Nickleby_, who became very intimate in his house. These, his
+father and mother and their two younger sons, with members of his wife's
+family, and his married sisters and their husbands, Mr. and Mrs. Burnett
+and Mr. and Mrs. Austin, are figures that all associate themselves
+prominently with the days of Doughty Street and the cottages of
+Twickenham and Petersham as remembered by me in the summers of 1838 and
+1839.
+
+In the former of these years the sports were necessarily quieter[24]
+than at Petersham, where extensive garden-grounds admitted of much
+athletic competition, from the more difficult forms of which I in
+general modestly retired, but where Dickens for the most part held his
+own against even such accomplished athletes as Maclise and Mr. Beard.
+Bar-leaping, bowling, and quoits were among the games carried on with
+the greatest ardor; and in sustained energy, what is called keeping it
+up, Dickens certainly distanced every competitor. Even the lighter
+recreations of battledoor and bagatelle were pursued with relentless
+activity; and at such amusements as the Petersham races, in those days
+rather celebrated, and which he visited daily while they lasted, he
+worked much harder himself than the running horses did.
+
+What else his letters of these years enable me to recall, that could
+possess any interest now, may be told in a dozen sentences. He wrote a
+farce by way of helping the Covent Garden manager which the actors could
+not agree about, and which he turned afterwards into a story called _The
+Lamplighter_. He entered his name among the students at the inn of the
+Middle Temple, though he did not eat dinners there until many years
+later. We made together a circuit of nearly all the London prisons, and,
+in coming to the prisoners under remand while going over Newgate,
+accompanied by Macready and Mr. Hablot Browne,[25] were startled by a
+sudden tragic cry of "My God! there's Wainewright!" In the
+shabby-genteel creature, with sandy disordered hair and dirty moustache,
+who had turned quickly round with a defiant stare at our entrance,
+looking at once mean and fierce, and quite capable of the cowardly
+murders he had committed, Macready had been horrified to recognize a man
+familiarly known to him in former years, and at whose table he had
+dined. Between the completion of _Oliver_ and its publication, Dickens
+went to see something of North Wales; and, joining him at Liverpool, I
+returned with him.[26] Soon after his arrival he had pleasant
+communication with Lockhart, dining with him at Cruikshank's a little
+later; and this was the prelude to a _Quarterly_ notice of _Oliver_ by
+Mr. Ford, written at the instance of Lockhart, but without the raciness
+he would have put into it, in which amende was made for previous less
+favorable remarks in that review. Dickens had not, however, waited for
+this to express publicly his hearty sympathy with Lockhart's handling of
+some passages in his admirable _Life of Scott_ that had drawn down upon
+him the wrath of the Ballantynes. This he did in the _Examiner_; where
+also I find him noticing a book by Thomas Hood: "rather poor, but I have
+not said so, because Hood is too, and ill besides." In the course of the
+year he was taken into Devonshire to select a home for his father, on
+the removal of the latter (who had long given up his reporting duties)
+from his London residence; and this he found in a cottage at Alphington,
+near Exeter, where he placed the elder Dickens with his wife and their
+youngest son. The same year closed Macready's Covent Garden management,
+and at the dinner to the retiring manager, when the Duke of Cambridge
+took the chair, Dickens spoke with that wonderful instinct of knowing
+what to abstain from saying, as well as what to say, which made his
+after-dinner speeches quite unique. Nor should mention be omitted of the
+Shakspeare Society, now diligently attended, of which Procter, Talfourd,
+Macready, Thackeray, Henry Davison, Blanchard, Charles Knight, John
+Bell, Douglas Jerrold, Maclise, Stanfield, George Cattermole, the good
+Tom Landseer, Frank Stone, and other old friends were members, and
+where, out of much enjoyment and many disputings,[27] there arose, from
+Dickens and all of us, plenty of after-dinner oratory. The closing
+months of this year of 1839 had special interest for him. At the end of
+October another daughter was born to him, who bears the name of that
+dear friend of his and mine, Macready, whom he asked to be her
+godfather; and before the close of the year he had moved out of Doughty
+Street into Devonshire Terrace, a handsome house with a garden of
+considerable size, shut out from the New Road by a high brick wall
+facing the York Gate into Regent's Park. These various matters, and his
+attempts at the _Barnaby_ novel on the conclusion of _Nickleby_, are the
+subject of his letters between October and December.
+
+"Thank God, all goes famously. I have worked at _Barnaby_ all day, and
+moreover seen a beautiful (and reasonable) house in Kent Terrace, where
+Macready once lived, but larger than his." Again (this having gone off):
+"_Barnaby_ has suffered so much from the house-hunting, that I mustn't
+chop to-day." Then (for the matter of the Middle Temple), "I return the
+form. It's the right temple, I take for granted. _Barnaby_ moves, not at
+race-horse speed, but yet as fast (I think) as under these unsettled
+circumstances could possibly be expected." Or again: "All well.
+_Barnaby_ has reached his tenth page. I have just turned lazy, and have
+passed into _Christabel_, and thence to _Wallenstein_." At last the
+choice was made. "A house of great promise (and great premium),
+'undeniable' situation, and excessive splendor, is in view. Mitton is
+in treaty, and I am in ecstatic restlessness. Kate wants to know whether
+you have any books to send her, so please to shoot here any literary
+rubbish on hand." To these I will only add a couple of extracts from his
+letters while in Exeter arranging his father's and mother's new home.
+They are very humorous; and the vividness with which everything, once
+seen, was photographed in his mind and memory, is pleasantly shown in
+them.
+
+"I took a little house for them this morning" (5th March, 1839: from
+the New London Inn), "and if they are not pleased with it I shall be
+grievously disappointed. Exactly a mile beyond the city on the Plymouth
+road there are two white cottages: one is theirs and the other belongs
+to their landlady. I almost forget the number of rooms, but there is
+an excellent parlor with two other rooms on the ground floor, there is
+really a beautiful little room over the parlor which I am furnishing
+as a drawing-room, and there is a splendid garden. The paint and paper
+throughout is new and fresh and cheerful-looking, the place is clean
+beyond all description, and the neighborhood I suppose the most
+beautiful in this most beautiful of English counties. Of the landlady,
+a Devonshire widow with whom I had the honor of taking lunch
+to-day, I must make most especial mention. She is a fat, infirm,
+splendidly-fresh-faced country dame, rising sixty and recovering from an
+attack 'on the nerves'--I thought they never went off the stones, but I
+find they try country air with the best of us. In the event of my
+mother's being ill at any time, I really think the vicinity of this
+good dame, the very picture of respectability and good humor, will be
+the greatest possible comfort. _Her_ furniture and domestic arrangements
+are a capital picture, but that I reserve till I see you, when I
+anticipate a hearty laugh. She bears the highest character with the
+bankers and the clergyman (who formerly lived in _my_ cottage himself),
+and is a kind-hearted worthy capital specimen of the sort of life, or I
+have no eye for the real and no idea of finding it out.
+
+"This good lady's brother and his wife live in the next nearest cottage,
+and the brother transacts the good lady's business, the nerves not
+admitting of her transacting it herself, although they leave her in her
+debilitated state something sharper than the finest lancet. Now, the
+brother having coughed all night till he coughed himself into such a
+perspiration that you might have 'wringed his hair,' according to the
+asseveration of eye-witnesses, his wife was sent for to negotiate with
+me; and if you could have seen me sitting in the kitchen with the two
+old women, endeavoring to make them comprehend that I had no evil
+intentions or covert designs, and that I had come down all that way to
+take some cottage and had _happened_ to walk down that road and see that
+particular one, you would never have forgotten it. Then, to see the
+servant-girl run backwards and forwards to the sick man, and when the
+sick man had signed one agreement which I drew up and the old woman
+instantly put away in a disused tea-caddy, to see the trouble and the
+number of messages it took before the sick man could be brought to sign
+another (a duplicate) that we might have one apiece, was one of the
+richest scraps of genuine drollery I ever saw in all my days. How, when
+the business was over, we became conversational; how I was facetious,
+and at the same time virtuous and domestic; how I drank toasts in the
+beer, and stated on interrogatory that I was a married man and the
+father of two blessed infants; how the ladies marveled thereat; how one
+of the ladies, having been in London, inquired where I lived, and, being
+told, remembered that Doughty Street and the Foundling Hospital were in
+the Old Kent Road, which I didn't contradict,--all this and a great deal
+more must make us laugh when I return, as it makes me laugh now to think
+of. Of my subsequent visit to the upholsterer recommended by the
+landlady; of the absence of the upholsterer's wife, and the timidity of
+the upholsterer fearful of acting in her absence; of my sitting behind a
+high desk in a little dark shop, calling over the articles in
+requisition and checking off the prices as the upholsterer exhibited the
+goods and called them out; of my coming over the upholsterer's daughter
+with many virtuous endearments, to propitiate the establishment and
+reduce the bill; of these matters I say nothing, either, for the same
+reason as that just mentioned. The discovery of the cottage I seriously
+regard as a blessing (not to speak it profanely) upon our efforts in
+this cause. I had heard nothing from the bank, and walked straight
+there, by some strange impulse, directly after breakfast. I am sure they
+may be happy there; for if I were older, and my course of activity were
+run, I am sure _I_ could, with God's blessing, for many and many a
+year.". . .
+
+"The theatre is open here, and Charles Kean is to-night playing for his
+last night. If it had been the 'rig'lar' drama I should have gone, but I
+was afraid Sir Giles Overreach might upset me, so I stayed away. My
+quarters are excellent, and the head-waiter is _such_ a waiter! Knowles
+(not Sheridan Knowles, but Knowles of the Cheetham Hill Road[28]) is an
+ass to him. This sounds bold, but truth is stranger than fiction.
+By-the-by, not the least comical thing that has occurred was the visit
+of the upholsterer (with some further calculations) since I began this
+letter. I think they took me here at the New London for the Wonderful
+Being I am; they were amazingly sedulous; and no doubt they looked for
+my being visited by the nobility and gentry of the neighborhood. My
+first and only visitor came to-night: a ruddy-faced man in faded black,
+with extracts from a feather-bed all over him; an extraordinary and
+quite miraculously dirty face; a thick stick; and the personal
+appearance altogether of an amiable bailiff in a green old age. I have
+not seen the proper waiter since, and more than suspect I shall not
+recover this blow. He was announced (by _the_ waiter) as 'a person.' I
+expect my bill every minute. . . .
+
+"The waiter is laughing outside the door with another waiter--this is
+the latest intelligence of my condition."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[24] We had at Twickenham a balloon club for the children, of which I
+appear to have been elected the president on condition of supplying all
+the balloons, a condition which I seem so insufficiently to have
+complied with as to bring down upon myself the subjoined resolution. The
+Snodgering Blee and Popem Jee were the little brother and sister, for
+whom, as for their successors, he was always inventing these surprising
+descriptive epithets. "Gammon Lodge, Saturday evening, June 23d, 1838.
+Sir, I am requested to inform you that at a numerous meeting of the
+Gammon Aeronautical Association for the Encouragement of Science and the
+Consumption of Spirits (of Wine)--Thomas Beard Esquire, Mrs. Charles
+Dickens, Charles Dickens, Esquire, the Snodgering Blee, Popem Jee, and
+other distinguished characters being present and assenting, the vote of
+censure of which I inclose a copy was unanimously passed upon you for
+gross negligence in the discharge of your duty, and most unjustifiable
+disregard of the best interests of the Society. I am, Sir, your most
+obedient servant, Charles Dickens, Honorary Secretary. To John Forster,
+Esquire."
+
+[25] Not Mr. Procter, as, by an oversight of his own, Dickens caused to
+be said in an interesting paper on Wainewright which appeared in his
+weekly periodical.
+
+[26] I quote from a letter dated Llangollen, Friday morning, 3d Nov.
+1838: "I wrote to you last night, but by mistake the letter has gone on
+Heaven knows where in my portmanteau. I have only time to say, go
+straight to Liverpool by the first Birmingham train on Monday morning,
+and at the Adelphi Hotel in that town you will find me. I trust to you
+to see my dear Kate and bring the latest intelligence of her and the
+darlings. My best love to them."
+
+[27] One of these disputes is referred to by Charles Knight in his
+Autobiography; and I see in Dickens's letters the mention of another in
+which I seem to have been turned by his kindly counsel from some folly I
+was going to commit: "I need not, I am sure, impress upon you the
+sincerity with which I make this representation. Our close and hearty
+friendship happily spares me the necessity. But I will add this--that
+feeling for you an attachment which no ties of blood or other
+relationship could ever awaken, and hoping to be to the end of my life
+your affectionate and chosen friend, I am convinced that I counsel you
+now as you would counsel me if I were in the like case; and I hope and
+trust that you will be led by an opinion which I am sure cannot be wrong
+when it is influenced by such feelings as I bear towards you, and so
+many warm and grateful considerations."
+
+[28] This was the butler of Mr. Gilbert Winter, one of the kind
+Manchester friends whose hospitality we had enjoyed with Mr. Ainsworth,
+and whose shrewd, quaint, old-world ways come delightfully back to me as
+I write his once well-known and widely-honored name.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+NEW LITERARY PROJECT.
+
+1839.
+
+ Thoughts for the Future--Doubts of old Serial
+ Form--Suggestion for his Publishers--My
+ Mediation with them--Proposed Weekly
+ Publication--Design of it--Old Favorites to be
+ revived--Subjects to be dealt with--Chapters on
+ Chambers--Gog and Magog Relaxations--Savage
+ Chronicles--Others as well as himself to
+ write--Travels to Ireland and America in
+ View--Stipulation as to Property and
+ Payments--Great Hopes of Success--Assent of his
+ Publishers--No Planned Story--Terms of
+ Agreement--Notion for his Hero--A Name hit
+ upon--Sanguine of the Issue.
+
+
+THE time was now come for him seriously to busy himself with a successor
+to _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_, which he had not, however, waited thus
+long before turning over thoroughly in his mind. _Nickleby's_ success
+had so far outgone even the expectation raised by _Pickwick's_, that,
+without some handsome practical admission of this fact at the close, its
+publishers could hardly hope to retain him. This had been frequently
+discussed by us, and was well understood. But, apart from the question
+of his resuming with them at all, he had persuaded himself it might be
+unsafe to resume in the old way, believing the public likely to tire of
+the same twenty numbers over again. There was also another and more
+sufficient reason for change which naturally had great weight with him,
+and this was the hope that, by invention of a new mode as well as kind
+of serial publication, he might be able for a time to discontinue the
+writing of a long story with all its strain on his fancy, in any case to
+shorten and vary the length of the stories written by himself, and
+perhaps ultimately to retain all the profits of a continuous publication
+without necessarily himself contributing every line that was to be
+written for it. These considerations had been discussed still more
+anxiously; and for several months some such project had been taking form
+in his thoughts.
+
+While he was at Petersham (July, 1839) he thus wrote to me: "I have been
+thinking that subject over. Indeed, I have been doing so to the great
+stoppage of _Nickleby_ and the great worrying and fidgeting of myself. I
+have been thinking that if Chapman & Hall were to admit you into their
+confidence with respect to what they mean to do at the conclusion of
+_Nickleby_, without admitting me, it would help us very much. You know
+that I am well disposed towards them, and that if they do something
+handsome, even handsomer perhaps than they dreamt of doing, they will
+find it their interest, and will find me tractable. You know also that I
+have had straightforward offers from responsible men to publish anything
+for me at a percentage on the profits and take all the risk; but that I
+am unwilling to leave them, and have declared to you that if they behave
+with liberality to me I will not on any consideration, although to a
+certain extent I certainly and surely must gain by it. Knowing all this,
+I feel sure that if you were to put before them the glories of our new
+project, and, reminding them that when _Barnaby_ is published I am clear
+of all engagements, were to tell them that if they wish to secure me and
+perpetuate our connection now is the time for them to step gallantly
+forward and make such proposals as will produce that result,--I feel
+quite sure that if this should be done by you, as you only can do it,
+the result will be of the most vital importance to me and mine, and that
+a very great deal may be effected, thus, to recompense your friend for
+very small profits and very large work as yet. I shall see you, please
+God, on Tuesday night; and if they wait upon you on Wednesday, I shall
+remain in town until that evening."
+
+They came; and the tenor of the interview was so favorable that I wished
+him to put in writing what from time to time had been discussed in
+connection with the new project. This led to the very interesting letter
+I shall now quote, written also in the same month from Petersham. I did
+not remember, until I lately read it, that the notion of a possible
+visit to America had been in his thoughts so early.
+
+"I should be willing to commence on the thirty-first of March, 1840, a
+new publication, consisting entirely of original matter, of which one
+number, price threepence, should be published every week, and of which a
+certain amount of numbers should form a volume, to be published at
+regular intervals. The best general idea of the plan of the work might
+be given, perhaps, by reference to the _Spectator_, the _Tatler_, and
+Goldsmith's _Bee_; but it would be far more popular both in the subjects
+of which it treats and its mode of treating them.
+
+"I should propose to start, as the _Spectator_ does, with some pleasant
+fiction relative to the origin of the publication; to introduce a little
+club or knot of characters and to carry their personal histories and
+proceedings through the work; to introduce fresh characters constantly;
+to reintroduce Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller, the latter of whom might
+furnish an occasional communication with great effect; to write amusing
+essays on the various foibles of the day as they arise; to take
+advantage of all passing events; and to vary the form of the papers by
+throwing them into sketches, essays, tales, adventures, letters from
+imaginary correspondents, and so forth, so as to diversify the contents
+as much as possible.
+
+"In addition to this general description of the contents, I may add that
+under particular heads I should strive to establish certain features in
+the work, which should be so many veins of interest and amusement
+running through the whole. Thus the Chapters on Chambers, which I have
+long thought and spoken of, might be very well incorporated with it; and
+a series of papers has occurred to me containing stories and
+descriptions of London as it was many years ago, as it is now, and as it
+will be many years hence, to which I would give some such title as The
+Relaxations of Gog and Magog, dividing them into portions like the
+_Arabian Nights_, and supposing Gog and Magog to entertain each other
+with such narrations in Guildhall all night long, and to break off every
+morning at daylight. An almost inexhaustible field of fun, raillery, and
+interest would be laid open by pursuing this idea.
+
+"I would also commence, and continue from time to time, a series of
+satirical papers purporting to be translated from some Savage
+Chronicles, and to describe the administration of justice in some
+country that never existed, and record the proceedings of its wise men.
+The object of this series (which if I can compare it with anything would
+be something between _Gulliver's Travels_ and the _Citizen of the
+World_) would be to keep a special lookout upon the magistrates in town
+and country, and never to leave those worthies alone.
+
+"The quantity of each number that should be written by myself would be a
+matter for discussion and arrangement. Of course I should pledge and
+bind myself upon that head. Nobody but myself would ever pursue _these
+ideas_, but I must have assistance of course, and there must be some
+contents of a different kind. Their general nature might be agreed upon
+beforehand, but I should stipulate that this assistance is chosen solely
+by myself, and that the contents of every number are as much under my
+own control, and subject to as little interference, as those of a number
+of _Pickwick_ or _Nickleby_.
+
+"In order to give fresh novelty and interest to this undertaking, I
+should be ready to contract to go at any specified time (say in the
+midsummer or autumn of the year, when a sufficient quantity of matter in
+advance should have been prepared, or earlier if it were thought fit)
+either to Ireland or to America, and to write from thence a series of
+papers descriptive of the places and people I see, introducing local
+tales, traditions, and legends, something after the plan of Washington
+Irving's _Alhambra_. I should wish the republication of these papers in
+a separate form, with others to render the subject complete (if we
+should deem it advisable), to form part of the arrangement for the work;
+and I should wish the same provision to be made for the republication of
+the Gog and Magog series, or indeed any that I undertook.
+
+"This is a very rough and slight outline of the project I have in view.
+I am ready to talk the matter over, to give any further explanations, to
+consider any suggestions, or to go into the details of the subject
+immediately. I say nothing of the novelty of such a publication
+nowadays, or its chances of success. Of course I think them very great,
+very great indeed,--almost beyond calculation,--or I should not seek to
+bind myself to anything so extensive.
+
+"The heads of the terms upon which I should be prepared to go into this
+undertaking would be--That I be made a proprietor in the work and a
+sharer in the profits. That when I bind myself to write a certain
+portion of every number, I am insured, _for_ that writing in every
+number, a certain sum of money. That those who assist me, and contribute
+the remainder of every number, shall be paid by the publishers
+immediately after its appearance, according to a scale to be calculated
+and agreed upon, on presenting my order for the amount to which they may
+be respectively entitled. Or, if the publishers prefer it, that they
+agree to pay me a certain sum for the _whole_ of every number, and leave
+me to make such arrangements for that part which I may not write, as I
+think best. Of course I should require that for these payments, or any
+other outlay connected with the work, I am not held accountable in any
+way; and that no portion of them is to be considered as received by me
+on account of the profits. I need not add that some arrangement would
+have to be made, if I undertake my Travels, relative to the expenses of
+traveling.
+
+"Now, I want our publishing friends to take these things into
+consideration, and to give me the views and proposals they would be
+disposed to entertain when they have maturely considered the matter."
+
+The result of their consideration was, on the whole, satisfactory. An
+additional fifteen hundred pounds was to be paid at the close of
+_Nickleby_, the new adventure was to be undertaken, and Cattermole was
+to be joined with Browne as its illustrator. Nor was its plan much
+modified before starting, though it was felt by us all that, for the
+opening numbers at least, Dickens would have to be sole contributor, and
+that, whatever otherwise might be its attraction, or the success of the
+detached papers proposed by him, some reinforcement of them from time to
+time, by means of a story with his name continued at reasonable if not
+regular intervals, would be found absolutely necessary. Without any such
+planned story, however, the work did actually begin, its course
+afterwards being determined by circumstances stronger than any project
+he had formed. The agreement, drawn up in contemplation of a mere
+miscellany of detached papers or essays, and in which no mention of any
+story appeared, was signed at the end of March; and its terms were such
+as to place him in his only proper and legitimate position in regard to
+all such contracts, of being necessarily a gainer in any case, and, in
+the event of success, the greatest gainer of all concerned in the
+undertaking. All the risk of every kind was to be undergone by the
+publishers; and, as part of the expenses to be defrayed by them of each
+weekly number, he was to receive fifty pounds. Whatever the success or
+failure, this was always to be paid. The numbers were then to be
+accounted for separately, and half the realized profits paid to him, the
+other half going to the publishers; each number being held strictly
+responsible for itself, and the loss upon it, supposing any, not carried
+to the general account. The work was to be continued for twelve months
+certain, with leave to the publishers then to close it; but if they
+elected to go on, he was himself bound to the enterprise for five years,
+and the ultimate copyright as well as profit was to be equally divided.
+
+Six weeks before signature of this agreement, while a title was still
+undetermined, I had this letter from him: "I will dine with you. I
+intended to spend the evening in strict meditation (as I did last
+night); but perhaps I had better go out, lest all work and no play
+should make me a dull boy. _I_ have a list of titles too, but the final
+title I have determined on--or something very near it. I have a notion
+of this old file in the queer house, opening the book by an account of
+himself, and, among other peculiarities, of his affection for an old
+quaint queer-cased clock; showing how that when they have sat alone
+together in the long evenings, he has got accustomed to its voice, and
+come to consider it as the voice of a friend; how its striking, in the
+night, has seemed like an assurance to him that it was still, a cheerful
+watcher at his chamber-door; and now its very face has seemed to have
+something of welcome in its dusty features, and to relax from its
+grimness when he has looked at it from his chimney-corner. Then I mean
+to tell how that he has kept odd manuscripts in the old, deep, dark,
+silent closet where the weights are; and taken them from thence to read
+(mixing up his enjoyments with some notion of his clock); and how, when
+the club came to be formed, they, by reason of their punctuality and his
+regard for this dumb servant, took their name from it. And thus I shall
+call the book either _Old Humphrey's Clock_, or _Master Humphrey's
+Clock_; beginning with a woodcut of old Humphrey and his clock, and
+explaining the why and wherefore. All Humphrey's own papers will be
+dated then From my clock-side, and I have divers thoughts about the best
+means of introducing the others. I thought about this all day yesterday
+and all last night till I went to bed. I am sure I can make a good thing
+of this opening, which I have thoroughly warmed up to in consequence."
+
+A few days later: "I incline rather more to _Master Humphrey's Clock_
+than _Old Humphrey's_--if so be that there is no danger of the pensive
+confounding master with a boy." After two days more: "I was thinking all
+yesterday, and have begun at _Master Humphrey_ to-day." Then, a week
+later: "I have finished the first number, but have not been able to do
+more in the space than lead up to the Giants, who are just on the
+scene."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP.
+
+1840-1841.
+
+ Visit to Walter Landor--First Thought of Little
+ Nell--Hopeful of Master Humphrey--A Title for
+ the Child-Story--First Sale of _Master
+ Humphrey's Clock_--Its Original Plan
+ abandoned--Reasons for this--To be limited to
+ One Story--Disadvantages of Weekly
+ Publication--A Favorite Description--In Bevis
+ Marks for Sampson Brass--At Lawn House,
+ Broadstairs--Dedication of his First Volume to
+ Rogers--Chapters 43-45--Dick Swiveller and the
+ Marchioness--Masterpiece of Kindly Fun--Closing
+ of the Tale--Effect upon the
+ Writer--Making-believe very much--The End
+ approaching--The Realities of Fiction--Death of
+ Little Nell--My Share in the Close--A
+ Suggestion adopted by him--Success of the
+ Story--Useful Lessons--Its Mode of
+ Construction--Character and
+ Characteristics--The Art of it--A Recent
+ Tribute--Harte's "Dickens in Camp."
+
+
+A DAY or two after the date of the last letter quoted, Dickens and his
+wife, with Maclise and myself, visited Landor in Bath, and it was during
+three happy days we passed together there that the fancy which was
+shortly to take the form of Little Nell first occurred to its
+author,[29]--but as yet with the intention only of making out of it a
+tale of a few chapters. On the 1st of March we returned from Bath; and
+on the 4th I had this letter: "If you can manage to give me a call in
+the course of the day or evening, I wish you would. I am laboriously
+turning over in my mind how I can best effect the improvement we spoke
+of last night, which I will certainly make by hook or by crook, and
+which I would like you to see _before_ it goes finally to the printer's.
+I have determined not to put that witch-story into number 3, for I am by
+no means satisfied of the effect of its contrast with Humphrey. I think
+of lengthening Humphrey, finishing the description of the society, and
+closing with the little child-story, which is SURE to be effective,
+especially after the old man's quiet way." Then there came hard upon
+this: "What do you think of the following double title for the beginning
+of that little tale? 'PERSONAL ADVENTURES OF MASTER HUMPHREY: _The Old
+Curiosity Shop_.' I have thought of _Master Humphrey's Tale_, _Master
+Humphrey's Narrative_, _A Passage in Master Humphrey's Life_--but I
+don't think any does as well as this. I have also thought of _The Old
+Curiosity Dealer and the Child_ instead of _The Old Curiosity Shop_.
+Perpend. Topping waits."----And thus was taking gradual form, with less
+direct consciousness of design on his own part than I can remember in
+any other instance of all his career, a story which was to add largely
+to his popularity, more than any other of his works to make the bond
+between himself and his readers one of personal attachment, and very
+widely to increase the sense entertained of his powers as a pathetic as
+well as humorous writer.
+
+He had not written more than two or three chapters, when the capability
+of the subject for more extended treatment than he had at first proposed
+to give to it pressed itself upon him, and he resolved to throw
+everything else aside, devoting himself to the one story only. There
+were other strong reasons for this. Of the first number of the _Clock_
+nearly seventy thousand were sold; but with the discovery that there was
+no continuous tale the orders at once diminished, and a change must have
+been made even if the material and means for it had not been ready.
+There had been an interval of three numbers between the first and second
+chapters, which the society of Mr. Pickwick and the two Wellers made
+pleasant enough; but after the introduction of Dick Swiveller there were
+three consecutive chapters; and in the continued progress of the tale
+to its close there were only two more breaks, one between the fourth and
+fifth chapters and one between the eighth and ninth, pardonable and
+enjoyable now for the sake of Sam and his father. The reintroduction of
+these old favorites, it will have been seen, formed part of his original
+plan; of his abandonment of which his own description may be added, from
+his preface to the collected edition: "The first chapter of this tale
+appeared in the fourth number of _Master Humphrey's Clock_, when I had
+already been made uneasy by the desultory character of that work, and
+when, I believe, my readers had thoroughly participated in the feeling.
+The commencement of a story was a great satisfaction to me, and I had
+reason to believe that my readers participated in this feeling too.
+Hence, being pledged to some interruptions and some pursuit of the
+original design, I set cheerfully about disentangling myself from those
+impediments as fast as I could; and, this done, from that time until its
+completion _The Old Curiosity Shop_ was written and published from week
+to week, in weekly parts."
+
+He had very early himself become greatly taken with it. "I am very glad
+indeed," he wrote to me after the first half-dozen chapters, "that you
+think so well of the _Curiosity Shop_, and especially that what may be
+got out of Dick strikes you. I _mean_ to make much of him. I feel the
+story extremely myself, which I take to be a good sign; and am already
+warmly interested in it. I shall run it on now for four whole numbers
+together, to give it a fair chance." Every step lightened the road as it
+became more and more real with each character that appeared in it, and
+I still recall the glee with which he told me what he intended to do not
+only with Dick Swiveller, but with Septimus Brass, changed afterwards to
+Sampson. Undoubtedly, however, Dick was his favorite. "Dick's behavior
+in the matter of Miss Wackles will, I hope, give you satisfaction," is
+the remark of another of his letters. "I cannot yet discover that his
+aunt has any belief in him, or is in the least degree likely to send him
+a remittance, so that he will probably continue to be the sport of
+destiny." His difficulties were the quickly recurring times of
+publication, the confined space in each number that yet had to
+contribute its individual effect, and (from the suddenness with which he
+had begun) the impossibility of getting in advance. "I was obliged to
+cramp most dreadfully what I thought a pretty idea in the last chapter.
+I hadn't room to turn:" to this or a similar effect his complaints are
+frequent, and of the vexations named it was by far the worst. But he
+steadily bore up against all, and made a triumph of the little story.
+
+To help his work he went twice to Broadstairs, in June and in September.
+From this he wrote to me (17th June), "It's now four o'clock, and I have
+been at work since half-past eight. I have really dried myself up into a
+condition which would almost justify me in pitching off the cliff, head
+first--but I must get richer before I indulge in a crowning luxury.
+Number 15, which I began to-day, I anticipate great things from. There
+is a description of getting gradually out of town, and passing through
+neighborhoods of distinct and various characters, with which, if I had
+read it as anybody else's writing, I think I should have been very much
+struck. The child and the old man are on their journey of course, and
+the subject is a very pretty one." Between these two Broadstairs visits
+he wrote to me, "I intended calling on you this morning on my way back
+from Bevis Marks, whither I went to look at a house for Sampson Brass.
+But I got mingled up in a kind of social paste with the Jews of
+Houndsditch, and roamed about among them till I came out in Moorfields,
+quite unexpectedly. So I got into a cab, and came home again, very
+tired, by way of the City Road." At the opening of September he was
+again at Broadstairs. The residence he most desired there, Fort House,
+stood prominently at the top of a breezy hill on the road to Kingsgate,
+with a corn-field between it and the sea, and this in many subsequent
+years he always occupied; but he was fain to be content, as yet, with
+Lawn House, a smaller villa between the hill and the corn-field, from
+which he now wrote of his attentions to Mr. Sampson Brass's sister: "I
+have been at work of course" (2d September), "and have just finished a
+number. I have effected a reform by virtue of which we breakfast at a
+quarter-before eight, so that I get to work at half-past, and am
+commonly free by one o'clock or so, which is a great happiness. Dick is
+now Sampson's clerk, and I have touched Miss Brass in Number 25,
+lightly, but effectively I hope."
+
+At this point it became necessary to close the first volume of the
+_Clock_, which was issued accordingly with a dedication to Rogers, and a
+preface to which allusion will be made hereafter. "I have opened the
+second volume," he wrote to me on the 9th of September, "with Kit; and
+I saw this morning looking out at the sea, as if a veil had been lifted
+up, an affecting thing that I can do with him by-and-by. Nous verrons."
+"I am glad you like that Kit number," he wrote twelve days later; "I
+thought you would. I have altered that about the opera-going. Of course
+I had no intention to delude the many-headed into a false belief
+concerning opera-nights, but merely to specify a class of senators. I
+needn't have done it, however, for God knows they're pretty well all
+alike." This referred to an objection made by me to something he had
+written of "opera-going senators on Wednesday nights;" and, of another
+change made in compliance with some other objection of mine, he wrote on
+the 4th of October, "You will receive the proof herewith. I have altered
+it. You must let it stand now. I really think the dead mankind a million
+fathoms deep, the best thing in the sentence. I have a notion of the
+dreadful silence down there, and of the stars shining down upon their
+drowned eyes,--the fruit, let me tell you, of a solitary walk by
+starlight on the cliffs. As to the child-image, I have made a note of it
+for alteration. In number thirty there will be some cutting needed, I
+think. I have, however, something in my eye near the beginning which I
+can easily take out. You will recognize a description of the road we
+traveled between Birmingham and Wolverhampton; but I had conceived it so
+well in my mind that the execution doesn't please me quite as well as I
+expected. I shall be curious to know whether you think there's anything
+in the notion of the man and his furnace-fire. It would have been a good
+thing to have opened a new story with, I have been thinking since."
+
+In the middle of October he returned to town, and by the end of the
+month he had so far advanced that the close of the story began to be not
+far distant. "Tell me what you think," he had written just before his
+return, "of 36 and 37? The way is clear for Kit now, and for a great
+effect at the last with the Marchioness." The last allusion I could not
+in the least understand, until I found, in the numbers just sent me,
+those exquisite chapters of the tale, the 57th and 58th, in which Dick
+Swiveller realizes his threat to Miss Wackles, discovers the small
+creature that his destiny is expressly saving up for him, dubs her
+Marchioness, and teaches her the delights of hot purl and cribbage. This
+is comedy of the purest kind; its great charm being the good-hearted
+fellow's kindness to the poor desolate child hiding itself under cover
+of what seems only mirth and fun. Altogether, and because of rather than
+in spite of his weakness, Dick is a captivating person. His gayety and
+good humor survive such accumulations of "staggerers," he makes such
+discoveries of the "rosy" in the very smallest of drinks, and becomes
+himself by his solacements of verse such a "perpetual grand Apollo,"
+that his failings are all forgiven, and hearts resolutely shut against
+victims of destiny in general open themselves freely to Dick Swiveller.
+
+At the opening of November, there seems to have been a wish on Maclise's
+part to try his hand at an illustration for the story; but I do not
+remember that it bore other fruit than a very pleasant day at Jack
+Straw's Castle, where Dickens read one of the later numbers to us.
+"Maclise and myself (alone in the carriage)," he wrote, "will be with
+you at two exactly. We propose driving out to Hampstead and walking
+there, if it don't rain in buckets'-full. I sha'n't send Bradburys' the
+MS. of next number till to-morrow, for it contains the shadow of the
+number after that, and I want to read it to Mac, as, if he likes the
+subject, it will furnish him with one, I think. You can't imagine
+(gravely I write and speak) how exhausted I am to-day with yesterday's
+labors. I went to bed last night utterly dispirited and done up. All
+night I have been pursued by the child; and this morning I am
+unrefreshed and miserable. I don't know what to do with myself. . . . I
+think the close of the story will be great." Connected with the same
+design on Maclise's part there was another reading, this time at my
+house, and of the number shadowed forth by what had been read at
+Hampstead. "I will bring the MS.," he writes on the 12th of November,
+"and, for Mac's information if needful, the number before it. I have
+only this moment put the finishing touch to it. The difficulty has been
+tremendous--the anguish unspeakable. I didn't say six. Therefore dine at
+half-past five like a Christian. I shall bring Mac at that hour."
+
+He had sent me, shortly before, the chapters in which the Marchioness
+nurses Dick in his fever, and puts his favorite philosophy to the hard
+test of asking him whether he has ever put pieces of orange-peel into
+cold water and made believe it was wine. "If you make believe very much,
+it's quite nice; but if you don't, you know, it hasn't much flavor:" so
+it stood originally, and to the latter word in the little creature's
+mouth I seem to have objected. Replying (on the 16th of December) he
+writes, "'If you make believe very much, it's quite nice; but if you
+don't, you know, it seems as if it would bear a little more seasoning,
+certainly.' I think that's better. Flavor is a common word in cookery,
+and among cooks, and so I used it. The part you cut out in the other
+number, which was sent me this morning, I had put in with a view to
+Quilp's last appearance on any stage, which is casting its shadow upon
+my mind; but it will come well enough without such a preparation, so I
+made no change. I mean to shirk Sir Robert Inglis, and work to-night. I
+have been solemnly revolving the general story all this morning. The
+forty-fifth number will certainly close. Perhaps this forty-first, which
+I am now at work on, had better contain the announcement of _Barnaby_? I
+am glad you like Dick and the Marchioness in that sixty-fourth chapter.
+I thought you would."
+
+Fast shortening as the life of little Nell was now, the dying year might
+have seen it pass away; but I never knew him wind up any tale with such
+a sorrowful reluctance as this. He caught at any excuse to hold his hand
+from it, and stretched to the utmost limit the time left to complete it
+in. Christmas interposed its delays too, so that Twelfth-night had come
+and gone when I wrote to him in the belief that he was nearly done.
+"Done!" he wrote back to me on Friday, the 7th; "Done!!! Why, bless you,
+I shall not be done till Wednesday night. I only began yesterday, and
+this part of the story is not to be galloped over, I can tell you. I
+think it will come famously--but I am the wretchedest of the wretched.
+It casts the most horrible shadow upon me, and it is as much as I can
+do to keep moving at all. I tremble to approach the place a great deal
+more than Kit; a great deal more than Mr. Garland; a great deal more
+than the Single Gentleman. I sha'n't recover it for a long time. Nobody
+will miss her like I shall. It is such a very painful thing to me, that
+I really cannot express my sorrow. Old wounds bleed afresh when I only
+think of the way of doing it: what the actual doing it will be, God
+knows. I can't preach to myself the schoolmaster's consolation, though I
+try. Dear Mary died yesterday, when I think of this sad story. I don't
+know what to say about dining to-morrow--perhaps you'll send up
+to-morrow morning for news? That'll be the best way. I have refused
+several invitations for this week and next, determining to go nowhere
+till I had done. I am afraid of disturbing the state I have been trying
+to get into, and having to fetch it all back again." He had finished,
+all but the last chapter, on the Wednesday named; that was the 12th of
+January; and on the following night he read to me the two chapters of
+Nell's death, the seventy-first and seventy-second, with the result
+described in a letter to me of the following Monday, the 17th January,
+1841:
+
+"I can't help letting you know how much your yesterday's letter pleased
+me. I felt sure you liked the chapters when we read them on Thursday
+night, but it was a great delight to have my impression so strongly and
+heartily confirmed. You know how little value I should set on what I had
+done, if all the world cried out that it was good, and those whose good
+opinion and approbation I value most were silent. The assurance that
+this little closing of the scene touches and is felt by you so strongly,
+is better to me than a thousand most sweet voices out of doors. When I
+first began, _on your valued suggestion_, to keep my thoughts upon this
+ending of the tale, I resolved to try and do something which might be
+read by people about whom Death had been, with a softened feeling, and
+with consolation. . . . After you left last night, I took my desk
+up-stairs, and, writing until four o'clock this morning, finished the
+old story. It makes me very melancholy to think that all these people
+are lost to me forever, and I feel as if I never could become attached
+to any new set of characters." The words printed in italics, as
+underlined by himself, give me my share in the story which had gone so
+closely to his heart. I was responsible for its tragic ending. He had
+not thought of killing her, when, about half-way through, I asked him to
+consider whether it did not necessarily belong even to his own
+conception, after taking so mere a child through such a tragedy of
+sorrow, to lift her also out of the commonplace of ordinary happy
+endings so that the gentle pure little figure and form should never
+change to the fancy. All that I meant he seized at once, and never
+turned aside from it again.
+
+The published book was an extraordinary success, and, in America more
+especially, very greatly increased the writer's fame. The pathetic vein
+it had opened was perhaps mainly the cause of this, but opinion at home
+continued still to turn on the old characteristics,--the freshness of
+humor of which the pathos was but another form and product, the grasp of
+reality with which character had again been seized, the discernment of
+good under its least attractive forms and of evil in its most
+captivating disguises, the cordial wisdom and sound heart, the enjoyment
+and fun, luxuriant yet under proper control. No falling-off was found in
+these; and I doubt if any of his people have been more widely liked than
+Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness. The characters generally, indeed,
+work out their share in the purpose of the tale; the extravagances of
+some of them help to intensify its meaning; and the sayings and doings
+of the worst and the best alike have their point and applicability. Many
+an oversuspicious person will find advantage in remembering what a too
+liberal application of Foxey's principle of suspecting everybody brought
+Mr. Sampson Brass to; and many an overhasty judgment of poor human
+nature will unconsciously be checked, when it is remembered that Mr.
+Christopher Nubbles _did_ come back to work out that shilling.
+
+But the main idea and chief figure of the piece constitute its interest
+for most people, and give it rank upon the whole with the most
+attractive productions of English fiction. I am not acquainted with any
+story in the language more adapted to strengthen in the heart what most
+needs help and encouragement, to sustain kindly and innocent impulses,
+and to awaken everywhere the sleeping germs of good. It includes
+necessarily much pain, much uninterrupted sadness; and yet the
+brightness and sunshine quite overtop the gloom. The humor is so
+benevolent; the view of errors that have no depravity of heart in them
+is so indulgent; the quiet courage under calamity, the purity that
+nothing impure can soil, are so full of tender teaching. Its effect as a
+mere piece of art, too, considering the circumstances in which I have
+shown it to be written, I think very noteworthy. It began with a plan
+for but a short half-dozen chapters; it grew into a full-proportioned
+story under the warmth of the feeling it had inspired its writer with;
+its very incidents created a necessity at first not seen; and it was
+carried to a close only contemplated after a full half of it had been
+written. Yet, from the opening of the tale to that undesigned
+ending,--from the image of little Nell asleep amid the quaint grotesque
+figures of the old curiosity warehouse to that other final sleep she
+takes among the grim forms and carvings of the old church aisle,--the
+main purpose seems to be always present. The characters and incidents
+that at first appear most foreign to it are found to have had with it a
+close relation. The hideous lumber and rottenness that surround the
+child in her grandfather's home take shape again in Quilp and his filthy
+gang. In the first still picture of Nell's innocence in the midst of
+strange and alien forms, we have the forecast of her after-wanderings,
+her patient miseries, her sad maturity of experience before its time.
+Without the show-people and their blended fictions and realities, their
+wax-works, dwarfs, giants, and performing dogs, the picture would have
+wanted some part of its significance. Nor could the genius of Hogarth
+himself have given it higher expression than in the scenes by the
+cottage door, the furnace-fire, and the burial-place of the old church,
+over whose tombs and gravestones hang the puppets of Mr. Punch's show
+while the exhibitors are mending and repairing them. And when, at last,
+Nell sits within the quiet old church where all her wanderings end, and
+gazes on those silent monumental groups of warriors,--helmets, swords,
+and gauntlets wasting away around them,--the associations among which
+her life had opened seem to have come crowding on the scene again, to be
+present at its close,--but stripped of their strangeness; deepened into
+solemn shapes by the suffering she has undergone; gently fusing every
+feeling of a life past into hopeful and familiar anticipation of a life
+to come; and already imperceptibly lifting her, without grief or pain,
+from the earth she loves, yet whose grosser paths her light steps only
+touched to show the track through them to heaven. This is genuine art,
+and such as all cannot fail to recognize who read the book in a right
+sympathy with the conception that pervades it. Nor, great as the
+discomfort was of reading it in brief weekly snatches, can I be wholly
+certain that the discomfort of so writing it involved nothing but
+disadvantage. With so much in every portion to do, and so little space
+to do it in, the opportunities to a writer for mere self-indulgence were
+necessarily rare.
+
+Of the innumerable tributes the story has received, and to none other by
+Dickens have more or more various been paid, there is one, the very
+last, which has much affected me. Not many months before my friend's
+death, he had sent me two _Overland Monthlies_ containing two sketches
+by a young American writer far away in California, "The Luck of Roaring
+Camp," and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," in which he had found such
+subtle strokes of character as he had not anywhere else in late years
+discovered; the manner resembling himself, but the matter fresh to a
+degree that had surprised him; the painting in all respects masterly,
+and the wild rude thing painted a quite wonderful reality. I have
+rarely known him more honestly moved. A few months passed;
+telegraph-wires flashed over the world that he had passed away on the
+9th of June; and the young writer of whom he had then written to me, all
+unconscious of that praise, put his tribute of gratefulness and sorrow
+into the form of a poem called _Dickens in Camp_.[30] It embodies the
+same kind of incident which had so affected the master himself, in the
+papers to which I have referred; it shows the gentler influences which,
+in even those Californian wilds, can restore outlawed "roaring camps" to
+silence and humanity; and there is hardly any form of posthumous tribute
+which I can imagine likely to have better satisfied his desire of fame
+than one which should thus connect, with the special favorite among all
+his heroines, the restraints and authority exerted by his genius over
+the rudest and least civilized of competitors in that far fierce race
+for wealth.
+
+ "Above the pines the moon was slowly drifting,
+ The river sang below;
+ The dim Sierras, far beyond, uplifting
+ Their minarets of snow:
+
+ "The roaring camp-fire, with rude humor, painted
+ The ruddy tints of health
+ On haggard face and form that drooped and fainted
+ In the fierce race for wealth;
+
+ "Till one arose, and from his pack's scant treasure
+ A hoarded volume drew,
+ And cards were dropped from hands of listless leisure
+ To hear the tale anew;
+
+ "And then, while round them shadows gathered faster,
+ And as the fire-light fell,
+ He read aloud the book wherein the Master
+ Had writ of 'Little Nell:'
+
+ "Perhaps 'twas boyish fancy,--for the reader
+ Was youngest of them all,--
+ But, as he read, from clustering pine and cedar
+ A silence seemed to fall;
+
+ "The fir-trees, gathering closer in the shadows,
+ Listened in every spray,
+ While the whole camp with 'Nell' on English meadows
+ Wandered and lost their way.
+
+ "And so in mountain solitudes--o'ertaken
+ As by some spell divine--
+ Their cares dropped from them like the needles shaken
+ From out the gusty pine.
+
+ "Lost is that camp, and wasted all its fire;
+ And he who wrought that spell?--
+ Ah, towering pine and stately Kentish spire,
+ Ye have one tale to tell!
+
+ "Lost is that camp! but let its fragrant story
+ Blend with the breath that thrills
+ With hop-vines' incense all the pensive glory
+ That fills the Kentish hills.
+
+ "And on that grave where English oak and holly
+ And laurel wreaths entwine,
+ Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly,--
+ This spray of Western pine!
+
+ "July, 1870."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[29] I have mentioned the fact in my _Life of Landor_; and to the
+passage I here add the comment made by Dickens when he read it: "It was
+at a celebration of his birthday in the first of his Bath lodgings, 35,
+St. James's Square, that the fancy which took the form of Little Nell in
+the _Curiosity Shop_ first dawned on the genius of its creator. No
+character in prose fiction was a greater favorite with Landor. He
+thought that, upon her, Juliet might for a moment have turned her eyes
+from Romeo, and that Desdemona might have taken her hair-breadth escapes
+to heart, so interesting and pathetic did she seem to him; and when,
+some years later, the circumstance I have named was recalled to him, he
+broke into one of those whimsical bursts of comical extravagance out of
+which arose the fancy of Boythorn. With tremendous emphasis he confirmed
+the fact, and added that he had never in his life regretted anything so
+much as his having failed to carry out an intention he had formed
+respecting it; for he meant to have purchased that house, 35, St.
+James's Square, and then and there to have burnt it to the ground, to
+the end that no meaner association should ever desecrate the birthplace
+of Nell. Then he would pause a little, become conscious of our sense of
+his absurdity, and break into a thundering peal of laughter." Dickens
+had himself proposed to tell this story as a contribution to my
+biography of our common friend, but his departure for America prevented
+him. "I see," he wrote to me, as soon as the published book reached him,
+"you have told, with what our friend would have called _won_-derful
+accuracy, the little St. James's Square story, which a certain faithless
+wretch was to have related."
+
+[30] _Poems._ By Bret Harte (Boston: Osgood & Co., 1871), pp. 32-35.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+DEVONSHIRE TERRACE AND BROADSTAIRS.
+
+1840.
+
+ A Good Saying--Landor mystified--The Mirthful
+ Side of Dickens--Extravagant Flights--Humorous
+ Despair--Riding Exercise--First of the
+ Ravens--The Groom Topping--The Smoky
+ Chimneys--Juryman at an Inquest--Practical
+ Humanity--Publication of _Clock's_ First
+ Number--Transfer of _Barnaby_ settled--A True
+ Prediction--Revisiting Old Scenes--C. D. to
+ Chapman & Hall--Terms of Sale of _Barnaby_--A
+ Gift to a Friend--Final Escape from
+ Bondage--Published Libels about him--Said to be
+ demented--To be insane and turned
+ Catholic--Begging Letter-Writers--A Donkey
+ asked for--Mr. Kindheart--Friendly
+ Meetings--Social Talk--Reconciling
+ Friends--Hint for judging Men.
+
+
+IT was an excellent saying of the first Lord Shaftesbury, that, seeing
+every man of any capacity holds within himself two men, the wise and the
+foolish, each of them ought freely to be allowed his turn; and it was
+one of the secrets of Dickens's social charm that he could, in strict
+accordance with this saying, allow each part of him its turn; could
+afford thoroughly to give rest and relief to what was serious in him,
+and, when the time came to play his gambols, could surrender himself
+wholly to the enjoyment of the time, and become the very genius and
+embodiment of one of his own most whimsical fancies.
+
+Turning back from the narrative of his last piece of writing to recall
+a few occurrences of the year during which it had occupied him, I find
+him at its opening in one of these humorous moods, and another friend,
+with myself, enslaved by its influence. "What on earth does it all
+mean?" wrote poor puzzled Mr. Landor to me, inclosing a letter from him
+of the date of the 11th of February, the day after the royal nuptials of
+that year. In this he had related to our old friend a wonderful
+hallucination arising out of that event, which had then taken entire
+possession of him. "Society is unhinged here," thus ran the letter, "by
+her majesty's marriage, and I am sorry to add that I have fallen
+hopelessly in love with the Queen, and wander up and down with vague and
+dismal thoughts of running away to some uninhabited island with a maid
+of honor, to be entrapped by conspiracy for that purpose. Can you
+suggest any particular young person, serving in such a capacity, who
+would suit me? It is too much perhaps to ask you to join the band of
+noble youths (Forster is in it, and Maclise) who are to assist me in
+this great enterprise, but a man of your energy would be invaluable. I
+have my eye upon Lady . . . , principally because she is very beautiful
+and has no strong brothers. Upon this, and other points of the scheme,
+however, we will confer more at large when we meet; and meanwhile burn
+this document, that no suspicion may arise or rumor get abroad."
+
+The maid of honor and the uninhabited island were flights of fancy, but
+the other daring delusion was for a time encouraged to such whimsical
+lengths, not alone by him, but (under his influence) by the two friends
+named, that it took the wildest forms of humorous extravagance; and of
+the private confidences much interchanged, as well as of the style of
+open speech in which our joke of despairing unfitness for any further
+use or enjoyment of life was unflaggingly kept up, to the amazement of
+bystanders knowing nothing of what it meant, and believing we had half
+lost our senses, I permit myself to give from his letters one further
+illustration. "I am utterly lost in misery," he writes to me on the 12th
+of February, "and can do nothing. I have been reading _Oliver_,
+_Pickwick_, and _Nickleby_ to get my thoughts together for the new
+effort, but all in vain:
+
+ "My heart is at Windsor,
+ My heart isn't here;
+ My heart is at Windsor.
+ A following my dear.
+
+I saw the Responsibilities this morning, and burst into tears. The
+presence of my wife aggravates me. I loathe my parents. I detest my
+house. I begin to have thoughts of the Serpentine, of the Regent's
+Canal, of the razors up-stairs, of the chemist's down the street, of
+poisoning myself at Mrs. ----'s table, of hanging myself upon the
+pear-tree in the garden, of abstaining from food and starving myself to
+death, of being bled for my cold and tearing off the bandage, of falling
+under the feet of cab-horses in the New Road, of murdering Chapman &
+Hall and becoming great in story (SHE must hear something of me
+then--perhaps sign the warrant: or is that a fable?), of turning
+Chartist, of heading some bloody assault upon the palace and saving Her
+by my single hand--of being anything but what I have been, and doing
+anything but what I have done. Your distracted friend, C. D." The wild
+derangement of asterisks in every shape and form, with which this
+incoherence closed, cannot here be given.
+
+Some ailments which dated from an earlier period in his life made
+themselves felt in the spring of the year, as I remember, and increased
+horse-exercise was strongly recommended to him. "I find it will be
+positively necessary to go, for five days in the week, at least," he
+wrote to me in March, "on a perfect regimen of diet and exercise, and am
+anxious therefore not to delay treating for a horse." We were now in
+consequence, when he was not at the sea-side, much on horseback in
+suburban lanes and roads; and the spacious garden of his new house was
+also turned to healthful use at even his busiest times of work. I mark
+this, too, as the time when the first of his ravens took up residence
+there; and as the beginning of disputes with two of his neighbors about
+the smoking of the stable-chimney, which his groom Topping, a highly
+absurd little man with flaming red hair, so complicated by secret
+devices of his own, meant to conciliate each complainant alternately and
+having the effect of aggravating both, that law-proceedings were only
+barely avoided. "I shall give you," he writes, "my latest report of the
+chimney in the form of an address from Topping, made to me on our way
+from little Hall's at Norwood the other night, where he and Chapman and
+I had been walking all day, while Topping drove Kate, Mrs. Hall, and her
+sisters, to Dulwich. Topping had been regaled upon the premises, and was
+just drunk enough to be confidential. 'Beggin' your pardon, sir, but the
+genelman next door sir, seems to be gettin' quite comfortable and
+pleasant about the chimley.'--'I don't think he is, Topping.'--'Yes he
+is sir I think. He comes out in the yard this morning and says,
+_Coachman_ he says' (observe the vision of a great large fat man called
+up by the word) _is that your raven_ he says, _Coachman? or is it Mr.
+Dickens's raven?_ he says. My master's sir, I says. Well, he says, It's
+a fine bird. _I think the chimley 'ill do now Coachman,--now the jint's
+taken off the pipe_ he says. I hope it will sir, I says; my master's a
+genelman as wouldn't annoy no genelman if he could help it, I'm sure;
+and my missis is so afraid of havin' a bit o' fire that o' Sundays our
+little bit o' weal or wot not, goes to the baker's a purpose.--_Damn the
+chimley, Coachman_, he says, _it's a smokin' now_.--It ain't a smokin'
+your way sir, I says; Well he says _no more it is, Coachman, and as long
+as it smokes anybody else's way, it's all right and I'm agreeable_.' Of
+course I shall now have the man from the other side upon me, and very
+likely with an action of nuisance for smoking into his conservatory."
+
+A graver incident, which occurred to him also among his earliest
+experiences as tenant of Devonshire Terrace, illustrates too well the
+always practical turn of his kindness and humanity not to deserve
+relation here. He has himself described it in one of his minor writings,
+in setting down what he remembered as the only good that ever came of a
+beadle. Of that great parish functionary, he says, "having newly taken
+the lease of a house in a certain distinguished metropolitan parish, a
+house which then appeared to me to be a frightfully first-class family
+mansion involving awful responsibilities, I became the prey." In other
+words, he was summoned, and obliged to sit, as juryman at an inquest on
+the body of a little child alleged to have been murdered by its mother;
+of which the result was, that, by his persevering exertion, seconded by
+the humane help of the coroner, Mr. Wakley, the verdict of himself and
+his fellow-jurymen charged her only with concealment of the birth. "The
+poor desolate creature dropped upon her knees before us with
+protestations that we were right (protestations among the most affecting
+that I have ever heard in my life), and was carried away insensible. I
+caused some extra care to be taken of her in the prison, and counsel to
+be retained for her defense when she was tried at the Old Bailey; and
+her sentence was lenient, and her history and conduct proved that it was
+right." How much he felt the little incident, at the actual time of its
+occurrence, may be judged from the few lines written to me next morning:
+"Whether it was the poor baby, or its poor mother, or the coffin, or my
+fellow-jurymen, or what not, I can't say, but last night I had a most
+violent attack of sickness and indigestion, which not only prevented me
+from sleeping, but even from lying down. Accordingly Kate and I sat up
+through the dreary watches."
+
+The day of the first publication of _Master Humphrey_ (Saturday, 4th
+April) had by this time come, and, according to the rule observed in his
+two other great ventures, he left town with Mrs. Dickens on Friday, the
+3d. With Maclise we had been together at Richmond the previous night;
+and I joined him at Birmingham the day following with news of the sale
+of the whole sixty thousand copies to which the first working had been
+limited, and of orders already in hand for ten thousand more! The
+excitement of the success somewhat lengthened our holiday; and, after
+visiting Shakspeare's house at Stratford and Johnson's at Lichfield, we
+found our resources so straitened in returning, that, employing as our
+messenger of need his younger brother Alfred, who had joined us from
+Tamworth, where he was a student-engineer, we had to pawn our gold
+watches at Birmingham.
+
+At the end of the following month he went to Broadstairs, and not many
+days before (on the 20th of May) a note from Mr. Jordan on behalf of Mr.
+Bentley opened the negotiations formerly referred to,[31] which
+transferred to Messrs. Chapman & Hall the agreement for _Barnaby Rudge_.
+I was myself absent when he left, and in a letter announcing his
+departure he had written, "I don't know of a word of news in all London,
+but there will be plenty next week, for I am going away, and I hope
+you'll send me an account of it. I am doubtful whether it will be a
+murder, a fire, a vast robbery, or the escape of Gould, but it will be
+something remarkable no doubt. I almost blame myself for the death of
+that poor girl who leaped off the monument upon my leaving town last
+year. She would not have done it if I had remained, neither would the
+two men have found the skeleton in the sewers." His prediction was quite
+accurate, for I had to tell him, after not many days, of the potboy who
+shot at the queen. "It's a great pity," he replied, very sensibly, "they
+couldn't suffocate that boy, Master Oxford, and say no more about it.
+To have put him quietly between two feather beds would have stopped his
+heroic speeches, and dulled the sound of his glory very much. As it is,
+she will have to run the gauntlet of many a fool and madman, some of
+whom may perchance be better shots and use other than Brummagem
+firearms." How much of this actually came to pass, the reader knows.
+
+From the letters of his present Broadstairs visit, there is little
+further to add to their account of his progress with his story; but a
+couple more lines may be given for their characteristic expression of
+his invariable habit upon entering any new abode, whether to stay in it
+for days or for years. On a Monday night he arrived, and on the Tuesday
+(2d of June) wrote to me, "_Before_ I tasted bit or drop yesterday, I
+set out my writing-table with extreme taste and neatness, and improved
+the disposition of the furniture generally." He stayed till the end of
+June; when Maclise and myself joined him for the pleasure of posting
+back home with him and Mrs. Dickens, by way of his favorite Chatham and
+Rochester and Cobham, where we passed two agreeable days in revisiting
+well-remembered scenes. I had meanwhile brought to a close the treaty
+for repurchase of _Oliver_ and surrender of _Barnaby_, upon terms which
+are succinctly stated in a letter written by him to Messrs. Chapman &
+Hall on the 2d of July, the day after our return:
+
+"The terms upon which you advance the money to-day for the purchase of
+the copyright and stock[32] of _Oliver_ on my behalf are understood
+between us to be these. That this 2250_l._ is to be deducted from the
+purchase-money of a work by me entitled _Barnaby Rudge_, of which two
+chapters are now in your hands, and of which the whole is to be written
+within some convenient time to be agreed upon between us. But if it
+should not be written (which God forbid!) within five years, you are to
+have a lien to this amount on the property belonging to me that is now
+in your hands, namely, my shares in the stock and copyright of _Sketches
+by Boz_, _The Pickwick Papers_, _Nicholas Nickleby_, _Oliver Twist_, and
+_Master Humphrey's Clock_; in which we do not include any share of the
+current profits of the last-named work, which I shall remain at liberty
+to draw at the times stated in our agreement. Your purchase of _Barnaby
+Rudge_ is made upon the following terms. It is to consist of matter
+sufficient for ten monthly numbers of the size of _Pickwick_ and
+_Nickleby_, which you are, however, at liberty to divide and publish in
+fifteen smaller numbers if you think fit. The terms for the purchase of
+this edition in numbers, and for the copyright of the whole book for six
+months after the publication of the last number, are 3000_l._ At the
+expiration of the six months the whole copyright reverts to me." The
+sequel was, as all the world knows, that Barnaby became successor to
+Little Nell, the money being repaid by the profits of the _Clock_; but I
+ought to mention also the more generous sequel that my own small
+service had, on my receiving from him, after not many days, an antique
+silver-mounted jug of great beauty of form and workmanship, but with a
+wealth far beyond jeweler's chasing or artist's design in the written
+words that accompanied it.[33] I accepted them to commemorate, not the
+help they would have far overpaid, but the gladness of his own escape
+from the last of the agreements that had hampered the opening of his
+career, and the better future that was now before him.
+
+At the opening of August he was with Mrs. Dickens for some days in
+Devonshire, on a visit to his father, but he had to take his work with
+him; and, as he wrote to me, they had only one real holiday, when
+Dawlish, Teignmouth, Babbicombe, and Torquay were explored, returning to
+Exeter at night. In the beginning of September he was again at
+Broadstairs.
+
+"I was just going to work," he wrote on the 9th, "when I got this
+letter, and the story of the man who went to Chapman & Hall's knocked
+me down flat. I wrote until now (a quarter to one) against the grain,
+and have at last given it up for one day. Upon my word it is
+intolerable. I have been grinding my teeth all the morning. I think I
+could say in two lines something about the general report with
+propriety. I'll add them to the proof" (the preface to the first volume
+of the _Clock_ was at this time in preparation), "giving you full power
+to cut them out if you should think differently from me, and from C. and
+H., who in such a matter must be admitted judges." He refers here to a
+report, rather extensively circulated at the time, and which through
+various channels had reached his publishers, that he was suffering from
+loss of reason and was under treatment in an asylum.[34] I would have
+withheld from him the mention of it, as an absurdity that must quickly
+pass away, but against my wish it had been communicated to him, and I
+had difficulty in keeping within judicious bounds his extreme and very
+natural wrath.
+
+A few days later (the 15th) he wrote, "I have been rather surprised of
+late to have applications from Roman Catholic clergymen, demanding
+(rather pastorally, and with a kind of grave authority) assistance,
+literary employment, and so forth. At length it struck me that, through
+some channel or other, I must have been represented as belonging to that
+religion. Would you believe that in a letter from Lamert, at Cork, to my
+mother, which I saw last night, he says, 'What do the papers mean by
+saying that Charles is demented, and, further, _that he has turned Roman
+Catholic_?'--!" Of the begging-letter-writers, hinted at here, I ought
+earlier to have said something. In one of his detached essays he has
+described, without a particle of exaggeration, the extent to which he
+was made a victim by this class of swindler, and the extravagance of the
+devices practiced on him; but he has not confessed, as he might, that
+for much of what he suffered he was himself responsible, by giving so
+largely, as at first he did, to almost every one who applied to him.
+What at last brought him to his senses in this respect, I think, was the
+request made by the adventurer who had exhausted every other expedient,
+and who desired finally, after describing himself reduced to the
+condition of a traveling Cheap Jack in the smallest way of crockery,
+that a donkey might be left out for him next day, which he would duly
+call for. This I perfectly remember, and I much fear that the applicant
+was the Daniel Tobin before mentioned.[35]
+
+Many and delightful were other letters written from Broadstairs at this
+date, filled with whimsical talk and humorous description relating
+chiefly to an eccentric friend who stayed with him most of the time,
+and is sketched in one of his published papers as Mr. Kindheart; but all
+too private for reproduction now. He returned in the middle of October,
+when we resumed our almost daily ridings, foregatherings with Maclise at
+Hampstead and elsewhere, and social entertainments with Macready,
+Talfourd, Procter, Stanfield, Fonblanque, Elliotson, Tennent, D'Orsay,
+Quin, Harness, Wilkie, Edwin Landseer, Rogers, Sydney Smith, and Bulwer.
+Of the genius of the author of _Pelham_ and _Eugene Aram_ he had, early
+and late, the highest admiration, and he took occasion to express it
+during the present year in a new preface which he published to _Oliver
+Twist_. Other friends became familiar in later years; but, disinclined
+as he was to the dinner-invitations that reached him from every quarter,
+all such meetings with those whom I have named, and in an especial
+manner the marked attentions shown him by Miss Coutts which began with
+the very beginning of his career, were invariably welcome.
+
+To speak here of the pleasure his society afforded, would anticipate the
+fitter mention to be made hereafter. But what in this respect
+distinguishes nearly all original men, he possessed eminently. His place
+was not to be filled up by any other. To the most trivial talk he gave
+the attraction of his own character. It might be a small
+matter,--something he had read or observed during the day, some quaint
+odd fancy from a book, a vivid little out-door picture, the laughing
+exposure of some imposture, or a burst of sheer mirthful enjoyment,--but
+of its kind it would be something unique, because genuinely part of
+himself. This, and his unwearying animal spirits, made him the most
+delightful of companions; no claim on good-fellowship ever found him
+wanting; and no one so constantly recalled to his friends the
+description Johnson gave of Garrick, as the cheerfulest man of his age.
+
+Of what occupied him in the way of literary labor in the autumn and
+winter months of the year, some description has been given; and, apart
+from what has already thus been said of his work at the closing chapters
+of _The Old Curiosity Shop_, nothing now calls for more special
+allusion, except that in his town-walks in November, impelled thereto by
+specimens recently discovered in his country-walks between Broadstairs
+and Ramsgate, he thoroughly explored the ballad literature of
+Seven-Dials, and took to singing himself, with an effect that justified
+his reputation for comic singing in his childhood, not a few of these
+wonderful productions. His last successful labor of the year was the
+reconciliation of two friends; and his motive, as well as the principle
+that guided him, as they are described by himself, I think worth
+preserving. For the first: "In the midst of this child's death, I, over
+whom something of the bitterness of death has passed, not lightly
+perhaps, was reminded of many old kindnesses, and was sorry in my heart
+that men who really liked each other should waste life at arm's length."
+For the last: "I have laid it down as a rule in my judgment of men, to
+observe narrowly whether some (of whom one is disposed to think badly)
+don't carry all their faults upon the surface, and others (of whom one
+is disposed to think well) don't carry many more beneath it. I have long
+ago made sure that our friend is in the first class; and when I know
+all the foibles a man has, with little trouble in the discovery, I begin
+to think he is worth liking." His latest letter of the year, dated the
+day following, closed with the hope that we might, he and I, enjoy
+together "fifty more Christmases, at least, in this world, and eternal
+summers in another." Alas!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[31] See _ante_, p. 163.
+
+[32] By way of a novelty to help off the stock, he had suggested (17th
+June), "Would it not be best to print new title-pages to the copies
+sheets and publish them as a new edition, with an interesting Preface? I
+am talking about all this as though the treaty were concluded, but I
+hope and trust that in effect it is, for negotiation and delay are worse
+to me than drawn daggers." See my remark _ante_, p. 123.
+
+[33] "Accept from me" (July 8, 1840), "as a slight memorial of your
+attached companion, the poor keepsake which accompanies this. My heart
+is not an eloquent one on matters which touch it most, but suppose this
+claret-jug the urn in which it lies, and believe that its warmest and
+truest blood is yours. This was the object of my fruitless search, and
+your curiosity, on Friday. At first I scarcely knew what trifle (you
+will deem it valuable, I know, for the giver's sake) to send you; but I
+thought it would be pleasant to connect it with our jovial moments, and
+to let it add, to the wine we shall drink from it together, a flavor
+which the choicest vintage could never impart. Take it from my
+hand,--filled to the brim and running over with truth and earnestness. I
+have just taken one parting look at it, and it seems the most elegant
+thing in the world to me, for I lose sight of the vase in the crowd of
+welcome associations that are clustering and wreathing themselves about
+it."
+
+[34] Already he had been the subject of similar reports on the occasion
+of the family sorrow which compelled him to suspend the publication of
+_Pickwick_ for two months (_ante_, p. 120), when, upon issuing a brief
+address in resuming his work (30th June, 1837), he said, "By one set of
+intimate acquaintances, especially well informed, he has been killed
+outright; by another, driven mad; by a third, imprisoned for debt; by a
+fourth, sent per steamer to the United States; by a fifth, rendered
+incapable of mental exertion for evermore; by all, in short, represented
+as doing anything but seeking in a few weeks' retirement the restoration
+of that cheerfulness and peace of which a sad bereavement had
+temporarily deprived him."
+
+[35] See _ante_, p. 81.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+BARNABY RUDGE.
+
+1841.
+
+ Advantage in beginning _Barnaby_--Birth of
+ Fourth Child and Second Son--The Raven--A Loss
+ in the Family--Grip's Death--C. D. describes
+ his Illness--Family Mourners--Apotheosis by
+ Maclise--Grip the Second--The Inn at
+ Chigwell--A _Clock_ Dinner--Lord Jeffrey in
+ London--The _Lamplighter_--The _Pic Nic
+ Papers_--Character of Lord George Gordon--A
+ Doubtful Fancy--Interest in New
+ Labor--Constraints of Weekly Publication--The
+ Prison-Riots--A Serious Illness--Close of
+ _Barnaby_--Character of the Tale--Defects in
+ the Plot--The No-Popery Riots--Descriptive
+ Power displayed--Leading Persons in Story--Mr.
+ Dennis the Hangman.
+
+
+THE letters of 1841 yield similar fruit as to his doings and sayings,
+and may in like manner first be consulted for the literary work he had
+in hand.
+
+He had the advantage of beginning _Barnaby Rudge_ with a fair amount of
+story in advance, which he had only to make suitable, by occasional
+readjustment of chapters, to publication in weekly portions; and on this
+he was engaged before the end of January. "I am at present" (22d
+January, 1841) "in what Leigh Hunt would call a kind of impossible
+state,--thinking what on earth Master Humphrey can think of through four
+mortal pages. I added, here and there, to the last chapter of the
+_Curiosity Shop_ yesterday, and it leaves me only four pages to write."
+(They were filled by a paper from Humphrey introductory of the new
+tale, in which will be found a striking picture of London from midnight
+to the break of day.) "I also made up, and wrote the needful insertions
+for, the second number of _Barnaby_,--so that I came back to the mill a
+little." Hardly yet; for after four days he writes, having meanwhile
+done nothing, "I have been looking (three o'clock) with an appearance of
+extraordinary interest and study at _one leaf_ of the _Curiosities of
+Literature_ ever since half-past ten this morning--I haven't the heart
+to turn over." Then on Friday the 29th better news came. "I didn't stir
+out yesterday, but sat and _thought_ all day; not writing a line; not so
+much as the cross of a t or dot of an i. I imaged forth a good deal of
+_Barnaby_ by keeping my mind steadily upon him; and am happy to say I
+have gone to work this morning in good twig, strong hope, and cheerful
+spirits. Last night I was unutterably and impossible-to-form-an-idea-of-ably
+miserable. . . . By-the-by, don't engage yourself otherwise than to me
+for Sunday week, because it's my birthday. I have no doubt we shall have
+got over our troubles here by that time, and I purpose having a snug
+dinner in the study." We had the dinner, though the troubles were not
+over; but the next day another son was born to him. "Thank God," he
+wrote on the 9th, "quite well. I am thinking hard, and have just written
+to Browne inquiring when he will come and confer about the raven." He
+had by this time resolved to make that bird, whose accomplishments had
+been daily ripening and enlarging for the last twelve months to the
+increasing mirth and delight of all of us, a prominent figure in
+_Barnaby_; and the invitation to the artist was for a conference how
+best to introduce him graphically.
+
+The next letter mentioning _Barnaby_ was from Brighton (25th February),
+whither he had flown for a week's quiet labor: "I have (it's four
+o'clock) done a very fair morning's work, at which I have sat very
+close, and been blessed besides with a clear view of the end of the
+volume. As the contents of one number usually require a day's thought at
+the very least, and often more, this puts me in great spirits. I
+think--that is, I hope--the story takes a great stride at this point,
+and takes it WELL. Nous verrons. Grip will be strong, and I build
+greatly on the Varden household."
+
+Upon his return he had to lament a domestic calamity, which, for its
+connection with that famous personage in _Barnaby_, must be mentioned
+here. The raven had for some days been ailing, and Topping had reported
+of him, as Shakspeare of Hamlet, that he had lost his mirth and foregone
+all customary exercises; but Dickens paid no great heed, remembering his
+recovery from an illness of the previous summer when he swallowed some
+white paint; so that the graver report which led him to send for the
+doctor came upon him unexpectedly, and nothing but his own language can
+worthily describe the result. Unable from the state of his feelings to
+write two letters, he sent the narrative to Maclise, under an enormous
+black seal, for transmission to me; and thus it befell that this
+fortunate bird receives a double passport to fame, so great a humorist
+having celebrated his farewell to the present world, and so great a
+painter his welcome to another.
+
+"You will be greatly shocked" (the letter is dated Friday evening,
+March 12, 1841) "and grieved to hear that the Raven is no more. He
+expired to-day at a few minutes after twelve o'clock at noon. He had
+been ailing for a few days, but we anticipated no serious result,
+conjecturing that a portion of the white paint he swallowed last summer
+might be lingering about his vitals without having any serious effect
+upon his constitution. Yesterday afternoon he was taken so much worse
+that I sent an express for the medical gentleman (Mr. Herring), who
+promptly attended, and administered a powerful dose of castor oil. Under
+the influence of this medicine, he recovered so far as to be able at
+eight o'clock P.M. to bite Topping. His night was peaceful. This morning
+at daybreak he appeared better; received (agreeably to the doctor's
+directions) another dose of castor oil; and partook plentifully of some
+warm gruel, the flavor of which he appeared to relish. Towards eleven
+o'clock he was so much worse that it was found necessary to muffle the
+stable-knocker. At half-past, or thereabouts, he was heard talking to
+himself about the horse and Topping's family, and to add some incoherent
+expressions which are supposed to have been either a foreboding of his
+approaching dissolution, or some wishes relative to the disposal of his
+little property: consisting chiefly of half-pence which he had buried in
+different parts of the garden. On the clock striking twelve he appeared
+slightly agitated, but he soon recovered, walked twice or thrice along
+the coach-house, stopped to bark, staggered, exclaimed _Halloa old
+girl!_ (his favorite expression), and died.
+
+"He behaved throughout with a decent fortitude, equanimity, and
+self-possession, which cannot be too much admired. I deeply regret that
+being in ignorance of his danger I did not attend to receive his last
+instructions. Something remarkable about his eyes occasioned Topping to
+run for the doctor at twelve. When they returned together our friend was
+gone. It was the medical gentleman who informed me of his decease. He
+did it with great caution and delicacy, preparing me by the remark that
+'a jolly queer start had taken place;' but the shock was very great
+notwithstanding. I am not wholly free from suspicions of poison. A
+malicious butcher has been heard to say that he would 'do' for him: his
+plea was that he would not be molested in taking orders down the mews,
+by any bird that wore a tail. Other persons have also been heard to
+threaten: among others, Charles Knight, who has just started a weekly
+publication price fourpence: _Barnaby_ being, as you know, threepence. I
+have directed a post-mortem examination, and the body has been removed
+to Mr. Herring's school of anatomy for that purpose.
+
+"I could wish, if you can take the trouble, that you could inclose this
+to Forster immediately after you have read it. I cannot discharge the
+painful task of communication more than once. Were they ravens who took
+manna to somebody in the wilderness? At times I hope they were, and at
+others I fear they were not, or they would certainly have stolen it by
+the way. In profound sorrow, I am ever your bereaved friend C. D. Kate
+is as well as can be expected, but terribly low, as you may suppose. The
+children seem rather glad of it. He bit their ankles. But that was
+play."
+
+[Illustration: [Sideways text: apotheosis] My dear Forster
+
+Dickens desires me transmit to you the enclosed announcement of the
+Raven's decease - which took place in Devonshire Terrace
+
+March 1841
+
+HIC DM]
+
+Maclise's covering letter was an apotheosis, to be rendered only in
+fac-simile.
+
+In what way the loss was replaced, so that _Barnaby_ should have the
+fruit of continued study of the habits of the family of birds which Grip
+had so nobly represented, Dickens has told in the preface to the story;
+and another, older, and larger Grip, obtained through Mr. Smithson, was
+installed in the stable, almost before the stuffed remains of his
+honored predecessor had been sent home in a glass case, by way of
+ornament to his master's study.
+
+I resume our correspondence on what he was writing: "I see there is yet
+room for a few lines" (25th March), "and you are quite right in wishing
+what I cut out to be restored. I did not want Joe to be so short about
+Dolly, and really wrote his references to that young lady carefully,--as
+natural things with a meaning in them. Chigwell, my dear fellow, is the
+greatest place in the world. Name your day for going. Such a delicious
+old inn opposite the churchyard,--such a lovely ride,--such beautiful
+forest scenery,--such an out-of-the-way, rural place,--such a sexton! I
+say again, name your day." The day was named at once; and the whitest of
+stones marks it, in now sorrowful memory. His promise was exceeded by
+our enjoyment; and his delight in the double recognition, of himself and
+of _Barnaby_, by the landlord of the nice old inn, far exceeded any
+pride he would have taken in what the world thinks the highest sort of
+honor.
+
+"I have shut myself up" (26th March) "by myself to-day, and mean to try
+and 'go it' at the _Clock_; Kate being out, and the house peacefully
+dismal. I don't remember altering the exact part you object to, but if
+there be anything here you object to, knock it out ruthlessly." "Don't
+fail" (April the 5th) "to erase anything that seems to you too strong.
+It is difficult for me to judge what tells too much, and what does not.
+I am trying a very quiet number to set against this necessary one. I
+hope it will be good, but I am in very sad condition for work. Glad you
+think this powerful. What I have put in is more relief, from the raven."
+Two days later: "I have done that number, and am now going to work on
+another. I am bent (please Heaven) on finishing the first chapter by
+Friday night. I hope to look in upon you to-night, when we'll dispose of
+the toasts for Saturday. Still bilious--but a good number, I hope,
+notwithstanding. Jeffrey has come to town, and was here yesterday." The
+toasts to be disposed of were those to be given at the dinner on the
+10th to celebrate the second volume of _Master Humphrey_: when Talfourd
+presided, when there was much jollity, and, according to the memorandum
+drawn up that Saturday night now lying before me, we all in the greatest
+good humor glorified each other: Talfourd proposing the _Clock_,
+Macready Mrs. Dickens, Dickens the publishers, and myself the artists;
+Macready giving Talfourd, Talfourd Macready, Dickens myself, and myself
+the comedian Mr. Harley, whose humorous songs had been the not least
+considerable element in the mirth of the evening.
+
+Five days later he writes, "I finished the number yesterday, and,
+although I dined with Jeffrey, and was obliged to go to Lord Denman's
+afterwards (which made me late), have done eight slips of the
+_Lamplighter_ for Mrs. Macrone, this morning. When I have got that off
+my mind, I shall try to go on steadily, fetching up the _Clock_
+lee-way." The _Lamplighter_ was his old farce,[36] which he now turned
+into a comic tale; and this, with other contributions given him by
+friends and edited by him as _Pic Nic Papers_, enabled him to help the
+widow of his old publisher in her straitened means by a gift of L300. He
+had finished his work of charity before he next wrote of _Barnaby
+Rudge_, but he was fetching up his lee-way lazily. "I am getting on"
+(29th of April) "very slowly. I want to stick to the story; and the fear
+of committing myself, because of the impossibility of trying back or
+altering a syllable, makes it much harder than it looks. It was too bad
+of me to give you the trouble of cutting the number, but I knew so well
+you would do it in the right places. For what Harley would call the
+'onward work' I really think I have some famous thoughts." There is an
+interval of a month before the next allusion: "Solomon's expression" (3d
+of June) "I meant to be one of those strong ones to which strong
+circumstances give birth in the commonest minds. Deal with it as you
+like. . . . Say what you please of Gordon" (I had objected to some points
+in his view of this madman, stated much too favorably as I thought), "he
+must have been at heart a kind man, and a lover of the despised and
+rejected, after his own fashion. He lived upon a small income, and
+always within it; was known to relieve the necessities of many people;
+exposed in his place the corrupt attempt of a minister to buy him out
+of Parliament; and did great charities in Newgate. He always spoke on
+the people's side, and tried against his muddled brains to expose the
+profligacy of both parties. He never got anything by his madness, and
+never sought it. The wildest and most raging attacks of the time allow
+him these merits: and not to let him have 'em in their full extent,
+remembering in what a (politically) wicked time he lived, would lie upon
+my conscience heavily. The libel he was imprisoned for when he died, was
+on the Queen of France; and the French government interested themselves
+warmly to procure his release,--which I think they might have done, but
+for Lord Grenville." I was more successful in the counsel I gave against
+a fancy he had at this part of the story, that he would introduce as
+actors in the Gordon riots three splendid fellows who should order,
+lead, control, and be obeyed as natural guides of the crowd in that
+delirious time, and who should turn out, when all was over, to have
+broken out from Bedlam; but, though he saw the unsoundness of this, he
+could not so readily see, in Gordon's case, the danger of taxing
+ingenuity to ascribe a reasonable motive to acts of sheer insanity. The
+feeblest parts of the book are those in which Lord George and his
+secretary appear.
+
+He left for Scotland after the middle of June, but he took work with
+him. "You may suppose," he wrote from Edinburgh on the 30th, "I have not
+done much work; but by Friday night's post from here I hope to send the
+first long chapter of a number and both the illustrations; from Loch
+Earn on Tuesday night, the closing chapter of that number; from the same
+place on Thursday night, the first long chapter of another, with both
+the illustrations; and, from some place which no man ever spelt but
+which sounds like Ballyhoolish, on Saturday, the closing chapter of that
+number, which will leave us all safe till I return to town." Nine days
+later he wrote from "Ballechelish," "I have done all I can or need do in
+the way of _Barnaby_ until I come home, and the story is progressing (I
+hope you will think) to good strong interest. I have left it, I think,
+at an exciting point, with a good dawning of the riots. In the first of
+the two numbers I have written since I have been away, I forget whether
+the blind man, in speaking to Barnaby about riches, tells him they are
+to be found in _crowds_. If I have not actually used that word, will you
+introduce it? A perusal of the proof of the following number (70) will
+show you how, and why." "Have you," he wrote shortly after his return
+(29th July), "seen No. 71? I thought there was a good glimpse of a
+crowd, from a window--eh?" He had now taken thoroughly to the interest
+of his closing chapters, and felt more than ever the constraints of his
+form of publication. "I am warming up very much" (on the 5th August from
+Broadstairs) "about _Barnaby_. Oh! if I only had him, from this time to
+the end, in monthly numbers. _N'importe!_ I hope the interest will be
+pretty strong,--and, in every number, stronger." Six days later, from
+the same place: "I was always sure I could make a good thing of
+_Barnaby_, and I think you'll find that it comes out strong to the last
+word. I have another number ready, all but two slips. Don't fear for
+young Chester. The time hasn't come----there we go again, you see, with
+the weekly delays. I am in great heart and spirits with the story, and
+with the prospect of having time to think before I go on again." A
+month's interval followed, and what occupied it will be described
+shortly. On the 11th September he wrote, "I have just burnt into
+Newgate, and am going in the next number to tear the prisoners out by
+the hair of their heads. The number which gets into the jail you'll have
+in proof by Tuesday." This was followed up a week later: "I have let all
+the prisoners out of Newgate, burnt down Lord Mansfield's, and played
+the very devil. Another number will finish the fires, and help us on
+towards the end. I feel quite smoky when I am at work. I want elbow-room
+terribly." To this trouble, graver supervened at his return, a serious
+personal sickness not the least; but he bore up gallantly, and I had
+never better occasion than now to observe his quiet endurance of pain,
+how little he thought of himself where the sense of self is commonly
+supreme, and the manful duty with which everything was done that, ailing
+as he was, he felt it necessary to do. He was still in his sick-room
+(22d October) when he wrote, "I hope I sha'n't leave off any more, now,
+until I have finished _Barnaby_." Three days after that, he was busying
+himself eagerly for others; and on the 2d of November the printers
+received the close of _Barnaby Rudge_.
+
+This tale was Dickens's first attempt out of the sphere of the life of
+the day and its actual manners. Begun during the progress of _Oliver
+Twist_, it had been for some time laid aside; the form it ultimately
+took had been comprised only partially within its first design; and the
+story in its finished shape presented strongly a special purpose, the
+characteristic of all but his very earliest writings. Its scene is laid
+at the time when the incessant execution of men and women, comparatively
+innocent, disgraced every part of the country; demoralizing thousands,
+whom it also prepared for the scaffold. In those days the theft of a few
+rags from a bleaching-ground, or the abstraction of a roll of ribbons
+from a counter, was visited with the penalty of blood; and such laws
+brutalized both their ministers and victims. It was the time, too, when
+a false religious outcry brought with it appalling guilt and misery.
+These are vices that leave more behind them than the first forms
+assumed, and they involve a lesson sufficiently required to justify a
+writer in dealing with them. There were also others grafted on them. In
+Barnaby himself it was desired to show what sources of comfort there
+might be, for the patient and cheerful heart, in even the worst of all
+human afflictions; and in the hunted life of his outcast father, whose
+crime had entailed not that affliction only but other more fearful
+wretchedness, we have as powerful a picture as any in his writings of
+the inevitable and unfathomable consequences of sin. But, as the story
+went on, it was incident to these designs that what had been
+accomplished in its predecessor could hardly be attained here, in
+singleness of purpose, unity of idea, or harmony of treatment; and other
+defects supervened in the management of the plot. The interest with
+which the tale begins has ceased to be its interest before the close;
+and what has chiefly taken the reader's fancy at the outset almost
+wholly disappears in the power and passion with which, in the later
+chapters, the great riots are described. So admirable is this
+description, however, that it would be hard to have to surrender it
+even for a more perfect structure of fable.
+
+There are few things more masterly in any of his books. From the first
+low mutterings of the storm to its last terrible explosion, this frantic
+outbreak of popular ignorance and rage is depicted with unabated power.
+The aimlessness of idle mischief by which the ranks of the rioters are
+swelled at the beginning; the recklessness induced by the monstrous
+impunity allowed to the early excesses; the sudden spread of this
+drunken guilt into every haunt of poverty, ignorance, or mischief in the
+wicked old city, where the rich materials of crime lie festering; the
+wild action of its poison on all, without scheme or plan of any kind,
+who come within its reach; the horrors that are more bewildering for
+this complete absence of purpose in them; and, when all is done, the
+misery found to have been self-inflicted in every cranny and corner of
+London, as if a plague had swept over the streets: these are features in
+the picture of an actual occurrence, to which the manner of the
+treatment gives extraordinary force and meaning. Nor, in the sequel, is
+there anything displayed with more profitable vividness than the law's
+indiscriminate cruelty at last, in contrast with its cowardly
+indifference at first; while, among the casual touches lighting up the
+scene with flashes of reality that illumine every part of it, may be
+instanced the discovery, in the quarter from which screams for succor
+are loudest when Newgate is supposed to be accidentally on fire, of four
+men who were certain in any case to have perished on the drop next day.
+
+The story, which has unusually careful writing in it, and much manly
+upright thinking, has not so many people eagerly adopted as of kin by
+everybody, as its predecessors are famous for; but it has yet a fair
+proportion of such as take solid form within the mind and keep hold of
+the memory. To these belong in an especial degree Gabriel Varden and his
+household, on whom are lavished all the writer's fondness and not a
+little of his keenest humor. The honest locksmith with his jovial jug,
+and the tink-tink-tink of his pleasant nature making cheerful music out
+of steel and iron; the buxom wife, with her plaguy tongue that makes
+every one wretched whom her kindly disposition would desire to make
+happy; the good-hearted plump little Dolly, coquettish minx of a
+daughter, with all she suffers and inflicts by her fickle winning ways
+and her small self-admiring vanities; and Miggs the vicious and
+slippery, acid, amatory, and of uncomfortable figure, sower of family
+discontents and discords, who swears all the while she wouldn't make or
+meddle with 'em "not for a annual gold-mine and found in tea and sugar:"
+there is not much social painting anywhere with a better domestic moral
+than in all these; and a nice propriety of feeling and thought regulates
+the use of such satire throughout. No one knows more exactly how far to
+go with that formidable weapon, or understands better that what
+satirizes everything, in effect satirizes nothing.
+
+Another excellent group is that which the story opens with, in the
+quaint old kitchen of the Maypole; John Willett and his friends,
+genuinely comic creations all of them. Then we have Barnaby and his
+raven: the light-hearted idiot, as unconscious of guilt as of
+suffering, and happy with no sense but of the influences of nature; and
+the grave sly bird, with sufficient sense to make himself as unhappy as
+rascally habits will make the human animal. There is poor brutish Hugh,
+too, loitering lazily outside the Maypole door, with a storm of passions
+in him raging to be let loose; already the scaffold's withered fruit, as
+he is doomed to be its ripe offering; and though with all the worst
+instincts of the savage, yet not without also some of the best. Still
+farther out of kindly nature's pitying reach lurks the worst villain of
+the scene: with this sole claim to consideration, that it was by
+constant contact with the filthiest instrument of law and state he had
+become the mass of moral filth he is. Mr. Dennis the hangman is a
+portrait that Hogarth would have painted with the same wholesome
+severity of satire which is employed upon it in _Barnaby Rudge_.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[36] See _ante_, pp. 125 and 183.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+PUBLIC DINNER IN EDINBURGH.
+
+1841.
+
+ His Son Walter Landor--Dies in Calcutta
+ (1863)--C. D. and the New Poor-Law--Moore and
+ Rogers--Jeffrey's Praise of Little
+ Nell--Resolve to visit Scotland--Edinburgh
+ Dinner proposed--Sir David Wilkie's
+ Death--Peter Robertson--Professor Wilson--A
+ Fancy of Scott--Lionization made
+ tolerable--Thoughts of Home--The Dinner and
+ Speeches--His Reception--Wilson's Eulogy--Home
+ Yearnings--Freedom of City voted to
+ him--Speakers at the Dinner--Politics and Party
+ Influences--Whig Jealousies--At the
+ Theatre--Hospitalities--Moral of it
+ all--Proposed Visit to the Highlands--Maclise
+ and Macready--Guide to the Highlands--Mr. Angus
+ Fletcher (Kindheart).
+
+
+AMONG the occurrences of the year, apart from the tale he was writing,
+the birth of his fourth child and second son has been briefly mentioned.
+"I mean to call the boy Edgar," he wrote, the day after he was born (9th
+February), "a good honest Saxon name, I think." He changed his mind in a
+few days, however, on resolving to ask Landor to be godfather. This
+intention, as soon as formed, he announced to our excellent old friend,
+telling him it would give the child something to boast of, to be called
+Walter Landor, and that to call him so would do his own heart good. For,
+as to himself, whatever realities had gone out of the ceremony of
+christening, the meaning still remained in it of enabling him to form a
+relationship with friends he most loved; and as to the boy, he held that
+to give him a name to be proud of was to give him also another reason
+for doing nothing unworthy or untrue when he came to be a man. Walter,
+alas! only lived to manhood. He obtained a military cadetship through
+the kindness of Miss Coutts, and died at Calcutta on the last day of
+1863, in his twenty-third year.
+
+The interest taken by this distinguished lady in him and in his had
+begun, as I have said, at an earlier date than even this; and I
+remember, while _Oliver Twist_ was going on, his pleasure because of her
+father's mention of him in a speech at Birmingham, for his advocacy of
+the cause of the poor. Whether to the new poor-law Sir Francis Burdett
+objected as strongly as we have seen that Dickens did, as well as many
+other excellent men, who forgot the atrocities of the system it
+displaced in their indignation at the needless and cruel harshness with
+which it was worked at the outset, I have not at hand the means of
+knowing. But certainly this continued to be strongly the feeling of
+Dickens, who exulted in nothing so much as at any misadventure to the
+Whigs in connection with it. "How often used Black and I," he wrote to
+me in April, "to quarrel about the effect of the poor-law bill! Walter
+comes in upon the cry. See whether the Whigs go out upon it." It was the
+strong desire he had to make himself heard upon it, even in Parliament,
+that led him not immediately to turn aside from a proposal, now
+privately made by some of the magnates of Reading, to bring him in for
+that borough; but the notion was soon dismissed, as, on its revival
+more than once in later times, it continued very wisely to be. His
+opinions otherwise were extremely radical at present, as will be
+apparent shortly; and he did not at all relish Peel's majority of one
+when it came soon after, and unseated the Whigs. It was just now, I may
+add, he greatly enjoyed a quiet setting-down of Moore by Rogers at Sir
+Francis Burdett's table, for talking exaggerated toryism. So debased was
+the House of Commons by reform, said Moore, that a Burke, if you could
+find him, would not be listened to. "No such thing, Tommy," said Rogers;
+"_find yourself_, and they'd listen even to you."
+
+This was not many days before he hinted to me an intention soon to be
+carried out in a rather memorable manner: "I have done nothing to-day"
+(18th March: we had bought books together, the day before, at Tom Hill's
+sale) "but cut the _Swift_, looking into it with a delicious laziness in
+all manner of delightful places, and put poor Tom's books away. I had a
+letter from Edinburgh this morning, announcing that Jeffrey's visit to
+London will be the week after next; telling me that he drives about
+Edinburgh declaring there has been 'nothing so good as Nell since
+Cordelia,' which he writes also to all manner of people; and informing
+me of a desire in that romantic town to give me greeting and welcome.
+For this and other reasons I am disposed to make Scotland my destination
+in June rather than Ireland. Think, _do_ think, meantime (here are ten
+good weeks), whether you couldn't, by some effort worthy of the owner of
+the gigantic helmet, go with us. Think of such a fortnight,--York,
+Carlisle, Berwick, your own Borders, Edinburgh, Rob Roy's country,
+railroads, cathedrals, country inns, Arthur's Seat, lochs, glens, and
+home by sea. DO think of this, seriously, at leisure." It was very
+tempting, but not to be.
+
+Early in April Jeffrey came, many feasts and entertainments welcoming
+him, of which he very sparingly partook; and before he left, the visit
+to Scotland in June was all duly arranged, to be initiated by the
+splendid welcome of a public dinner in Edinburgh, with Lord Jeffrey
+himself in the chair. Allan the painter had come up meanwhile, with
+increasing note of preparation; and it was while we were all regretting
+Wilkie's absence abroad, and Dickens with warrantable pride was saying
+how surely the great painter would have gone to this dinner, that the
+shock of his sudden death[37] came, and there was left but the sorrowful
+satisfaction of honoring his memory. There was one other change before
+the day. "I heard from Edinburgh this morning," he wrote on the 15th of
+June. "Jeffrey is not well enough to take the chair, so Wilson does. I
+think under all circumstances of politics, acquaintance, and _Edinburgh
+Review_, that it's much better as it is--Don't you?"
+
+His first letter from Edinburgh, where he and Mrs. Dickens had taken up
+quarters at the Royal Hotel on their arrival the previous night, is
+dated the 23d of June: "I have been this morning to the Parliament
+House, and am now introduced (I hope) to everybody in Edinburgh. The
+hotel is perfectly besieged, and I have been forced to take refuge in a
+sequestered apartment at the end of a long passage, wherein I write this
+letter. They talk of 300 at the dinner. We are very well off in point of
+rooms, having a handsome sitting-room, another next to it for _Clock_
+purposes, a spacious bedroom, and large dressing-room adjoining. The
+castle is in front of the windows, and the view noble. There was a
+supper ready last night which would have been a dinner anywhere." This
+was his first practical experience of the honors his fame had won for
+him, and it found him as eager to receive as all were eager to give.
+Very interesting still, too, are those who took leading part in the
+celebration; and in his pleasant sketches of them there are some once
+famous and familiar figures not so well known to the present generation.
+Here, among the first, are Wilson and Robertson.
+
+"The renowned Peter Robertson is a large, portly, full-faced man, with a
+merry eye, and a queer way of looking under his spectacles which is
+characteristic and pleasant. He seems a very warm-hearted earnest man
+too, and I felt quite at home with him forthwith. Walking up and down
+the hall of the courts of law (which was full of advocates, writers to
+the signet, clerks, and idlers) was a tall, burly, handsome man of
+eight-and-fifty, with a gait like O'Connell's, the bluest eye you can
+imagine, and long hair--longer than mine--falling down in a wild way
+under the broad brim of his hat. He had on a surtout coat, a blue
+checked shirt; the collar standing up, and kept in its place with a wisp
+of black neckerchief; no waistcoat; and a large pocket-handkerchief
+thrust into his breast, which was all broad and open. At his heels
+followed a wiry, sharp-eyed, shaggy devil of a terrier, dogging his
+steps as he went slashing up and down, now with one man beside him, now
+with another, and now quite alone, but always at a fast, rolling pace,
+with his head in the air, and his eyes as wide open as he could get
+them. I guessed it was Wilson, and it was. A bright, clear-complexioned,
+mountain-looking fellow, he looks as though he had just come down from
+the Highlands, and had never in his life taken pen in hand. But he has
+had an attack of paralysis in his right arm, within this month. He
+winced when I shook hands with him; and once or twice, when we were
+walking up and down, slipped as if he had stumbled on a piece of
+orange-peel. He is a great fellow to look at, and to talk to; and, if
+you could divest your mind of the actual Scott, is just the figure you
+would put in his place."
+
+Nor have the most ordinary incidents of the visit any lack of interest
+for us now, in so far as they help to complete the picture of himself:
+"Allan has been squiring me about, all the morning. He and Fletcher have
+gone to a meeting of the dinner-stewards, and I take the opportunity of
+writing to you. They dine with us to-day, and we are going to-night to
+the theatre. M'Ian is playing there. I mean to leave a card for him
+before evening. We are engaged for every day of our stay, already; but
+the people I have seen are so very hearty and warm in their manner that
+much of the horrors of lionization gives way before it. I am glad to
+find that they propose giving me for a toast on Friday the Memory of
+Wilkie. I should have liked it better than anything, if I could have
+made my choice. Communicate all particulars to Mac. I would to God you
+were both here. Do dine together at the Gray's Inn on Friday, and think
+of me. If I don't drink my first glass of wine to you, may my pistols
+miss fire, and my mare slip her shoulder. All sorts of regard from Kate.
+She has gone with Miss Allan to see the house she was born in, etc.
+Write me soon, and long, etc."
+
+His next letter was written the morning after the dinner, on Saturday,
+the 26th June: "The great event is over; and, being gone, I am a man
+again. It was the most brilliant affair you can conceive; the completest
+success possible, from first to last. The room was crammed, and more
+than seventy applicants for tickets were of necessity refused yesterday.
+Wilson was ill, but plucked up like a lion, and spoke famously.[38] I
+send you a paper herewith, but the report is dismal in the extreme. They
+say there will be a better one--I don't know where or when. Should there
+be, I will send it to you. I _think_ (ahem!) that I spoke rather well.
+It was an excellent room, and both the subjects (Wilson and Scottish
+Literature, and the Memory of Wilkie) were good to go upon. There were
+nearly two hundred ladies present. The place is so contrived that the
+cross table is raised enormously: much above the heads of people
+sitting below: and the effect on first coming in (on me, I mean) was
+rather tremendous. I was quite self-possessed, however, and,
+notwithstanding the enthoosemoosy, which was very startling, as cool as
+a cucumber. I wish to God you had been there, as it is impossible for
+the 'distinguished guest' to describe the scene. It beat all natur.". . .
+
+Here was the close of his letter: "I have been expecting every day to
+hear from you, and not hearing mean to make this the briefest epistle
+possible. We start next Sunday (that's to-morrow week). We are going out
+to Jeffrey's to-day (he is very unwell), and return here to-morrow
+evening. If I don't find a letter from you when I come back, expect no
+Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life from your indignant correspondent.
+Murray the manager made very excellent, tasteful, and gentlemanly
+mention of Macready, about whom Wilson had been asking me divers
+questions during dinner." "A hundred thanks for your letter," he writes
+four days later. "I read it this morning with the greatest pleasure and
+delight, and answer it with ditto, ditto. Where shall I begin--about my
+darlings? I am delighted with Charley's precocity. He takes arter his
+father, he does. God bless them, you can't imagine (_you!_ how can you?)
+how much I long to see them. It makes me quite sorrowful to think of
+them. . . . Yesterday, sir, the lord provost, council, and magistrates
+voted me by acclamation the freedom of the city, in testimony (I quote
+the letter just received from 'James Forrest, lord provost') 'of the
+sense entertained by them of your distinguished abilities as an author.'
+I acknowledged this morning in appropriate terms the honor they had
+done me, and through me the pursuit to which I was devoted. It _is_
+handsome, is it not?"
+
+The parchment scroll of the city-freedom, recording the grounds on which
+it was voted, hung framed in his study to the last, and was one of his
+valued possessions. Answering some question of mine, he told me further
+as to the speakers, and gave some amusing glimpses of the party-spirit
+which still at that time ran high in the capital of the north.
+
+"The men who spoke at the dinner were all the most rising men here, and
+chiefly at the Bar. They were all, alternately, Whigs and Tories; with
+some few Radicals, such as Gordon, who gave the memory of Burns. He is
+Wilson's son-in-law and the lord-advocate's nephew--a very masterly
+speaker indeed, who ought to become a distinguished man. Neaves, who
+gave the other poets, a _little_ too lawyer-like for my taste, is a
+great gun in the courts. Mr. Primrose is Lord Rosebery's son. Adam
+Black, the publisher as you know. Dr. Alison, a very popular friend of
+the poor. Robertson you know. Allan you know. Colquhoun is an advocate.
+All these men were selected for the toasts as being crack speakers,
+known men, and opposed to each other very strongly in politics. For this
+reason, the professors and so forth who sat upon the platform about me
+made no speeches and had none assigned them. I felt it was very
+remarkable to see such a number of gray-headed men gathered about my
+brown flowing locks; and it struck most of those who were present very
+forcibly. The judges, solicitor-general, lord-advocate, and so forth,
+were all here to call, the day after our arrival. The judges never go
+to public dinners in Scotland. Lord Meadowbank alone broke through the
+custom, and none of his successors have imitated him. It will give you a
+good notion of _party_ to hear that the solicitor-general and
+lord-advocate refused to go, though they had previously engaged,
+_unless_ the croupier or the chairman were a Whig. Both (Wilson and
+Robertson) were Tories, simply because, Jeffrey excepted, no Whig could
+be found who was adapted to the office. The solicitor laid strict
+injunctions on Napier not to go if a Whig were not in office. No Whig
+was, and he stayed away. I think this is good?--bearing in mind that all
+the old Whigs of Edinburgh were cracking their throats in the room. They
+gave out that they were ill, and the lord-advocate did actually lie in
+bed all the afternoon; but this is the real truth, and one of the judges
+told it me with great glee. It seems they couldn't quite trust Wilson or
+Robertson, as they thought; and feared some Tory demonstration. Nothing
+of the kind took place; and ever since, these men have been the loudest
+in their praises of the whole affair."
+
+The close of his letter tells us all his engagements, and completes his
+graceful picture of the hearty Scottish welcome given him. It has also
+some personal touches that may be thought worth preserving. "A threat
+reached me last night (they have been hammering at it in their papers,
+it seems, for some time) of a dinner at Glasgow. But I hope, having
+circulated false rumors of my movements, to get away before they send to
+me; and only to stop there on my way home, to change horses and send to
+the post-office. . . . You will like to know how we have been living.
+Here's a list of engagements, past and present. Wednesday, we dined at
+home, and went incog. to the theatre at night, to Murray's box; the
+pieces admirably done, and M'Ian in the _Two Drovers_ quite wonderful
+and most affecting. Thursday, to Lord Murray's; dinner and evening
+party. Friday, _the_ dinner. Saturday, to Jeffrey's, a beautiful place
+about three miles off" (Craigcrook, which at Lord Jeffrey's invitation I
+afterwards visited with him), "stop there all night, dine on Sunday, and
+home at eleven. Monday, dine at Dr. Alison's, four miles off. Tuesday,
+dinner and evening party at Allan's. Wednesday, breakfast with Napier,
+dine with Blackwood's seven miles off, evening party at the treasurer's
+of the town-council, supper with all the artists (!!). Thursday, lunch
+at the solicitor-general's, dine at Lord Gillies's, evening party at
+Joseph Gordon's, one of Brougham's earliest supporters. Friday, dinner
+and evening party at Robertson's. Saturday, dine again at Jeffrey's;
+back to the theatre, at half-past nine to the moment, for public
+appearance;[39] places all let, etc. etc. etc. Sunday, off at seven
+o'clock in the morning to Stirling, and then to Callender, a stage
+further. Next day, to Loch Earn, and pull up there for three days, to
+rest and work. The moral of all this is, that there is no place like
+home; and that I thank God most heartily for having given me a quiet
+spirit, and a heart that won't hold many people. I sigh for Devonshire
+Terrace and Broadstairs, for battledoor and shuttlecock; I want to dine
+in a blouse with you and Mac; and I feel Topping's merits more acutely
+than I have ever done in my life. On Sunday evening, the 17th of July, I
+shall revisit my household gods, please Heaven. I wish the day were
+here. For God's sake be in waiting. I wish you and Mac would dine in
+Devonshire Terrace that day with Fred. He has the key of the cellar.
+_Do._ We shall be at Inverary in the Highlands on Tuesday week, getting
+to it through the Pass of Glencoe, of which you may have heard! On
+Thursday following we shall be at Glasgow, where I shall hope to receive
+your last letter before we meet. At Inverary, too, I shall make sure of
+finding at least one, at the post-office. . . . Little Allan is trying hard
+for the post of queen's limner for Scotland, vacant by poor Wilkie's
+death. Every one is in his favor but ----, who is jobbing for some one
+else. Appoint him, will you, and I'll give up the premiership.--How I
+breakfasted to-day in the house where Scott lived seven-and-twenty
+years; how I have made solemn pledges to write about missing children in
+the _Edinburgh Review_, and will do my best to keep them; how I have
+declined to be brought in, free gratis for nothing and qualified to
+boot, for a Scotch county that's going a-begging, lest I should be
+thought to have dined on Friday under false pretenses; these, with other
+marvels, shall be yours anon. . . . I must leave off sharp, to get dressed
+and off upon the seven miles' dinner-trip. Kate's affectionate regards.
+My hearty loves to Mac and Grim." Grim was another great artist having
+the same beginning to his name, whose tragic studies had suggested an
+epithet quite inapplicable to any of his personal qualities.
+
+The narrative of the trip to the Highlands must have a chapter to itself
+and its incidents of adventure and comedy. The latter chiefly were due
+to the guide who accompanied him, a quasi-Highlander himself, named a
+few pages back as Mr. Kindheart, whose real name was Mr. Angus Fletcher,
+and to whom it hardly needs that I should give other mention than will
+be supplied by such future notices of him as my friend's letters may
+contain. He had a wayward kind of talent, which he could never
+concentrate on a settled pursuit; and though at the time we knew him
+first he had taken up the profession of a sculptor, he abandoned it soon
+afterwards. His mother, a woman distinguished by many remarkable
+qualities, lived now in the English lake-country; and it was no fault of
+hers that this home was no longer her son's. But what mainly had closed
+it to him was undoubtedly not less the secret of such liking for him as
+Dickens had. Fletcher's eccentricities and absurdities, often divided by
+the thinnest partition from the most foolish extravagance, but
+occasionally clever, and always the genuine though whimsical outgrowth
+of the life he led, had a curious sort of charm for Dickens. He enjoyed
+the oddity and humor; tolerated all the rest; and to none more freely
+than to Kindheart during the next few years, both in Italy and in
+England, opened his house and hospitality. The close of the poor
+fellow's life, alas! was in only too sad agreement with all the previous
+course of it; but this will have mention hereafter. He is waiting now to
+introduce Dickens to the Highlands.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[37] Dickens refused to believe it at first. "My heart assures me Wilkie
+liveth," he wrote. "He is the sort of man who will be VERY old when he
+dies"--and certainly one would have said so.
+
+[38] The speeches generally were good, but the descriptions in the text
+by himself will here be thought sufficient. One or two sentences ought,
+however, to be given to show the tone of Wilson's praise, and I will
+only preface them by the remark that Dickens's acknowledgments, as well
+as his tribute to Wilkie, were expressed with great felicity, and that
+Peter Robertson seems to have thrown the company into convulsions of
+laughter by his imitation of Dominie Sampson's PRO-DI-GI-OUS, in a
+supposed interview between that worthy schoolmaster and Mr. Squeers of
+Dotheboys. I now quote from Professor Wilson's speech:
+
+"Our friend has mingled in the common walks of life; he has made himself
+familiar with the lower orders of society. He has not been deterred by
+the aspect of vice and wickedness, and misery and guilt, from seeking a
+spirit of good in things evil, but has endeavored by the might of genius
+to transmute what was base into what is precious as the beaten gold. . . .
+But I shall be betrayed, if I go on much longer,--which it would be
+improper for me to do,--into something like a critical delineation of
+the genius of our illustrious guest. I shall not attempt that; but I
+cannot but express, in a few ineffectual words, the delight which every
+human bosom feels in the benign spirit which pervades all his creations.
+How kind and good a man he is, I need not say; nor what strength of
+genius he has acquired by that profound sympathy with his
+fellow-creatures, whether in prosperity and happiness, or overwhelmed
+with unfortunate circumstances, but who yet do not sink under their
+miseries, but trust to their own strength of endurance, to that
+principle of truth and honor and integrity which is no stranger to the
+uncultivated bosom, and which is found in the lowest abodes in as great
+strength as in the halls of nobles and the palaces of kings. Mr. Dickens
+is also a satirist. He satirizes human life, but he does not satirize it
+to degrade it. He does not wish to pull down what is high into the
+neighborhood of what is low. He does not seek to represent all virtue as
+a hollow thing, in which no confidence can be placed. He satirizes only
+the selfish, and the hard-hearted, and the cruel. Our distinguished
+guest may not have given us, as yet, a full and complete delineation of
+the female character. But this he has done: he has not endeavored to
+represent women as charming merely by the aid of accomplishments,
+however elegant and graceful. He has not depicted those accomplishments
+as their essentials, but has spoken of them rather as always inspired by
+a love of domesticity, by fidelity, by purity, by innocence, by charity,
+and by hope, which makes them discharge, under the most difficult
+circumstances, their duties, and which brings over their path in this
+world some glimpses of the light of heaven. Mr. Dickens may be assured
+that there is felt for him all over Scotland a sentiment of kindness,
+affection, admiration, and love; and I know for certain that the
+knowledge of these sentiments must make him happy."
+
+[39] On this occasion, as he told me afterwards, the orchestra did a
+double stroke of business, much to the amazement of himself and his
+friends, by improvising at his entrance _Charley is my Darling_, amid
+tumultuous shouts of delight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+ADVENTURES IN THE HIGHLANDS.
+
+1841.
+
+ A Fright--Fletcher's Eccentricities--The
+ Trossachs--The Travelers' Guide--A Comical
+ Picture--Highland Accommodation--Grand
+ Scenery--Changes in Route--A
+ Waterfall--Entrance to Glencoe--The Pass of
+ Glencoe--Loch Leven--A July Evening--Postal
+ Service at Loch Earn Head--The Maid of the
+ Inn--Impressions of Glencoe--An
+ Adventure--Torrents swollen with
+ Rain--Dangerous Traveling--Incidents and
+ Accidents--Broken-down Bridge--A Fortunate
+ Resolve--Post-boy in Danger--The Rescue--Narrow
+ Escape--A Highland Inn and Inmates--English
+ Comfort at Dalmally--Dinner at Glasgow
+ proposed--Eagerness for Home.
+
+
+FROM Loch Earn Head Dickens wrote on Monday, the 5th of July, having
+reached it, "wet through," at four that afternoon: "Having had a great
+deal to do in a crowded house on Saturday night at the theatre, we left
+Edinburgh yesterday morning at half-past seven, and traveled, with
+Fletcher for our guide, to a place called Stewart's Hotel, nine miles
+further than Callender. We had neglected to order rooms, and were
+obliged to make a sitting-room of our own bed-chamber; in which my
+genius for stowing furniture away was of the very greatest service.
+Fletcher slept in a kennel with three panes of glass in it, which formed
+part and parcel of a window; the other three panes whereof belonged to a
+man who slept on the other side of the partition. He told me this
+morning that he had had a nightmare all night, and had screamed
+horribly, he knew. The stranger, as you may suppose, hired a gig and
+went off at full gallop with the first glimpse of daylight.[40] Being
+very tired (for we had not had more than three hours' sleep on the
+previous night) we lay till ten this morning, and at half-past eleven
+went through the Trossachs to Loch Katrine, where I walked from the
+hotel after tea last night. It is impossible to say what a glorious
+scene it was. It rained as it never does rain anywhere but here. We
+conveyed Kate up a rocky pass to go and see the island of the Lady of
+the Lake, but she gave in after the first five minutes, and we left
+her, very picturesque and uncomfortable, with Tom" (the servant they had
+brought with them from Devonshire Terrace) "holding an umbrella over her
+head, while we climbed on. When we came back, she had gone into the
+carriage. We were wet through to the skin, and came on in that state
+four-and-twenty miles. Fletcher is very good-natured, and of
+extraordinary use in these outlandish parts. His habit of going into
+kitchens and bars, disconcerting at Broadstairs, is here of great
+service. Not expecting us till six, they hadn't lighted our fires when
+we arrived here; and if you had seen him (with whom the responsibility
+of the omission rested) running in and out of the sitting-room and the
+two bedrooms with a great pair of bellows, with which he distractedly
+blew each of the fires out in turn, you would have died of laughing. He
+had on his head a great Highland cap, on his back a white coat, and cut
+such a figure as even the inimitable can't depicter. . . .
+
+"The inns, inside and out, are the queerest places imaginable. From the
+road, this one," at Loch Earn Head, "looks like a white wall, with
+windows in it by mistake. We have a good sitting-room, though, on the
+first floor: as large (but not as lofty) as my study. The bedrooms are
+of that size which renders it impossible for you to move, after you have
+taken your boots off, without chipping pieces out of your legs. There
+isn't a basin in the Highlands which will hold my face; not a drawer
+which will open, after you have put your clothes in it; not a
+water-bottle capacious enough to wet your toothbrush. The huts are
+wretched and miserable beyond all description. The food (for those who
+can pay for it) 'not bad,' as M. would say: oat-cake, mutton,
+hotch-potch, trout from the loch, small beer bottled, marmalade, and
+whiskey. Of the last-named article I have taken about a pint to-day. The
+weather is what they call 'soft'--which means that the sky is a vast
+water-spout that never leaves off emptying itself; and the liquor has no
+more effect than water. . . . I am going to work to-morrow, and hope before
+leaving here to write you again. The elections have been sad work
+indeed. That they should return Sibthorp and reject Bulwer, is, by
+Heaven, a national disgrace. . . . I don't wonder the devil flew over
+Lincoln. The people were far too addle-headed, even for him. . . . I don't
+bore you with accounts of Ben this and that, and Lochs of all sorts of
+names, but this is a wonderful region. The way the mists were stalking
+about to-day, and the clouds lying down upon the hills; the deep glens,
+the high rocks, the rushing waterfalls, and the roaring rivers down in
+deep gulfs below; were all stupendous. This house is wedged round by
+great heights that are lost in the clouds; and the loch, twelve miles
+long, stretches out its dreary length before the windows. In my next I
+shall soar to the sublime, perhaps; in this here present writing I
+confine myself to the ridiculous. But I am always," etc. etc.
+
+His next letter bore the date of "Ballechelish, Friday evening, ninth
+July, 1841, half-past nine, P.M.," and described what we had often
+longed to see together, the Pass of Glencoe. . . . "I can't go to bed
+without writing to you from here, though the post will not leave this
+place until we have left it and arrived at another. On looking over the
+route which Lord Murray made out for me, I found he had put down
+Thursday next for Abbotsford and Dryburgh Abbey, and a journey of
+seventy miles besides! Therefore, and as I was happily able to steal a
+march upon myself at Loch Earn Head, and to finish in two days what I
+thought would take me three, we shall leave here to-morrow morning; and,
+by being a day earlier than we intended at all the places between this
+and Melrose (which we propose to reach by Wednesday night), we shall
+have a whole day for Scott's house and tomb, and still be at York on
+Saturday evening, and home, God willing, on Sunday. . . . We left Loch Earn
+Head last night, and went to a place called Killin, eight miles from it,
+where we slept. I walked some six miles with Fletcher after we got
+there, to see a waterfall; and truly it was a magnificent sight, foaming
+and crashing down three great steeps of riven rock; leaping over the
+first as far off as you could carry your eye, and rumbling and foaming
+down into a dizzy pool below you, with a deafening roar. To-day we have
+had a journey of between 50 and 60 miles, through the bleakest and most
+desolate part of Scotland, where the hill-tops are still covered with
+great patches of snow, and the road winds over steep mountain-passes,
+and on the brink of deep brooks and precipices. The cold all day has
+been _intense_, and the rain sometimes most violent. It has been
+impossible to keep warm, by any means; even whiskey failed; the wind was
+too piercing even for that. One stage of ten miles, over a place called
+the Black Mount, took us two hours and a half to do; and when we came to
+a lone public called the King's House, at the entrance to Glencoe,--this
+was about three o'clock,--we were wellnigh frozen. We got a fire
+directly, and in twenty minutes they served us up some famous kippered
+salmon, broiled; a broiled fowl; hot mutton ham and poached eggs;
+pancakes; oat-cake; wheaten bread; butter; bottled porter; hot water,
+lump sugar, and whiskey; of which we made a very hearty meal. All the
+way, the road had been among moors and mountains, with huge masses of
+rock, which fell down God knows where, sprinkling the ground in every
+direction, and giving it the aspect of the burial-place of a race of
+giants. Now and then we passed a hut or two, with neither window nor
+chimney, and the smoke of the peat fire rolling out at the door. But
+there were not six of these dwellings in a dozen miles; and anything so
+bleak and wild, and mighty in its loneliness, as the whole country, it
+is impossible to conceive. Glencoe itself is perfectly _terrible_. The
+pass is an awful place. It is shut in on each side by enormous rocks
+from which great torrents come rushing down in all directions. In
+amongst these rocks on one side of the pass (the left as we came) there
+are scores of glens, high up, which form such haunts as you might
+imagine yourself wandering in, in the very height and madness of a
+fever. They will live in my dreams for years--I was going to say as long
+as I live, and I seriously think so. The very recollection of them makes
+me shudder. . . . Well, I will not bore you with my impressions of these
+tremendous wilds, but they really are fearful in their grandeur and
+amazing solitude. Wales is a mere toy compared with them."
+
+The further mention of his guide's whimsical ways may stand, for it
+cannot now be the possible occasion of pain or annoyance, or of
+anything but very innocent laughter:
+
+"We are now in a bare white house on the banks of Loch Leven, but in a
+comfortably-furnished room on the top of the house,--that is, on the
+first floor,--with the rain pattering against the window as though it
+were December, the wind howling dismally, a cold damp mist on everything
+without, a blazing fire within half way up the chimney, and a most
+infernal Piper practicing under the window for a competition of pipers
+which is to come off shortly. . . . The store of anecdotes of Fletcher with
+which we shall return will last a long time. It seems that the F.'s are
+an extensive clan, and that his father was a Highlander. Accordingly,
+wherever he goes, he finds out some cotter or small farmer who is his
+cousin. I wish you could see him walking into his cousins' curds and
+cream, and into their dairies generally! Yesterday morning, between
+eight and nine, I was sitting writing at the open window, when the
+postman came to the inn (which at Loch Earn Head is the post-office) for
+the letters. He is going away, when Fletcher, who has been writing
+somewhere below-stairs, rushes out, and cries, 'Halloa there! Is that
+the Post?' 'Yes!' somebody answers. 'Call him back!' says Fletcher:
+'Just sit down till I've done, _and don't go away till I tell
+you_.'--Fancy! The General Post, with the letters of forty villages in a
+leathern bag! . . . To-morrow at Oban. Sunday at Inverary. Monday at
+Tarbet. Tuesday at Glasgow (and that night at Hamilton). Wednesday at
+Melrose. Thursday at ditto. Friday I don't know where. Saturday at York.
+Sunday--how glad I shall be to shake hands with you! My love to Mac. I
+thought he'd have written once. Ditto to Macready. I had a very nice and
+welcome letter from him, and a most hearty one from Elliotson. . . . P.S.
+Half asleep. So excuse drowsiness of matter and composition. I shall be
+full of joy to meet another letter from you! . . . P.P.S. They speak Gaelic
+here, of course, and many of the common people understand very little
+English. Since I wrote this letter, I rang the girl up-stairs, and gave
+elaborate directions (you know my way) for a pint of sherry to be made
+into boiling negus; mentioning all the ingredients one by one, and
+particularly nutmeg. When I had quite finished, seeing her obviously
+bewildered, I said, with great gravity, 'Now you know what you're going
+to order?' 'Oh, yes. Sure.' 'What?'--a pause--'Just'--another
+pause--'Just plenty of _nutbergs_!'"
+
+The impression made upon him by the Pass of Glencoe was not overstated
+in this letter. It continued with him as he there expressed it; and as
+we shall see hereafter, even where he expected to find Nature in her
+most desolate grandeur on the dreary waste of an American prairie, his
+imagination went back with a higher satisfaction to Glencoe. But his
+experience of it is not yet completely told. The sequel was in a letter
+of two days' later date, from "Dalmally, Sunday, July the eleventh,
+1841:"
+
+"As there was no place of this name in our route, you will be surprised
+to see it at the head of this present writing. But our being here is a
+part of such moving accidents by flood and field as will astonish you.
+If you should happen to have your hat on, take it off, that your hair
+may stand on end without any interruption. To get from Ballyhoolish (as
+I am obliged to spell it when Fletcher is not in the way; and he is out
+at this moment) to Oban, it is necessary to cross two ferries, one of
+which is an arm of the sea, eight or ten miles broad. Into this
+ferry-boat, passengers, carriages, horses, and all, get bodily, and are
+got across by hook or by crook if the weather be reasonably fine.
+Yesterday morning, however, it blew such a strong gale that the landlord
+of the inn, where we had paid for horses all the way to Oban (thirty
+miles), honestly came up-stairs just as we were starting, with the money
+in his hand, and told us it would be impossible to cross. There was
+nothing to be done but to come back five-and-thirty miles, through
+Glencoe and Inverouran, to a place called Tyndrum, whence a road twelve
+miles long crosses to Dalmally, which is sixteen miles from Inverary.
+Accordingly we turned back, and in a great storm of wind and rain began
+to retrace the dreary road we had come the day before. . . . I was not at
+all ill pleased to have to come again through that awful Glencoe. If it
+had been tremendous on the previous day, yesterday it was perfectly
+horrific. It had rained all night, and was raining then, as it only does
+in these parts. Through the whole glen, which is ten miles long,
+torrents were boiling and foaming, and sending up in every direction
+spray like the smoke of great fires. They were rushing down every hill
+and mountain side, and tearing like devils across the path, and down
+into the depths of the rocks. Some of the hills looked as if they were
+full of silver, and had cracked in a hundred places. Others as if they
+were frightened, and had broken out into a deadly sweat. In others there
+was no compromise or division of streams, but one great torrent came
+roaring down with a deafening noise, and a rushing of water that was
+quite appalling. Such a _spaet_, in short (that's the country word), has
+not been known for many years, and the sights and sounds were beyond
+description. The post-boy was not at all at his ease, and the horses
+were very much frightened (as well they might be) by the perpetual
+raging and roaring; one of them started as we came down a steep place,
+and we were within that much (----) of tumbling over a precipice; just
+then, too, the drag broke, and we were obliged to go on as we best
+could, without it: getting out every now and then, and hanging on at the
+back of the carriage to prevent its rolling down too fast, and going
+Heaven knows where. Well, in this pleasant state of things we came to
+King's House again, having been four hours doing the sixteen miles. The
+rumble where Tom sat was by this time so full of water that he was
+obliged to borrow a gimlet and bore holes in the bottom to let it run
+out. The horses that were to take us on were out upon the hills,
+somewhere within ten miles round; and three or four bare-legged fellows
+went out to look for 'em, while we sat by the fire and tried to dry
+ourselves. At last we got off again (without the drag and with a broken
+spring, no smith living within ten miles), and went limping on to
+Inverouran. In the first three miles we were in a ditch and out again,
+and lost a horse's shoe. All this time it never once left off raining;
+and was very windy, very cold, very misty, and most intensely dismal. So
+we crossed the Black Mount, and came to a place we had passed the day
+before, where a rapid river runs over a bed of broken rock. Now, this
+river, sir, had a bridge last winter, but the bridge broke down when the
+thaw came, and has never since been mended; so travelers cross upon a
+little platform, made of rough deal planks stretching from rock to rock;
+and carriages and horses ford the water, at a certain point. As the
+platform is the reverse of steady (we had proved this the day before),
+is very slippery, and affords anything but a pleasant footing, having
+only a trembling little rail on one side, and on the other nothing
+between it and the foaming stream, Kate decided to remain in the
+carriage, and trust herself to the wheels rather than to her feet.
+Fletcher and I had got out, and it was going away, when I advised her,
+as I had done several times before, to come with us; for I saw that the
+water was very high, the current being greatly swollen by the rain, and
+that the post-boy had been eyeing it in a very disconcerted manner for
+the last half-hour. This decided her to come out; and Fletcher, she,
+Tom, and I, began to cross, while the carriage went about a quarter of a
+mile down the bank, in search of a shallow place. The platform shook so
+much that we could only come across two at a time, and then it felt as
+if it were hung on springs. As to the wind and rain! . . . well, put into
+one gust all the wind and rain you ever saw and heard, and you'll have
+some faint notion of it! When we got safely to the opposite bank, there
+came riding up a wild Highlander, in a great plaid, whom we recognized
+as the landlord of the inn, and who, without taking the least notice of
+us, went dashing on,--with the plaid he was wrapped in, streaming in the
+wind,--screeching in Gaelic to the post-boy on the opposite bank, and
+making the most frantic gestures you ever saw, in which he was joined by
+some other wild man on foot, who had come across by a short cut,
+knee-deep in mire and water. As we began to see what this meant, we
+(that is, Fletcher and I) scrambled on after them, while the boy,
+horses, and carriage were plunging in the water, which left only the
+horses' heads and the boy's body visible. By the time we got up to them,
+the man on horseback and the men on foot were perfectly mad with
+pantomime; for as to any of their shouts being heard by the boy, the
+water made such a great noise that they might as well have been dumb. It
+made me quite sick to think how I should have felt if Kate had been
+inside. The carriage went round and round like a great stone, the boy
+was as pale as death, the horses were struggling and plashing and
+snorting like sea-animals, and we were all roaring to the driver to
+throw himself off and let them and the coach go to the devil, when
+suddenly it came all right (having got into shallow water), and, all
+tumbling and dripping and jogging from side to side, climbed up to the
+dry land. I assure you we looked rather queer, as we wiped our faces and
+stared at each other in a little cluster round about it. It seemed that
+the man on horseback had been looking at us through a telescope as we
+came to the track, and knowing that the place was very dangerous, and
+seeing that we meant to bring the carriage, had come on at a great
+gallop to show the driver the only place where he could cross. By the
+time he came up, the man had taken the water at a wrong place, and in a
+word was as nearly drowned (with carriage, horses, luggage, and all) as
+ever man was. Was _this_ a good adventure?
+
+"We all went on to the inn,--the wild man galloping on first, to get a
+fire lighted,--and there we dined on eggs and bacon, oat-cake, and
+whiskey; and changed and dried ourselves. The place was a mere knot of
+little outhouses, and in one of these there were fifty Highlanders _all
+drunk_. . . . Some were drovers, some pipers, and some workmen engaged to
+build a hunting-lodge for Lord Breadalbane hard by, who had been driven
+in by stress of weather. One was a paper-hanger. He had come out three
+days before to paper the inn's best room, a chamber almost large enough
+to keep a Newfoundland dog in, and, from the first half-hour after his
+arrival to that moment, had been hopelessly and irreclaimably drunk.
+They were lying about in all directions: on forms, on the ground, about
+a loft overhead, round the turf-fire wrapped in plaids, on the tables,
+and under them. We paid our bill, thanked our host very heartily, gave
+some money to his children, and after an hour's rest came on again. At
+ten o'clock at night we reached this place, and were overjoyed to find
+quite an English inn, with good beds (those we have slept on, yet, have
+always been of straw), and every possible comfort. We breakfasted this
+morning at half-past ten, and at three go on to Inverary to dinner. I
+believe the very rough part of the journey is over, and I am really glad
+of it. Kate sends all kind of regards. I shall hope to find a letter
+from you at Inverary when the post reaches there, to-morrow. I wrote to
+Oban yesterday, desiring the post-office keeper to send any he might
+have for us, over to that place. Love to Mac."
+
+One more letter, brief, but overflowing at every word with his generous
+nature, must close the delightful series written from Scotland. It was
+dated from Inverary the day following his exciting adventure; promised
+me another from Melrose (which has unfortunately not been kept with the
+rest); and inclosed the invitation to a public dinner at Glasgow. "I
+have returned for answer that I am on my way home, on pressing business
+connected with my weekly publication, and can't stop. But I have offered
+to come down any day in September or October, and accept the honor then.
+Now, I shall come and return per mail; and, if this suits them, enter
+into a solemn league and covenant to come with me. _Do._ You must. I am
+sure you will. . . . Till my next, and always afterwards, God bless you. I
+got your welcome letter this morning, and have read it a hundred times.
+What a pleasure it is! Kate's best regards. I am dying for Sunday, and
+wouldn't stop now for twenty dinners of twenty thousand each.
+
+[Illustration: 'Always your affectionate friend
+
+'Doz.]
+
+"Will Lord John meet the Parliament, or resign first?" I agreed to
+accompany him to Glasgow; but illness intercepted that celebration.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[40] Poor good Mr. Fletcher had, among his other peculiarities, a habit
+of venting any particular emotion in a wildness of cry that went beyond
+even the descriptive power of his friend, who referred to it frequently
+in his Broadstairs letters. Here is an instance (20th Sept, 1840): "Mrs.
+M. being in the next machine the other day heard him howl like a wolf
+(as he does) when he first touched the cold water. I am glad to have my
+former story in that respect confirmed. There is no sound on earth like
+it. In the infernal regions there may be, but elsewhere there is no
+compound addition of wild beasts that could produce its like for their
+total. The description of the wolves in _Robinson Crusoe_ is the nearest
+thing; but it's feeble--very feeble--in comparison." Of the generally
+amiable side to all his eccentricities I am tempted to give an
+illustration from the same letter: "An alarming report being brought to
+me the other day that he was preaching, I betook myself to the spot, and
+found he was reading Wordsworth to a family on the terrace, outside the
+house, in the open air and public way. The whole town were out. When he
+had given them a taste of Wordsworth, he sent home for Mrs. Norton's
+book, and entertained them with selections from that. He concluded with
+an imitation of Mrs. Hemans reading her own poetry, which he performed
+with a pocket-handkerchief over his head to imitate her veil--all this
+in public, before everybody."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+AGAIN AT BROADSTAIRS.
+
+1841.
+
+ Peel and his Party--Getting very
+ Radical--Thoughts of colonizing--Political
+ Squib by C. D.--Fine Old English Tory
+ Times--Mesmerism--Metropolitan Prisons--Book by
+ a Workman--An August Day by the Sea--Another
+ Story in Prospect--_Clock_ Discontents--New
+ Adventure--Agreement for it signed--The Book
+ that proved to be _Chuzzlewit_--Peel and Lord
+ Ashley--Visions of America.
+
+
+SOON after his return, at the opening of August, he went to Broadstairs;
+and the direction in which that last question shows his thoughts to have
+been busy was that to which he turned his first holiday leisure. He sent
+me some rhymed squibs as his anonymous contribution to the fight the
+Liberals were then making against what was believed to be intended by
+the return to office of the Tories; ignorant as we were how much wiser
+than his party the statesman then at the head of it was, or how greatly
+what we all most desired would be advanced by the very success that had
+been most disheartening. There will be no harm now in giving one of
+these pieces, which will sufficiently show the tone of all of them, and
+with what a hearty relish they were written. I doubt indeed if he ever
+enjoyed anything more than the power of thus taking part occasionally,
+unknown to outsiders, in the sharp conflict the press was waging at the
+time. "By Jove, how radical I am getting!" he wrote to me (13th August).
+"I wax stronger and stronger in the true principles every day. I don't
+know whether it's the sea, or no, but so it is." He would at times even
+talk, in moments of sudden indignation at the political outlook, of
+carrying off himself and his household gods, like Coriolanus, to a world
+elsewhere! "Thank God there is a Van Diemen's Land. That's my comfort.
+Now, I wonder if I should make a good settler! I wonder, if I went to a
+new colony with my head, hands, legs, and health, I should force myself
+to the top of the social milk-pot and live upon the cream! What do you
+think? Upon my word, I believe I should."
+
+His political squibs during the Tory interregnum comprised some capital
+subjects for pictures after the manner of Peter Pindar; but that which I
+select has no touch of personal satire in it, and he would himself, for
+that reason, have least objected to its revival. Thus ran his new
+version of "The Fine Old English Gentleman, to be said or sung at all
+conservative dinners:"
+
+ I'll sing you a new ballad, and I'll warrant it first-rate,
+ Of the days of that old gentleman who had that old estate;
+ When they spent the public money at a bountiful old rate
+ On ev'ry mistress, pimp, and scamp, at ev'ry noble gate.
+ In the fine old English Tory times;
+ Soon may they come again!
+
+ The good old laws were garnished well with gibbets, whips, and chains,
+ With fine old English penalties, and fine old English pains,
+ With rebel heads and seas of blood once hot in rebel veins;
+ For all these things were requisite to guard the rich old gains
+ Of the fine old English Tory times;
+ Soon may they come again!
+
+ This brave old code, like Argus, had a hundred watchful eyes,
+ And ev'ry English peasant had his good old English spies,
+ To tempt his starving discontent with fine old English lies,
+ Then call the good old Yeomanry to stop his peevish cries,
+ In the fine old English Tory times;
+ Soon may they come again!
+
+ The good old times for cutting throats that cried out in their need,
+ The good old times for hunting men who held their fathers' creed,
+ The good old times when William Pitt, as all good men agreed,
+ Came down direct from Paradise at more than railroad speed. . . .
+ Oh, the fine old English Tory times;
+ When will they come again?
+
+ In those rare days, the press was seldom known to snarl or bark,
+ But sweetly sang of men in pow'r, like any tuneful lark;
+ Grave judges, too, to all their evil deeds were in the dark;
+ And not a man in twenty score knew how to make his mark.
+ Oh, the fine old English Tory times;
+ Soon may they come again! . . .
+
+ But tolerance, though slow in flight, is strong-wing'd in the main;
+ That night must come on these fine days, in course of time was plain;
+ The pure old spirit struggled, but its struggles were in vain;
+ A nation's grip was on it, and it died in choking pain,
+ With the fine old English Tory days,
+ All of the olden time.
+
+ The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the land,
+ In England there shall be--dear bread! in Ireland--sword and brand!
+ And poverty, and ignorance, shall swell the rich and grand,
+ So, rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand
+ Of the fine old English Tory days;
+ Hail to the coming time!
+
+Of matters in which he had been specially interested before he quitted
+London, one or two may properly be named. He had always sympathized,
+almost as strongly as Archbishop Whately did, with Dr. Elliotson's
+mesmeric investigations; and, reinforced as these were in the present
+year by the displays of a Belgian youth whom another friend, Mr. Chauncy
+Hare Townshend, brought over to England, the subject, which to the last
+had an attraction for him, was for the time rather ardently followed up.
+The improvement during the last few years in the London prisons was
+another matter of eager and pleased inquiry with him; and he took
+frequent means of stating what in this respect had been done, since even
+the date when his _Sketches_ were written, by two most efficient public
+officers at Clerkenwell and Tothill Fields, Mr. Chesterton and
+Lieutenant Tracey, whom the course of these inquiries turned into
+private friends. His last letter to me before he quitted town
+sufficiently explains itself. "Slow rises worth by poverty deprest" was
+the thought in his mind at every part of his career, and he never for a
+moment was unmindful of the duty it imposed upon him: "I subscribed for
+a couple of copies" (31st July) "of this little book. I knew nothing of
+the man, but he wrote me a very modest letter of two lines, some weeks
+ago. I have been much affected by the little biography at the beginning,
+and I thought you would like to share the emotion it had raised in me. I
+wish we were all in Eden again--for the sake of these toiling
+creatures."
+
+In the middle of August (Monday, 16th) I had announcement that he was
+coming up for special purposes: "I sit down to write to you without an
+atom of news to communicate. Yes, I have,--something that will surprise
+you, who are pent up in dark and dismal Lincoln's Inn Fields. It is the
+brightest day you ever saw. The sun is sparkling on the water so that I
+can hardly bear to look at it. The tide is in, and the fishing-boats
+are dancing like mad. Upon the green-topped cliffs the corn is cut and
+piled in shocks; and thousands of butterflies are fluttering about,
+taking the bright little red flags at the mast-heads for flowers, and
+panting with delight accordingly. [Here the Inimitable, unable to resist
+the brilliancy out of doors, breaketh off, rusheth to the machines, and
+plungeth into the sea. Returning, he proceedeth:] Jeffrey is just as he
+was when he wrote the letter I sent you. No better, and no worse. I had
+a letter from Napier on Saturday, urging the children's-labor subject
+upon me. But, as I hear from Southwood Smith that the report cannot be
+printed until the new Parliament has sat at the least six weeks, it will
+be impossible to produce it before the January number. I shall be in
+town on Saturday morning and go straight to you. A letter has come from
+little Hall begging that when I _do_ come to town I will dine there, as
+they wish to talk about the new story. I have written to say that I will
+do so on Saturday, and we will go together; but I shall be by no means
+good company. . . . I have more than half a mind to start a bookseller of
+my own. I could; with good capital too, as you know; and ready to spend
+it. _G. Varden beware!_"
+
+Small causes of displeasure had been growing out of the _Clock_, and
+were almost unavoidably incident to the position in which he found
+himself respecting it. Its discontinuance had become necessary, the
+strain upon himself being too great without the help from others which
+experience had shown to be impracticable; but I thought he had not met
+the difficulty wisely by undertaking, which already he had done, to
+begin a new story so early as the following March. On his arrival,
+therefore, we decided on another plan, with which we went armed that
+Saturday afternoon to his publishers, and of which the result will be
+best told by himself. He had returned to Broadstairs the following
+morning, and next day (Monday, the 23d of August) he wrote to me in very
+enthusiastic terms of the share I had taken in what he calls "the
+development on Saturday afternoon; when I thought Chapman very manly and
+sensible, Hall morally and physically feeble though perfectly well
+intentioned, and both the statement and reception of the project quite
+triumphant. Didn't you think so too?" A fortnight later, Tuesday, the
+7th of September, the agreement was signed in my chambers, and its terms
+were to the effect following. The _Clock_ was to cease with the close of
+_Barnaby Rudge_, the respective ownerships continuing as provided; and
+the new work in twenty numbers, similar to those of _Pickwick_ and
+_Nickleby_, was not to begin until after an interval of twelve months,
+in November, 1842. During its publication he was to receive two hundred
+pounds monthly, to be accounted as part of the expenses; for all which,
+and all risks incident, the publishers made themselves responsible,
+under conditions the same as in the _Clock_ agreement; except that out
+of the profits of each number they were to have only a fourth,
+three-fourths going to him, and this arrangement was to hold good until
+the termination of six months from the completed book, when, upon
+payment to him of a fourth of the value of all existing stock, they were
+to have half the future interest. During the twelve months' interval
+before the book began, he was to be paid one hundred and fifty pounds
+each month; but this was to be drawn from his three-fourths of the
+profits, and in no way to interfere with the monthly payments of two
+hundred pounds while the publication was going on.[41] Such was the
+"project," excepting only a provision to be mentioned hereafter against
+the improbable event of the profits being inadequate to the repayment;
+and my only drawback from the satisfaction of my own share in it arose
+from my fear of the use he was likely to make of the leisure it afforded
+him.
+
+That this fear was not ill founded appeared at the close of the next
+note I had from him: "There's no news" (13th September) "since my last.
+We are going to dine with Rogers to-day, and with Lady Essex, who is
+also here. Rogers is much pleased with Lord Ashley, who was offered by
+Peel a post in the government, but resolutely refused to take office
+unless Peel pledged himself to factory-improvement. Peel 'hadn't made up
+his mind,' and Lord Ashley was deaf to all other inducements, though
+they must have been very tempting. Much do I honor him for it. I am in
+an exquisitely lazy state, bathing, walking, reading, lying in the sun,
+doing everything but working. This frame of mind is superinduced by the
+prospect of rest, and the promising arrangements which I owe to you. I
+am still haunted by visions of America night and day. To miss this
+opportunity would be a sad thing. Kate cries dismally if I mention the
+subject. But, God willing, I think it _must_ be managed somehow!"
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[41] "M. was quite aghast last night (9th of September) at the
+brilliancy of the C. & H. arrangement: which is worth noting perhaps."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+EVE OF THE VISIT TO AMERICA.
+
+1841.
+
+ Greetings from America--Reply to Washington
+ Irving--Difficulties in the Way--Resolve to
+ go--Wish to revisit Scenes of Boyhood--Proposed
+ Book of Travel--Arrangements for the
+ Journey--Impatience of Suspense--Resolve to
+ leave the Children--Mrs. Dickens reconciled--A
+ Grave Illness--Domestic Griefs--The Old
+ Sorrow--At Windsor--Son Walter's
+ Christening--At Liverpool with the Travelers.
+
+
+THE notion of America was in his mind, as we have seen, when he first
+projected the _Clock_; and a very hearty letter from Washington Irving
+about Little Nell and the _Curiosity Shop_, expressing the delight with
+his writings and the yearnings to himself which had indeed been pouring
+in upon him for some time from every part of the States, had very
+strongly revived it. He answered Irving with more than his own warmth:
+unable to thank him enough for his cordial and generous praise, or to
+tell him what lasting gratification it had given. "I wish I could find
+in your welcome letter," he added, "some hint of an intention to visit
+England. I should love to go with you, as I have gone, God knows how
+often, into Little Britain, and Eastcheap, and Green Arbor Court, and
+Westminster Abbey. . . . It would gladden my heart to compare notes with
+you about all those delightful places and people that I used to walk
+about and dream of in the daytime, when a very small and
+not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy." After interchange of these
+letters the subject was frequently revived; upon his return from
+Scotland it began to take shape as a thing that somehow or other, at no
+very distant date, _must be_; and at last, near the end of a letter
+filled with many unimportant things, the announcement, doubly
+underlined, came to me.
+
+The decision once taken, he was in his usual fever until its
+difficulties were disposed of. The objections to separation from the
+children led at first to the notion of taking them, but this was as
+quickly abandoned; and what remained to be overcome yielded readily to
+the kind offices of Macready, the offer of whose home to the little ones
+during the time of absence, though not accepted to the full extent, gave
+yet the assurance needed to quiet natural apprehensions. All this,
+including an arrangement for publication of such notes as might occur to
+him on the journey, took but a few days; and I was reading in my
+chambers a letter he had written the previous day from Broadstairs, when
+a note from him reached me, written that morning in London, to tell me
+he was on his way to take share of my breakfast. He had come overland by
+Canterbury after posting his first letter, had seen Macready the
+previous night, and had completed some part of the arrangements. This
+mode of rapid procedure was characteristic of him at all similar times,
+and will appear in the few following extracts from his letters:
+
+"Now" (19th September) "to astonish you. After balancing, considering,
+and weighing the matter in every point of view, I HAVE MADE UP MY MIND
+(WITH GOD'S LEAVE) TO GO TO AMERICA--AND TO START AS SOON AFTER
+CHRISTMAS AS IT WILL BE SAFE TO GO." Further information was promised
+immediately; and a request followed, characteristic as any he could have
+added to his design of traveling so far away, that we should visit once
+more together the scenes of his boyhood. "On the ninth of October we
+leave here. It's a Saturday. If it should be fine dry weather, or
+anything like it, will you meet us at Rochester, and stop there two or
+three days to see all the lions in the surrounding country? Think of
+this. . . . If you'll arrange to come, I'll have the carriage down, and
+Topping; and, supposing news from Glasgow don't interfere with us, which
+I fervently hope it will not, I will insure that we have much
+enjoyment."
+
+Three days later than that which announced his resolve, the subject was
+resumed: "I wrote to Chapman & Hall asking them what they thought of it,
+and saying I meant to keep a note-book, and publish it for half a guinea
+or thereabouts, on my return. They instantly sent the warmest possible
+reply, and said they had taken it for granted I would go, and had been
+speaking of it only the day before. I have begged them to make every
+inquiry about the fares, cabins, berths, and times of sailing; and I
+shall make a great effort to take Kate _and_ the children. In that case
+I shall try to let the house furnished, for six months (for I shall
+remain that time in America); and if I succeed, the rent will nearly pay
+the expenses out, and home. I have heard of family cabins at L100; and I
+think one of these is large enough to hold us all. A single fare, I
+think, is forty guineas. I fear I could not be happy if we had the
+Atlantic between us; but leaving them in New York while I ran off a
+thousand miles or so, would be quite another thing. If I can arrange all
+my plans before publishing the _Clock_ address, I shall state therein
+that I am going: which will be no unimportant consideration, as
+affording the best possible reason for a long delay. How I am to get on
+without you for seven or eight months, I cannot, upon my soul, conceive.
+I dread to think of breaking up all our old happy habits for so long a
+time. The advantages of going, however, appear by steady looking-at so
+great, that I have come to persuade myself it is a matter of imperative
+necessity. Kate weeps whenever it is spoken of. Washington Irving has
+got a nasty low fever. I heard from him a day or two ago."
+
+His next letter was the unexpected arrival which came by hand from
+Devonshire Terrace, when I thought him still by the sea: "This is to
+give you notice that I am coming to breakfast with you this morning on
+my way to Broadstairs. I repeat it, sir,--on my way _to_ Broadstairs.
+For, directly I got Macready's note yesterday I went to Canterbury, and
+came on by day-coach for the express purpose of talking with him; which
+I did between 11 and 12 last night in Clarence Terrace. The American
+preliminaries are necessarily startling, and, to a gentleman of my
+temperament, destroy rest, sleep, appetite, and work, unless definitely
+arranged.[42] Macready has quite decided me in respect of time and so
+forth. The instant I have wrung a reluctant consent from Kate, I shall
+take our joint passage in the mail-packet for next January. I never
+loved my friends so well as now." We had all discountenanced his first
+thought of taking the children; and, upon this and other points, the
+experience of our friend who had himself traveled over the States was
+very valuable. His next letter, two days later from Broadstairs,
+informed me of the result of the Macready conference: "Only a word. Kate
+is quite reconciled. 'Anne' (her maid) goes, and is amazingly cheerful
+and light of heart upon it. And I think, at present, that it's a greater
+trial to me than anybody. The 4th of January is the day. Macready's note
+to Kate was received and acted upon with a perfect response. She talks
+about it quite gayly, and is satisfied to have nobody in the house but
+Fred, of whom, as you know, they are all fond. He has got his promotion,
+and they give him the increased salary from the day on which the minute
+was made by Baring, I feel so amiable, so meek, so fond of people, so
+full of gratitudes and reliances, that I am like a sick man. And I am
+already counting the days between this and coming home again."
+
+He was soon, alas! to be what he compared himself to. I met him at
+Rochester at the end of September, as arranged; we passed a day and
+night there; a day and night in Cobham and its neighborhood, sleeping at
+the Leather Bottle; and a day and night at Gravesend. But we were hardly
+returned when some slight symptoms of bodily trouble took suddenly
+graver form, and an illness followed involving the necessity of surgical
+attendance. This, which with mention of the helpful courage displayed by
+him has before been alluded to,[43] put off necessarily the Glasgow
+dinner; and he had scarcely left his bedroom when a trouble arose near
+home which touched him to the depths of the greatest sorrow of his life,
+and, in the need of exerting himself for others, what remained of his
+own illness seemed to pass away.
+
+His wife's younger brother had died with the same unexpected suddenness
+that attended her younger sister's death; and the event had followed
+close upon the decease of Mrs. Hogarth's mother while on a visit to her
+daughter and Mr. Hogarth. "As no steps had been taken towards the
+funeral," he wrote (25th October) in reply to my offer of such service
+as I could render, "I thought it best at once to bestir myself; and not
+even you could have saved my going to the cemetery. It is a great trial
+to me to give up Mary's grave; greater than I can possibly express. I
+thought of moving her to the catacombs and saying nothing about it; but
+then I remembered that the poor old lady is buried next her at her own
+desire, and could not find it in my heart, directly she is laid in the
+earth, to take her grandchild away. The desire to be buried next her is
+as strong upon me now as it was five years ago; and I _know_ (for I
+don't think there ever was love like that I bear her) that it will never
+diminish. I fear I can do nothing. Do you think I can? They would move
+her on Wednesday, if I resolved to have it done. I cannot bear the
+thought of being excluded from her dust; and yet I feel that her
+brothers and sisters, and her mother, have a better right than I to be
+placed beside her. It is but an idea. I neither think nor hope (God
+forbid) that our spirits would ever mingle _there_. I ought to get the
+better of it, but it is very hard. I never contemplated this--and coming
+so suddenly, and after being ill, it disturbs me more than it ought. It
+seems like losing her a second time. . . ." "No," he wrote the morning
+after, "I tried that. No, there is no ground on either side to be had. I
+must give it up. I shall drive over there, please God, on Thursday
+morning, before they get there; and look at her coffin."
+
+He suffered more than he let any one perceive, and was obliged again to
+keep his room for some days. On the 2d of November he reported himself
+as progressing and ordered to Richmond, which, after a week or so, he
+changed to the White Hart at Windsor, where I passed some days with him,
+Mrs. Dickens, and her younger sister Georgina; but it was not till near
+the close of that month he could describe himself as thoroughly on his
+legs again, in the ordinary state on which he was wont to pride himself,
+bolt upright, staunch at the knees, a deep sleeper, a hearty eater, a
+good laugher, and nowhere a bit the worse, "bating a little weakness now
+and then, and a slight nervousness at times."
+
+We had some days of much enjoyment at the end of the year, when Landor
+came up from Bath for the christening of his godson; and the
+"Britannia," which was to take the travelers from us in January, brought
+over to them in December all sorts of cordialities, anticipations, and
+stretchings-forth of palms, in token of the welcome awaiting them. On
+New Year's Eve they dined with me, and I with them on New Year's Day;
+when (his house having been taken for the period of his absence by
+General Sir John Wilson) we sealed up his wine-cellar, after opening
+therein some sparkling Moselle in honor of the ceremony, and drinking it
+then and there to his happy return. Next morning (it was a Sunday) I
+accompanied them to Liverpool, Maclise having been suddenly stayed by
+his mother's death; the intervening day and its occupations have been
+humorously sketched in his American book; and on the 4th they sailed. I
+never saw the Britannia after I stepped from her deck back to the small
+steamer that had taken us to her. "How little I thought" (were the last
+lines of his first American letter), "the first time you mounted the
+shapeless coat, that I should have such a sad association with its back
+as when I saw it by the paddle-box of that small steamer!"
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[42] See _ante_, p. 123.
+
+[43] See _ante_, p. 244.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA.
+
+1842.
+
+ Rough Passage--A Steamer in a Storm--Resigned
+ to the Worst--Of Himself and
+ Fellow-travelers--The Atlantic from Deck--The
+ Ladies' Cabin--Its Occupants--Card-playing on
+ the Atlantic--Ship-news--A Wager--Halifax
+ Harbor--Ship aground--Captain Hewitt--Speaker
+ of House of Assembly--Ovation to C. D.--Arrival
+ at Boston--Incursion of Editors--At Tremont
+ House--The Welcome--Deputations--Dr. Channing
+ to C. D.--Public Appearances--A Secretary
+ engaged--Bostonians--General
+ Characteristics--Personal Notices--Perils of
+ Steamers--A Home-thought--American
+ Institutions--How first impressed--Reasons for
+ the Greeting--What was welcomed in C. D.--Old
+ World and New World--Daniel Webster as to C.
+ D.--Channing as to C. D.--Subsequent
+ Disappointments--New York Invitation to
+ Dinner--Fac-similes of Signatures--Additional
+ Fac-similes--New York Invitation to
+ Ball--Fac-similes of Signatures--Additional
+ Fac-similes.
+
+
+THE first lines of that letter were written as soon as he got sight of
+earth again, from the banks of Newfoundland, on Monday, the 17th of
+January, the fourteenth day from their departure: even then so far from
+Halifax that they could not expect to make it before Wednesday night, or
+to reach Boston until Saturday or Sunday. They had not been fortunate in
+the passage. During the whole voyage the weather had been
+unprecedentedly bad, the wind for the most part dead against them, the
+wet intolerable, the sea horribly disturbed, the days dark, and the
+nights fearful. On the previous Monday night it had blown a hurricane,
+beginning at five in the afternoon and raging all night. His description
+of the storm is published, and the peculiarities of a steamer's behavior
+in such circumstances are hit off as if he had been all his life a
+sailor. Any but so extraordinary an observer would have described a
+steamer in a storm as he would have described a sailing-ship in a storm.
+But any description of the latter would be as inapplicable to my
+friend's account of the other as the ways of a jackass to those of a mad
+bull. In the letter from which it was taken, however, there were some
+things addressed to myself alone: "For two or three hours we gave it up
+as a lost thing; and with many thoughts of you, and the children, and
+those others who are dearest to us, waited quietly for the worst. I
+never expected to see the day again, and resigned myself to God as well
+as I could. It was a great comfort to think of the earnest and devoted
+friends we had left behind, and to know that the darlings would not
+want."
+
+This was not the exaggerated apprehension of a landsman merely. The head
+engineer, who had been in one or other of the Cunard vessels since they
+began running, had never seen such stress of weather; and I heard
+Captain Hewitt himself say afterwards that nothing but a steamer, and
+one of that strength, could have kept her course and stood it out. A
+sailing-vessel must have beaten off and driven where she could; while
+through all the fury of that gale they actually made fifty-four miles
+headlong through the tempest, straight on end, not varying their track
+in the least.
+
+He stood out against sickness only for the day following that on which
+they sailed. For the three following days he kept his bed, miserable
+enough, and had not, until the eighth day of the voyage, six days before
+the date of his letter, been able to get to work at the dinner-table.
+What he then observed of his fellow-travelers, and had to tell of their
+life on board, has been set forth in his _Notes_ with delightful humor;
+but in its first freshness I received it in this letter, and some
+whimsical passages, then suppressed, there will be no harm in printing
+now:
+
+"We have 86 passengers; and such a strange collection of beasts never
+was got together upon the sea, since the days of the Ark. I have never
+been in the saloon since the first day; the noise, the smell, and the
+closeness being quite intolerable. I have only been on deck _once_!--and
+then I was surprised and disappointed at the smallness of the panorama.
+The sea, running as it does and has done, is very stupendous, and viewed
+from the air or some great height would be grand no doubt. But seen from
+the wet and rolling decks, in this weather and these circumstances, it
+only impresses one giddily and painfully. I was very glad to turn away,
+and come below again.
+
+"I have established myself, from the first, in the ladies' cabin--you
+remember it? I'll describe its other occupants, and our way of passing
+the time, to you.
+
+"First, for the occupants. Kate and I, and Anne--when she is out of bed,
+which is not often. A queer little Scotch body, a Mrs. P--,[44] whose
+husband is a silversmith in New York. He married her at Glasgow three
+years ago, and bolted the day after the wedding; being (which he had not
+told her) heavily in debt. Since then she has been living with her
+mother; and she is now going out under the protection of a male cousin,
+to give him a year's trial. If she is not comfortable at the expiration
+of that time, she means to go back to Scotland again. A Mrs. B--, about
+20 years old, whose husband is on board with her. He is a young
+Englishman domiciled in New York, and by trade (as well as I can make
+out) a woolen-draper. They have been married a fortnight. A Mr. and Mrs.
+C--, marvelously fond of each other, complete the catalogue. Mrs. C--, I
+have settled, is a publican's daughter, and Mr. C-- is running away with
+her, the till, the time-piece off the bar mantel-shelf, the mother's
+gold watch from the pocket at the head of the bed; and other
+miscellaneous property. The women are all pretty; unusually pretty. I
+never saw such good faces together, anywhere."
+
+Their "way of passing the time" will be found in the _Notes_ much as it
+was written to me; except that there was one point connected with the
+card-playing which he feared might overtax the credulity of his readers,
+but which he protested had occurred more than once: "Apropos of rolling,
+I have forgotten to mention that in playing whist we are obliged to put
+the tricks in our pockets, to keep them from disappearing altogether;
+and that five or six times in the course of every rubber we are all
+flung from our seats, roll out at different doors, and keep on rolling
+until we are picked up by stewards. This has become such a matter of
+course, that we go through it with perfect gravity, and, when we are
+bolstered up on our sofas again, resume our conversation or our game at
+the point where it was interrupted." The news that excited them from day
+to day, too, of which little more than a hint appears in the _Notes_, is
+worth giving as originally written:
+
+"As for news, we have more of that than you would think for. One man
+lost fourteen pounds at vingt-un in the saloon yesterday, or another got
+drunk before dinner was over, or another was blinded with lobster-sauce
+spilt over him by the steward, or another had a fall on deck and
+fainted. The ship's cook was drunk yesterday morning (having got at some
+salt-water-damaged whiskey), and the captain ordered the boatswain to
+play upon him with the hose of the fire-engine until he roared for
+mercy--which he didn't get: for he was sentenced to look out, for four
+hours at a stretch for four nights running, without a great-coat, and to
+have his grog stopped. Four dozen plates were broken at dinner. One
+steward fell down the cabin stairs with a round of beef, and injured his
+foot severely. Another steward fell down after him and cut his eye open.
+The baker's taken ill; so is the pastry-cook. A new man, sick to death,
+has been required to fill the place of the latter officer, and has been
+dragged out of bed and propped up in a little house upon deck, between
+two casks, and ordered (the captain standing over him) to make and roll
+out pie-crust; which he protests, with tears in his eyes, it is death to
+him in his bilious state to look at. Twelve dozen of bottled porter has
+got loose upon deck, and the bottles are rolling about distractedly,
+overhead. Lord Mulgrave (a handsome fellow, by-the-by, to look at, and
+nothing but a good 'un to go) laid a wager with twenty-five other men
+last night, whose berths, like his, are in the fore-cabin, which can
+only be got at by crossing the deck, that he would reach his cabin
+first. Watches were set by the captain's, and they sallied forth,
+wrapped up in coats and storm caps. The sea broke over the ship so
+violently, that they were _five-and-twenty minutes_ holding on by the
+handrail at the starboard paddle-box, drenched to the skin by every
+wave, and not daring to go on or come back, lest they should be washed
+overboard. News! A dozen murders in town wouldn't interest us half as
+much."
+
+Nevertheless their excitements were not over. At the very end of the
+voyage came an incident very lightly touched in the _Notes_, but more
+freely told to me under date of the 21st January: "We were running into
+Halifax harbor on Wednesday night, with little wind and a bright moon;
+had made the light at its outer entrance, and given the ship in charge
+to the pilot; were playing our rubber, all in good spirits (for it had
+been comparatively smooth for some days, with tolerably dry decks and
+other unusual comforts), when suddenly the ship STRUCK! A rush upon deck
+followed, of course. The men (I mean the crew! think of this) were
+kicking off their shoes and throwing off their jackets preparatory to
+swimming ashore; the pilot was beside himself; the passengers dismayed;
+and everything in the most intolerable confusion and hurry. Breakers
+were roaring ahead; the land within a couple of hundred yards; and the
+vessel driving upon the surf, although her paddles were worked
+backwards, and everything done to stay her course. It is not the custom
+of steamers, it seems, to have an anchor ready. An accident occurred in
+getting ours over the side; and for half an hour we were throwing up
+rockets, burning blue-lights, and firing signals of distress, all of
+which remained unanswered, though we were so close to the shore that we
+could see the waving branches of the trees. All this time, as we veered
+about, a man was heaving the lead every two minutes; the depths of water
+constantly decreasing; and nobody self-possessed but Hewitt. They let go
+the anchor at last, got out a boat, and sent her ashore with the fourth
+officer, the pilot, and four men aboard, to try and find out where we
+were. The pilot had no idea; but Hewitt put his little finger upon a
+certain part of the chart, and was as confident of the exact spot
+(though he had never been there in his life) as if he had lived there
+from infancy. The boat's return about an hour afterwards proved him to
+be quite right. We had got into a place called the Eastern Passage, in a
+sudden fog and through the pilot's folly. We had struck upon a mud-bank,
+and driven into a perfect little pond, surrounded by banks and rocks and
+shoals of all kinds: the only safe speck in the place. Eased by this
+report, and the assurance that the tide was past the ebb, we turned in
+at three o'clock in the morning, to lie there all night."
+
+The next day's landing at Halifax, and delivery of the mails, are
+sketched in the _Notes_; but not his personal part in what followed:
+"Then, sir, comes a breathless man who has been already into the ship
+and out again, shouting my name as he tears along. I stop, arm in arm
+with the little doctor whom I have taken ashore for oysters. The
+breathless man introduces himself as The Speaker of the House of
+Assembly; _will_ drag me away to his house; and _will_ have a carriage
+and his wife sent down for Kate, who is laid up with a hideously swoln
+face. Then he drags me up to the Governor's house (Lord Falkland is the
+governor), and then Heaven knows where; concluding with both houses of
+parliament, which happen to meet for the session that very day, and are
+opened by a mock speech from the throne delivered by the governor, with
+one of Lord Grey's sons for his aide-de-camp, and a great host of
+officers about him. I wish you could have seen the crowds cheering the
+inimitable[45] in the streets. I wish you could have seen judges,
+law-officers, bishops, and law-makers welcoming the inimitable. I wish
+you could have seen the inimitable shown to a great elbow-chair by the
+Speaker's throne, and sitting alone in the middle of the floor of the
+House of Commons, the observed of all observers, listening with
+exemplary gravity to the queerest speaking possible, and breaking in
+spite of himself into a smile as he thought of this commencement to the
+Thousand and One stories in reserve for home and Lincoln's Inn Fields
+and Jack Straw's Castle.--Ah, Forster! when I _do_ come back again!----"
+
+He resumed his letter at Tremont House on Saturday, the 28th of January,
+having reached Boston that day week at five in the afternoon; and, as
+his first American experience is very lightly glanced at in the _Notes_,
+a fuller picture will perhaps be welcome. "As the Cunard boats have a
+wharf of their own at the custom-house, and that a narrow one, we were a
+long time (an hour at least) working in. I was standing in full fig on
+the paddle-box beside the captain, staring about me, when suddenly, long
+before we were moored to the wharf, a dozen men came leaping on board at
+the peril of their lives, with great bundles of newspapers under their
+arms; worsted comforters (very much the worse for wear) round their
+necks; and so forth. 'Aha!' says I, 'this is like our London Bridge;'
+believing of course that these visitors were news-boys. But what do you
+think of their being EDITORS? And what do you think of their tearing
+violently up to me and beginning to shake hands like madmen? Oh! if you
+could have seen how I wrung their wrists! And if you could but know how
+I hated one man in very dirty gaiters, and with very protruding upper
+teeth, who said to all comers after him, 'So you've been introduced to
+our friend Dickens--eh?' There was one among them, though, who really
+was of use; a Doctor S., editor of the ----. He ran off here (two miles
+at least), and ordered rooms and dinner. And in course of time Kate, and
+I, and Lord Mulgrave (who was going back to his regiment at Montreal on
+Monday, and had agreed to live with us in the mean while) sat down in a
+spacious and handsome room to a very handsome dinner, bating
+peculiarities of putting on table, and had forgotten the ship entirely.
+A Mr. Alexander, to whom I had written from England promising to sit for
+a portrait, was on board directly we touched the land, and brought us
+here in his carriage. Then, after sending a present of most beautiful
+flowers, he left us to ourselves, and we thanked him for it."
+
+What further he had to say of that week's experience finds its first
+public utterance here. "How can I tell you," he continues, "what has
+happened since that first day? How can I give you the faintest notion of
+my reception here; of the crowds that pour in and out the whole day; of
+the people that line the streets when I go out; of the cheering when I
+went to the theatre; of the copies of verses, letters of congratulation,
+welcomes of all kinds, balls, dinners, assemblies without end? There is
+to be a public dinner to me here in Boston, next Tuesday, and great
+dissatisfaction has been given to the many by the high price (three
+pounds sterling each) of the tickets. There is to be a ball next Monday
+week at New York, and 150 names appear on the list of the committee.
+There is to be a dinner in the same place, in the same week, to which I
+have had an invitation with every known name in America appended to it.
+But what can I tell you about any of these things which will give you
+the slightest notion of the enthusiastic greeting they give me, or the
+cry that runs through the whole country? I have had deputations from the
+Far West, who have come from more than two thousand miles' distance:
+from the lakes, the rivers, the back-woods, the log houses, the cities,
+factories, villages, and towns. Authorities from nearly all the States
+have written to me. I have heard from the universities, Congress,
+Senate, and bodies, public and private, of every sort and kind. 'It is
+no-nonsense, and no common feeling,' wrote Dr. Channing to me yesterday.
+'It is all heart. There never was, and never will be, such a triumph.'
+And it is a good thing, is it not, . . . to find those fancies it has
+given me and you the greatest satisfaction to think of, at the core of
+it all? It makes my heart quieter, and me a more retiring, sober,
+tranquil man, to watch the effect of those thoughts in all this noise
+and hurry, even than if I sat, pen in hand, to put them down for the
+first time. I feel, in the best aspects of this welcome, something of
+the presence and influence of that spirit which directs my life, and
+through a heavy sorrow has pointed upwards with unchanging finger for
+more than four years past. And if I know my heart, not twenty times this
+praise would move me to an act of folly.". . .
+
+There were but two days more before the post left for England, and the
+close of this part of his letter sketched the engagements that awaited
+him on leaving Boston: "We leave here next Saturday. We go to a place
+called Worcester, about 75 miles off, to the house of the governor of
+this place; and stay with him all Sunday. On Monday we go on by railroad
+about 50 miles further to a town called Springfield, where I am met by a
+'reception committee' from Hartford 20 miles further, and carried on by
+the multitude: I am sure I don't know how, but I shouldn't wonder if
+they appear with a triumphal car. On Wednesday I have a public dinner
+there. On Friday I shall be obliged to present myself in public again,
+at a place called New Haven, about 30 miles further. On Saturday
+evening I hope to be at New York; and there I shall stay ten days or a
+fortnight. You will suppose that I have enough to do. I am sitting for a
+portrait and for a bust. I have the correspondence of a secretary of
+state, and the engagements of a fashionable physician. I have a
+secretary whom I take on with me. He is a young man of the name of Q.;
+was strongly recommended to me; is most modest, obliging, silent, and
+willing; and does his work _well_. He boards and lodges at my expense
+when we travel; and his salary is ten dollars per month--about two
+pounds five of our English money. There will be dinners and balls at
+Washington, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and I believe everywhere. In
+Canada, I have promised to _play_ at the theatre with the officers, for
+the benefit of a charity. We are already weary, at times, past all
+expression; and I finish this by means of a pious fraud. We were engaged
+to a party, and have written to say we are both desperately ill. . . .
+'Well,' I can fancy you saying, 'but about his impressions of Boston and
+the Americans?'--Of the latter, I will not say a word until I have seen
+more of them, and have gone into the interior. I will only say, now,
+that we have never yet been required to dine at a table-d'hote; that,
+thus far, our rooms are as much our own here as they would be at the
+Clarendon; that but for an odd phrase now and then--such as _Snap of
+cold weather_; a _tongue-y man_ for a talkative fellow; _Possible?_ as a
+solitary interrogation; and _Yes?_ for indeed--I should have marked, so
+far, no difference whatever between the parties here and those I have
+left behind. The women are very beautiful, but they soon fade; the
+general breeding is neither stiff nor forward; the good nature,
+universal. If you ask the way to a place--of some common water-side man,
+who don't know you from Adam--he turns and goes with you. Universal
+deference is paid to ladies; and they walk about at all seasons, wholly
+unprotected. . . . This hotel is a trifle smaller than Finsbury Square; and
+is made so infernally hot (I use the expression advisedly) by means of a
+furnace with pipes running through the passages, that we can hardly bear
+it. There are no curtains to the beds, or to the bedroom windows. I am
+told there never are, hardly, all through America. The bedrooms are
+indeed very bare of furniture. Ours is nearly as large as your great
+room, and has a wardrobe in it of painted wood not larger (I appeal to
+K.) than an English watch-box. I slept in this room for two nights,
+quite satisfied with the belief that it was a shower-bath."
+
+The last addition made to this letter, from which many vividest pages of
+the _Notes_ (among them the bright quaint picture of Boston streets)
+were taken with small alteration, bore date the 29th of January: "I
+hardly know what to add to all this long and unconnected history. Dana,
+the author of that _Two Years before the Mast_" (a book which I had
+praised much to him, thinking it like De Foe), "is a very nice fellow
+indeed; and in appearance not at all the man you would expect. He is
+short, mild-looking, and has a care-worn face. His father is exactly
+like George Cruikshank after a night's jollity--only shorter. The
+professors at the Cambridge university, Longfellow, Felton, Jared
+Sparks, are noble fellows. So is Kenyon's friend, Ticknor. Bancroft is
+a famous man; a straightforward, manly, earnest heart; and talks much of
+you, which is a great comfort. Doctor Channing I will tell you more of,
+after I have breakfasted alone with him next Wednesday. . . . Sumner is of
+great service to me. . . . The president of the Senate here presides at my
+dinner on Tuesday. Lord Mulgrave lingered with us till last Tuesday (we
+had our little captain to dinner on the Monday), and then went on to
+Canada. Kate is quite well, and so is Anne, whose smartness surpasses
+belief. They yearn for home, and so do I.
+
+"Of course you will not see in the papers any true account of our
+voyage, for they keep the dangers of the passage, when there are any,
+very quiet. I observed so many perils peculiar to steamers that I am
+still undecided whether we shall not return by one of the New York
+liners. On the night of the storm, I was wondering within myself where
+we should be, if the chimney were blown overboard; in which case, it
+needs no great observation to discover that the vessel must be instantly
+on fire from stem to stern. When I went on deck next day, I saw that it
+was held up by a perfect forest of chains and ropes, which had been
+rigged in the night. Hewitt told me (when we were on shore, not before)
+that they had men lashed, hoisted up, and swinging there, all through
+the gale, getting these stays about it. This is not agreeable--is it?
+
+"I wonder whether you will remember that next Tuesday is my birthday!
+This letter will leave here that morning.
+
+"On looking back through these sheets, I am astonished to find how
+little I have told you, and how much I have, even now, in store which
+shall be yours by word of mouth. The American poor, the American
+factories, the institutions of all kinds--I have a book, already. There
+is no man in this town, or in this State of New England, who has not a
+blazing fire and a meat dinner every day of his life. A flaming sword in
+the air would not attract so much attention as a beggar in the streets.
+There are no charity uniforms, no wearisome repetition of the same dull
+ugly dress, in that blind school.[46] All are attired after their own
+tastes, and every boy and girl has his or her individuality as distinct
+and unimpaired as you would find it in their own homes. At the theatres,
+all the ladies sit in the fronts of the boxes. The gallery are as quiet
+as the dress circle at dear Drury Lane. A man with seven heads would be
+no sight at all, compared with one who couldn't read and write.
+
+"I won't speak (I say 'speak'! I wish I could) about the dear precious
+children, because I know how much we shall hear about them when we
+receive those letters from home for which we long so ardently."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Unmistakably to be seen, in this earliest of his letters, is the quite
+fresh and unalloyed impression first received by him at this memorable
+visit; and it is due, as well to himself as to the great country which
+welcomed him, that this should be considered independently of any
+modification it afterwards underwent. Of the fervency and universality
+of the welcome there could indeed be no doubt, and as little that it
+sprang from feelings honorable both to giver and receiver. The sources
+of Dickens's popularity in England were in truth multiplied many-fold in
+America. The hearty, cordial, and humane side of his genius had
+fascinated them quite as much; but there was also something beyond this.
+The cheerful temper that had given new beauty to the commonest forms of
+life, the abounding humor which had added largely to all innocent
+enjoyment, the honorable and in those days rare distinction of America
+which left no home in the Union inaccessible to such advantages, had
+made Dickens the object everywhere of grateful admiration, for the most
+part of personal affection. But even this was not all. I do not say it
+either to lessen or to increase the value of the tribute, but to express
+simply what it was; and there cannot be a question that the young
+English author, whom by his language they claimed equally for their own,
+was almost universally regarded by the Americans as a kind of embodied
+protest against what they believed to be worst in the institutions of
+England, depressing and overshadowing in a social sense, and adverse to
+purely intellectual influences. In all the papers of every grade in the
+Union, of which many were sent to me at the time, the feeling of triumph
+over the mother-country in this particular is everywhere predominant.
+You worship titles, they said, and military heroes, and millionaires,
+and we of the New World want to show you, by extending the kind of
+homage that the Old World reserves for kings and conquerors, to a young
+man with nothing to distinguish him but his heart and his genius, what
+it is we think in these parts worthier of honor, than birth, or wealth,
+a title, or a sword. Well, there was something in this too, apart from a
+mere crowing over the mother-country. The Americans had honestly more
+than a common share in the triumphs of a genius which in more than one
+sense had made the deserts and wildernesses of life to blossom like the
+rose. They were entitled to select for a welcome, as emphatic as they
+might please to render it, the writer who pre-eminently in his
+generation had busied himself to "detect and save," in human creatures,
+such sparks of virtue as misery or vice had not availed to extinguish;
+to discover what is beautiful and comely under what commonly passes for
+the ungainly and the deformed; to draw happiness and hopefulness from
+despair itself; and, above all, so to have made known to his own
+countrymen the wants and sufferings of the poor, the ignorant, and the
+neglected, that they could be left in absolute neglect no more. "A
+triumph has been prepared for him," wrote Mr. Ticknor to our dear friend
+Kenyon, "in which the whole country will join. He will have a progress
+through the States unequaled since Lafayette's." Daniel Webster told the
+Americans that Dickens had done more already to ameliorate the condition
+of the English poor than all the statesmen Great Britain had sent into
+Parliament. His sympathies are such, exclaimed Dr. Channing, as to
+recommend him in an especial manner to us. He seeks out that class, in
+order to benefit them, with whom American institutions and laws
+sympathize most strongly; and it is in the passions, sufferings, and
+virtues of the mass that he has found his subjects of most thrilling
+interest. "He shows that life in its rudest form may wear a tragic
+grandeur; that amidst follies and excesses, provoking laughter or scorn,
+the moral feelings do not wholly die; and that the haunts of the
+blackest crime are sometimes lighted up by the presence and influence of
+the noblest souls. His pictures have a tendency to awaken sympathy with
+our race, and to change the unfeeling indifference which has prevailed
+towards the depressed multitude, into a sorrowful and indignant
+sensibility to their wrongs and woes."
+
+Whatever may be the turn which we are to see the welcome take, by
+dissatisfaction that arose on both sides, it is well that we should thus
+understand what in its first manifestations was honorable to both.
+Dickens had his disappointments, and the Americans had theirs; but what
+was really genuine in the first enthusiasm remained without grave alloy
+from either; and the letters, as I proceed to give them, will so
+naturally explain and illustrate the misunderstanding as to require
+little further comment. I am happy to be able here to place on record
+fac-similes of the invitations to the public entertainments in New York
+which reached him before he quitted Boston. The mere signatures suffice
+to show how universal the welcome was from that great city of the
+Union.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[44] The initials used here are in no case those of the real names,
+being employed in every case for the express purpose of disguising the
+names. Generally the remark is applicable to all initials used in the
+letters printed in the course of this work.
+
+[45] This word, applied to him by his old master; Mr. Giles (_ante_, p.
+33), was for a long time the epithet we called him by.
+
+[46] His descriptions of this school, and of the case of Laura
+Bridgeman, will be found in the _Notes_, and have therefore been, of
+course, omitted here.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+SECOND IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA.
+
+1842.
+
+ Second Letter--International Copyright--Third
+ Letter--The Dinner at Boston--Worcester,
+ Springfield, and Hartford--Queer
+ Traveling--Levees at Hartford and New Haven--At
+ Wallingford--Serenades--Cornelius C.
+ Felton--Payment of Personal Expenses
+ declined--At New York--Irving and
+ Colden--Description of the Ball--Newspaper
+ Accounts--A Phase of Character--Opinion in
+ America--International Copyright--American
+ Authors in regard to it--Outcry against the
+ Nation's Guest--Declines to be silent on
+ Copyright--Speech at Dinner--Irving in the
+ Chair--Chairman's Breakdown--An Incident
+ afterwards in London--Results of Copyright
+ Speeches--A Bookseller's Demand for
+ Help--Suggestion for Copyright Memorial--Henry
+ Clay's Opinion--Life in New York--Distresses of
+ Popularity--Intentions for Future--Refusal of
+ Invitations--Going South and West--As to
+ Return--Dangers incident to
+ Steamers--Slavery--Ladies of America--Party
+ Conflicts--Non-arrival of Cunard
+ Steamer--Copyright Petition for Congress--No
+ Hope of the Caledonia--Substitute for
+ her--Anxiety as to Letters--Of Distinguished
+ Americans--Hotel Bills--Thoughts of the
+ Children--Acadia takes Caledonia's
+ Place--Letter to C. D. from Carlyle--Carlyle on
+ Copyright--Argument against Stealing--Rob Roy's
+ Plan worth bettering--C. D. as to Carlyle.
+
+
+HIS second letter, radiant with the same kindly warmth that gave always
+pre-eminent charm to his genius, was dated from the Carlton Hotel, New
+York, on the 14th February, but its only allusion of any public interest
+was to the beginning of his agitation of the question of international
+copyright. He went to America with no express intention of starting
+this question in any way, and certainly with no belief that such remark
+upon it as a person in his position could alone be expected to make
+would be resented strongly by any sections of the American people. But
+he was not long left in doubt on this head. He had spoken upon it twice
+publicly, "to the great indignation of some of the editors here, who are
+attacking me for so doing, right and left." On the other hand, all the
+best men had assured him that, if only at once followed up in England,
+the blow struck might bring about a change in the law; and, yielding to
+the pleasant hope that the best men could be a match for the worst, he
+urged me to enlist on his side what force I could, and in particular, as
+he had made Scott's claim his war-cry, to bring Lockhart into the field.
+I could not do much, but I did what I could.
+
+Three days later he began another letter; and, as this will be entirely
+new to the reader, I shall print it as it reached me, with only such
+omission of matter concerning myself as I think it my duty, however
+reluctantly, to make throughout these extracts. There was nothing in its
+personal details, or in those relating to international copyright,
+available for his _Notes_; from which they were excluded by the two
+rules he observed in that book,--the first to be altogether silent as to
+the copyright discussion, and the second to abstain from all mention of
+individuals. But there can be no harm here in violating either rule,
+for, as Sydney Smith said with his humorous sadness, "We are all dead
+now."
+
+"Carlton House, New York: Thursday, February Seventeenth, 1842. . . . As
+there is a sailing-packet from here to England to-morrow which is
+warranted (by the owners) to be a marvelous fast sailer, and as it
+appears most probable that she will reach home (I write the word with a
+pang) before the Cunard steamer of next month, I indite this letter. And
+lest this letter should reach you before another letter which I
+dispatched from here last Monday, let me say in the first place that I
+_did_ dispatch a brief epistle to you on that day, together with a
+newspaper, and a pamphlet touching the Boz ball; and that I put in the
+post-office at Boston another newspaper for you containing an account of
+the dinner, which was just about to come off, you remember, when I wrote
+to you from that city.
+
+"It was a most superb affair; and the speaking _admirable_. Indeed, the
+general talent for public speaking here is one of the most striking of
+the things that force themselves upon an Englishman's notice. As every
+man looks on to being a member of Congress, every man prepares himself
+for it; and the result is quite surprising. You will observe one odd
+custom,--the drinking of sentiments. It is quite extinct with us, but
+here everybody is expected to be prepared with an epigram as a matter of
+course.
+
+"We left Boston on the fifth, and went away with the governor of the
+city to stay till Monday at his house at Worcester. He married a sister
+of Bancroft's, and another sister of Bancroft's went down with us. The
+village of Worcester is one of the prettiest in New England. . . . On
+Monday morning at nine o'clock we started again by railroad and went on
+to Springfield, where a deputation of two were waiting, and everything
+was in readiness that the utmost attention could suggest. Owing to the
+mildness of the weather, the Connecticut river was 'open,' videlicet not
+frozen, and they had a steamboat ready to carry us on to Hartford; thus
+saving a land-journey of only twenty-five miles, but on such roads at
+this time of year that it takes nearly twelve hours to accomplish! The
+boat was very small, the river full of floating blocks of ice, and the
+depth where we went (to avoid the ice and the current) not more than a
+few inches. After two hours and a half of this queer traveling, we got
+to Hartford. There, there was quite an English inn; except in respect of
+the bedrooms, which are always uncomfortable; and the best committee of
+management that has yet presented itself. They kept us more quiet, and
+were more considerate and thoughtful, even to their own exclusion, than
+any I have yet had to deal with. Kate's face being horribly bad, I
+determined to give her a rest here; and accordingly wrote to get rid of
+my engagement at New Haven, on that plea. We remained in this town until
+the eleventh: holding a formal levee every day for two hours, and
+receiving on each from two hundred to three hundred people. At five
+o'clock on the afternoon of the eleventh, we set off (still by railroad)
+for New Haven, which we reached about eight o'clock. The moment we had
+had tea, we were forced to open another levee for the students and
+professors of the college (the largest in the States), and the
+townspeople. I suppose we shook hands, before going to bed, with
+considerably more than five hundred people; and I stood, as a matter of
+course, the whole time. . . .
+
+"Now, the deputation of two had come on with us from Hartford; and at
+New Haven there was another committee; and the immense fatigue and
+worry of all this, no words can exaggerate. We had been in the morning
+over jails and deaf and dumb asylums; had stopped on the journey at a
+place called Wallingford, where a whole town had turned out to see me,
+and to gratify whose curiosity the train stopped expressly; had had a
+day of great excitement and exertion on the Thursday (this being
+Friday); and were inexpressibly worn out. And when at last we got to bed
+and were 'going' to fall asleep, the choristers of the college turned
+out in a body, under the window, and serenaded us! We had had,
+by-the-by, another serenade at Hartford, from a Mr. Adams (a nephew of
+John Quincy Adams) and a German friend. _They_ were most beautiful
+singers: and when they began, in the dead of the night, in a long,
+musical, echoing passage outside our chamber door; singing, in low
+voices to guitars, about home and absent friends and other topics that
+they knew would interest us; we were more moved than I can tell you. In
+the midst of my sentimentality, though, a thought occurred to me which
+made me laugh so immoderately that I was obliged to cover my face with
+the bedclothes. 'Good Heavens!' I said to Kate, 'what a monstrously
+ridiculous and commonplace appearance my boots must have, outside the
+door!' I never _was_ so impressed with a sense of the absurdity of
+boots, in all my life.
+
+"The New Haven serenade was not so good; though there were a great many
+voices, and a 'reg'lar' band. It hadn't the heart of the other. Before
+it was six hours old, we were dressing with might and main, and making
+ready for our departure; it being a drive of twenty minutes to the
+steamboat, and the hour of sailing nine o'clock. After a hasty breakfast
+we started off; and after another levee on the deck (actually on the
+deck), and 'three times three for Dickens,' moved towards New York.
+
+"I was delighted to find on board a Mr. Felton whom I had known at
+Boston. He is the Greek professor at Cambridge, and was going on to the
+ball and dinner. Like most men of his class whom I have seen, he is a
+most delightful fellow,--unaffected, hearty, genial, jolly; quite an
+Englishman of the best sort. We drank all the porter on board, ate all
+the cold pork and cheese, and were very merry indeed. I should have told
+you, in its proper place, that both at Hartford and New Haven a regular
+bank was subscribed, by these committees, for _all_ my expenses. No bill
+was to be got at the bar, and everything was paid for. But as I would on
+no account suffer this to be done, I stoutly and positively refused to
+budge an inch until Mr. Q. should have received the bills from the
+landlord's own hands, and paid them to the last farthing. Finding it
+impossible to move me, they suffered me, most unwillingly, to carry the
+point.
+
+"About half-past 2 we arrived here. In half an hour more, we reached
+this hotel, where a very splendid suite of rooms was prepared for us;
+and where everything is very comfortable, and no doubt (as at Boston)
+_enormously_ dear. Just as we sat down to dinner, David Colden made his
+appearance; and when he had gone, and we were taking our wine,
+Washington Irving came in alone, with open arms. And here he stopped,
+until ten o'clock at night." (Through Lord Jeffrey, with whom he was
+connected by marriage, and Macready, of whom he was the cordial friend,
+we already knew Mr. Colden; and his subsequent visits to Europe led to
+many years' intimate intercourse, greatly enjoyed by us both.) "Having
+got so far, I shall divide my discourse into four points. First, the
+ball. Secondly, some slight specimens of a certain phase of character in
+the Americans. Thirdly, international copyright. Fourthly, my life here,
+and projects to be carried out while I remain.
+
+"Firstly, the ball. It came off last Monday (vide pamphlet.) 'At a
+quarter-past 9, exactly' (I quote the printed order of proceeding), we
+were waited upon by 'David Colden, Esquire, and General George Morris;'
+habited, the former in full ball costume, the latter in the full dress
+uniform of Heaven knows what regiment of militia. The general took Kate,
+Colden gave his arm to me, and we proceeded downstairs to a carriage at
+the door, which took us to the stage-door of the theatre, greatly to the
+disappointment of an enormous crowd who were besetting the main door and
+making a most tremendous hullaballoo. The scene on our entrance was very
+striking. There were three thousand people present in full dress; from
+the roof to the floor, the theatre was decorated magnificently; and the
+light, glitter, glare, show, noise, and cheering, baffle my descriptive
+powers. We were walked in through the centre of the centre dress-box,
+the front whereof was taken out for the occasion; so to the back of the
+stage, where the mayor and other dignitaries received us; and we were
+then paraded all round the enormous ball-room, twice, for the
+gratification of the many-headed. That done, we began to dance--Heaven
+knows how we did it, for there was no room. And we continued dancing
+until, being no longer able even to stand, we slipped away quietly, and
+came back to the hotel. All the documents connected with this
+extraordinary festival (quite unparalleled here) we have preserved; so
+you may suppose that on this head alone we shall have enough to show you
+when we come home. The bill of fare for supper is, in its amount and
+extent, quite a curiosity.
+
+"Now, the phase of character in the Americans which amuses me most was
+put before me in its most amusing shape by the circumstances attending
+this affair. I had noticed it before, and have since; but I cannot
+better illustrate it than by reference to this theme. Of course I can do
+nothing but in some shape or other it gets into the newspapers. All
+manner of lies get there, and occasionally a truth so twisted and
+distorted that it has as much resemblance to the real fact as Quilp's
+leg to Taglioni's. But with this ball to come off, the newspapers were
+if possible unusually loquacious; and in their accounts of me, and my
+seeings, sayings, and doings on the Saturday night and Sunday before,
+they describe my manner, mode of speaking, dressing, and so forth. In
+doing this, they report that I am a very charming fellow (of course),
+and have a very free and easy way with me; 'which,' say they, 'at first
+amused a few fashionables;' but soon pleased them exceedingly. Another
+paper, coming after the ball, dwells upon its splendor and brilliancy;
+hugs itself and its readers upon all that Dickens saw, and winds up by
+gravely expressing its conviction that Dickens was never in such
+society in England as he has seen in New York, and that its high and
+striking tone cannot fail to make an indelible impression on his mind!
+For the same reason I am always represented, whenever I appear in
+public, as being 'very pale;' 'apparently thunderstruck;' and utterly
+confounded by all I see. . . . You recognize the queer vanity which is at
+the root of all this? I have plenty of stories in connection with it to
+amuse you with when I return."
+
+
+ "_Twenty-fourth February._
+
+"It is unnecessary to say . . . that this letter _didn't_ come by the
+sailing packet, and _will_ come by the Cunard boat. After the ball I was
+laid up with a very bad sore throat, which confined me to the house four
+whole days; and as I was unable to write, or indeed to do anything but
+doze and drink lemonade, I missed the ship. . . . I have still a
+horrible cold, and so has Kate, but in other respects we are all right.
+I proceed to my third head: the international copyright question.
+
+"I believe there is no country on the face of the earth where there is
+less freedom of opinion on any subject in reference to which there is a
+broad difference of opinion, than in this.--There!--I write the words
+with reluctance, disappointment, and sorrow; but I believe it from the
+bottom of my soul. I spoke, as you know, of international copyright, at
+Boston; and I spoke of it again at Hartford. My friends were paralyzed
+with wonder at such audacious daring. The notion that I, a man alone by
+himself, in America, should venture to suggest to the Americans that
+there was one point on which they were neither just to their own
+countrymen nor to us, actually struck the boldest dumb! Washington
+Irving, Prescott, Hoffman, Bryant, Halleck, Dana, Washington
+Allston--every man who writes in this country is devoted to the
+question, and not one of them _dares_ to raise his voice and complain of
+the atrocious state of the law. It is nothing that of all men living I
+am the greatest loser by it. It is nothing that I have a claim to speak
+and be heard. The wonder is that a breathing man can be found with
+temerity enough to suggest to the Americans the possibility of their
+having done wrong. I wish you could have seen the faces that I saw, down
+both sides of the table at Hartford, when I began to talk about Scott. I
+wish you could have heard how I gave it out. My blood so boiled as I
+thought of the monstrous injustice that I felt as if I were twelve feet
+high when I thrust it down their throats.
+
+"I had no sooner made that second speech than such an outcry began (for
+the purpose of deterring me from doing the like in this city) as an
+Englishman can form no notion of. Anonymous letters, verbal dissuasions;
+newspaper attacks making Colt (a murderer who is attracting great
+attention here) an angel by comparison with me; assertions that I was no
+gentleman, but a mere mercenary scoundrel; coupled with the most
+monstrous misrepresentations relative to my design and purpose in
+visiting the United States; came pouring in upon me every day. The
+dinner committee here (composed of the first gentlemen in America,
+remember that) were so dismayed, that they besought me not to pursue the
+subject, _although they every one agreed with me_. I answered that I
+would. That nothing should deter me. . . . That the shame was theirs,
+not mine; and that as I would not spare them when I got home, I would
+not be silenced here. Accordingly, when the night came, I asserted my
+right, with all the means I could command to give it dignity, in face,
+manner, or words; and I believe that if you could have seen and heard
+me, you would have loved me better for it than ever you did in your
+life.
+
+"The _New York Herald_, which you will receive with this, is the
+_Satirist_ of America; but having a great circulation (on account of its
+commercial intelligence and early news) it can afford to secure the best
+reporters. . . . My speech is done, upon the whole, with remarkable
+accuracy. There are a great many typographical errors in it; and by the
+omission of one or two words, or the substitution of one word for
+another, it is often materially weakened. Thus, I did not say that I
+'claimed' my right, but that I 'asserted' it; and I did not say that I
+had 'some claim,' but that I had 'a most righteous claim,' to speak. But
+altogether it is very correct."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Washington Irving was chairman of this dinner, and, having from the
+first a dread that he should break down in his speech, the catastrophe
+came accordingly. Near him sat the Cambridge professor who had come with
+Dickens by boat from New Haven, with whom already a warm friendship had
+been formed that lasted for life, and who has pleasantly sketched what
+happened. Mr. Felton saw Irving constantly in the interval of
+preparation, and could not but despond at his daily iterated foreboding
+of _I shall certainly break down_; though besides the real dread there
+was a sly humor which heightened its whimsical horror with an
+irresistible drollery. But the professor plucked up hope a little when
+the night came and he saw that Irving had laid under his plate the
+manuscript of his speech. During dinner, nevertheless, his old
+foreboding cry was still heard, and "at last the moment arrived; Mr.
+Irving rose; and the deafening and long-continued applause by no means
+lessened his apprehension. He began in his pleasant voice; got through
+two or three sentences pretty easily, but in the next hesitated; and,
+after one or two attempts to go on, gave it up, with a graceful allusion
+to the tournament and the troop of knights all armed and eager for the
+fray; and ended with the toast CHARLES DICKENS, THE GUEST OF THE NATION.
+_There!_ said he, as he resumed his seat amid applause as great as had
+greeted his rising, _There! I told you I should break down, and I've
+done it!_" He was in London a few months later, on his way to Spain; and
+I heard Thomas Moore describe[47] at Rogers's table the difficulty there
+had been to overcome his reluctance, because of this break-down, to go
+to the dinner of the Literary Fund on the occasion of Prince Albert's
+presiding. "However," said Moore, "I told him only to attempt a few
+words, and I suggested what they should be, and he said he'd never
+thought of anything so easy, and he went, and did famously." I knew very
+well, as I listened, that this had _not_ been the result; but as the
+distinguished American had found himself, on this second occasion, not
+among orators as in New York, but among men as unable as himself to
+speak in public, and equally able to do better things,[48] he was
+doubtless more reconciled to his own failure. I have been led to this
+digression by Dickens's silence on his friend's break-down. He had so
+great a love for Irving that it was painful to speak of him as at any
+disadvantage, and of the New York dinner he wrote only in its connection
+with his own copyright speeches.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"The effect of all this copyright agitation at least has been to awaken
+a great sensation on both sides of the subject; the respectable
+newspapers and reviews taking up the cudgels as strongly in my favor, as
+the others have done against me. Some of the vagabonds take great credit
+to themselves (grant us patience!) for having made me popular by
+publishing my books in newspapers: as if there were no England, no
+Scotland, no Germany, no place but America in the whole world. A
+splendid satire upon this kind of trash has just occurred. A man came
+here yesterday, and demanded, not besought but demanded, pecuniary
+assistance; and fairly bullied Mr. Q. for money. When I came home, I
+dictated a letter to this effect,--that such applications reached me in
+vast numbers every day; that if I were a man of fortune, I could not
+render assistance to all who sought it; and that, depending on my own
+exertion for all the help I could give, I regretted to say I could
+afford him none. Upon this, my gentleman sits down and writes me that he
+is an itinerant bookseller; that he is the first man who sold my books
+in New York; that he is distressed in the city where I am reveling in
+luxury; that he thinks it rather strange that the man who wrote
+_Nickleby_ should be utterly destitute of feeling; and that he would
+have me 'take care I don't repent it.' What do you think of _that_?--as
+Mac would say. I thought it such a good commentary, that I dispatched
+the letter to the editor of the only English newspaper here, and told
+him he might print it if he liked.
+
+"I will tell you what _I_ should like, my dear friend, always supposing
+that your judgment concurs with mine, and that you would take the
+trouble to get such a document. I should like to have a short letter
+addressed to me by the principal English authors who signed the
+international copyright petition, expressive of their sense that I have
+done my duty to the cause. I am sure I deserve it, but I don't wish it
+on that ground. It is because its publication in the best journals here
+would unquestionably do great good. As the gauntlet is down, let us go
+on. Clay has already sent a gentleman to me express from Washington
+(where I shall be on the 6th or 7th of next month) to declare his strong
+interest in the matter, his cordial approval of the 'manly' course I
+have held in reference to it, and his desire to stir in it if possible.
+I have lighted up such a blaze that a meeting of the foremost people on
+the other side (very respectfully and properly conducted in reference to
+me, personally, I am bound to say) was held in this town t'other night.
+And it would be a thousand pities if we did not strike as hard as we
+can, now that the iron is so hot.
+
+"I have come at last, and it is time I did, to my life here, and
+intentions for the future. I can do nothing that I want to do, go
+nowhere where I want to go, and see nothing that I want to see. If I
+turn into the street, I am followed by a multitude. If I stay at home,
+the house becomes, with callers, like a fair. If I visit a public
+institution, with only one friend, the directors come down
+incontinently, waylay me in the yard, and address me in a long speech. I
+go to a party in the evening, and am so inclosed and hemmed about by
+people, stand where I will, that I am exhausted for want of air. I dine
+out, and have to talk about everything, to everybody. I go to church for
+quiet, and there is a violent rush to the neighborhood of the pew I sit
+in, and the clergyman preaches _at_ me. I take my seat in a
+railroad-car, and the very conductor won't leave me alone. I get out at
+a station, and can't drink a glass of water, without having a hundred
+people looking down my throat when I open my mouth to swallow. Conceive
+what all this is! Then by every post, letters on letters arrive, all
+about nothing, and all demanding an immediate answer. This man is
+offended because I won't live in his house; and that man is thoroughly
+disgusted because I won't go out more than four times in one evening. I
+have no rest or peace, and am in a perpetual worry.
+
+"Under these febrile circumstances, which this climate especially
+favors, I have come to the resolution that I will not (so far as my will
+has anything to do with the matter) accept any more public
+entertainments or public recognitions of any kind, during my stay in the
+United States; and in pursuance of this determination I have refused
+invitations from Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Virginia, Albany,
+and Providence. Heaven knows whether this will be effectual, but I shall
+soon see, for on Monday morning, the 28th, we leave for Philadelphia.
+There I shall only stay three days. Thence we go to Baltimore, and
+_there_ I shall only stay three days. Thence to Washington, where we may
+stay perhaps ten days; perhaps not so long. Thence to Virginia, where we
+may halt for one day; and thence to Charleston, where we may pass a week
+perhaps, and where we shall very likely remain until your March letters
+reach us, through David Colden. I had a design of going from Charleston
+to Columbia in South Carolina, and there engaging a carriage, a
+baggage-tender and negro boy to guard the same, and a saddle-horse for
+myself,--with which caravan I intended going 'right away,' as they say
+here, into the West, through the wilds of Kentucky and Tennessee, across
+the Alleghany Mountains, and so on until we should strike the lakes and
+could get to Canada. But it has been represented to me that this is a
+track only known to traveling merchants; that the roads are bad, the
+country a tremendous waste, the inns log houses, and the journey one
+that would play the very devil with Kate. I am staggered, but not
+deterred. If I find it possible to be done in the time, I mean to do it;
+being quite satisfied that without some such dash I can never be a free
+agent, or see anything worth the telling.
+
+"We mean to return home in a packet-ship,--not a steamer. Her name is
+the George Washington, and she will sail from here, for Liverpool, on
+the seventh of June. At that season of the year they are seldom more
+than three weeks making the voyage; and I never will trust myself upon
+the wide ocean, if it please Heaven, in a steamer again. When I tell you
+all that I observed on board that Britannia, I shall astonish you.
+Meanwhile, consider two of their dangers. First, that if the funnel were
+blown overboard the vessel must instantly be on fire, from stem to
+stern; to comprehend which consequence, you have only to understand that
+the funnel is more than 40 feet high, and that at night you see the
+solid fire two or three feet above its top. Imagine this swept down by a
+strong wind, and picture to yourself the amount of flame on deck; and
+that a strong wind is likely to sweep it down you soon learn, from the
+precautions taken to keep it up in a storm, when it is the first thing
+thought of. Secondly, each of these boats consumes between London and
+Halifax 700 tons of coals; and it is pretty clear, from this enormous
+difference of weight in a ship of only 1200 tons burden in all, that she
+must either be too heavy when she comes out of port, or too light when
+she goes in. The daily difference in her rolling, as she burns the coals
+out, is something absolutely fearful. Add to all this, that by day and
+night she is full of fire and people, that she has no boats, and that
+the struggling of that enormous machinery in a heavy sea seems as though
+it would rend her into fragments--and you may have a pretty con-sid-erable
+damned good sort of a feeble notion that it don't fit nohow; and that it
+a'n't calculated to make you smart, overmuch; and that you don't feel
+'special bright; and by no means first-rate; and not at all tonguey (or
+disposed for conversation); and that however rowdy you may be by natur',
+it does use you up com-plete, and that's a fact; and makes you quake
+considerable, and disposed toe damn the [)e]ngin[)e]!--All of which
+phrases, I beg to add, are pure Americanisms of the first water.
+
+"When we reach Baltimore, we are in the regions of slavery. It exists
+there, in its least shocking and most mitigated form; but there it is.
+They whisper, here (they dare only whisper, you know, and that below
+their breaths), that on that place, and all through the South, there is
+a dull gloomy cloud on which the very word seems written. I shall be
+able to say, one of these days, that I accepted no public mark of
+respect in any place where slavery was;--and that's something.
+
+"The ladies of America are decidedly and unquestionably beautiful. Their
+complexions are not so good as those of Englishwomen; their beauty does
+not last so long; and their figures are very inferior. But they are most
+beautiful. I still reserve my opinion of the national character,--just
+whispering that I tremble for a radical coming here, unless he is a
+radical on principle, by reason and reflection, and from the sense of
+right. I fear that if he were anything else, he would return home a
+Tory. . . . I say no more on that head for two months from this time,
+save that I do fear that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty will be
+dealt by this country, in the failure of its example to the earth. The
+scenes that are passing in Congress now, all tending to the separation
+of the States, fill one with such a deep disgust that I dislike the very
+name of Washington (meaning the place, not the man), and am repelled by
+the mere thought of approaching it."
+
+
+ "_Twenty-seventh February. Sunday._
+
+"There begins to be great consternation here, in reference to the Cunard
+packet which (we suppose) left Liverpool on the fourth. She has not yet
+arrived. We scarcely know what to do with ourselves in our extreme
+anxiety to get letters from home. I have really had serious thoughts of
+going back to Boston, alone, to be nearer news. We have determined to
+remain here until Tuesday afternoon, if she should not arrive before,
+and to send Mr. Q. and the luggage on to Philadelphia to-morrow morning.
+God grant she may not have gone down! but every ship that comes in
+brings intelligence of a terrible gale (which indeed was felt ashore
+here) on the night of the fourteenth; and the sea-captains swear (not
+without some prejudice, of course) that no steamer could have lived
+through it, supposing her to have been in its full fury. As there is no
+steam-packet to go to England, supposing the Caledonia not to arrive, we
+are obliged to send our letters by the Garrick ship, which sails early
+to-morrow morning. Consequently I must huddle this up, and dispatch it
+to the post-office with all speed. I have so much to say that I could
+fill quires of paper, which renders this sudden pull-up the more
+provoking.
+
+"I have in my portmanteau a petition for an international copyright law,
+signed by all the best American writers, with Washington Irving at
+their head. They have requested me to hand it to Clay for presentation,
+and to back it with any remarks I may think proper to offer. So
+'Hoo-roar for the principle, as the money-lender said ven he vouldn't
+renoo the bill.'
+
+"God bless you. . . . You know what I would say about home and the
+darlings. A hundred times God bless you. . . . Fears are entertained for
+Lord Ashburton also. Nothing has been heard of him."
+
+A brief letter, sent me next day by the minister's bag, was in effect a
+postscript to the foregoing, and expressed still more strongly the
+doubts and apprehensions his voyage out had impressed him with, and
+which, though he afterwards saw reason greatly to modify his misgivings,
+were not so strange at that time as they appear to us now:
+
+"Carlton House, New York, February twenty-eighth, 1842. . . . The
+Caledonia, I grieve and regret to say, has not arrived. If she left
+England to her time, she has been four-and-twenty days at sea. There is
+no news of her; and on the nights of the fourteenth and eighteenth it
+blew a terrible gale, which almost justifies the worst suspicions. For
+myself, I have hardly any hope of her; having seen enough, in our
+passage out, to convince me that steaming across the ocean in heavy
+weather is as yet an experiment of the utmost hazard.
+
+"As it was supposed that there would be no steamer whatever for England
+this month (since in ordinary course the Caledonia would have returned
+with the mails on the 2d of March), I hastily got the letters ready
+yesterday and sent them by the Garrick; which may perhaps be three
+weeks out, but is not very likely to be longer. But belonging to the
+Cunard company is a boat called the Unicorn, which in the summertime
+plies up the St. Lawrence, and brings passengers from Canada to join the
+British and North American steamers at Halifax. In the winter she lies
+at the last-mentioned place; from which news has come this morning that
+they have sent her on to Boston for the mails, and, rather than
+interrupt the communication, mean to dispatch her to England in lieu of
+the poor Caledonia. This in itself, by the way, is a daring deed; for
+she was originally built to run between Liverpool and Glasgow, and is no
+more designed for the Atlantic than a Calais packet-boat; though she
+once crossed it, in the summer season.
+
+"You may judge, therefore, what the owners think of the probability of
+the Caledonia's arrival. How slight an alteration in our plans would
+have made us passengers on board of her!
+
+"It would be difficult to tell you, my dear fellow, what an impression
+this has made upon our minds, or with what intense anxiety and suspense
+we have been waiting for your letters from home. We were to have gone
+South to-day, but linger here until to-morrow afternoon (having sent the
+secretary and luggage forward) for one more chance of news. Love to dear
+Macready, and to dear Mac, and every one we care for. It's useless to
+speak of the dear children. It seems now as though we should never hear
+of them. . . .
+
+"P.S. Washington Irving is a _great_ fellow. We have laughed most
+heartily together. He is just the man he ought to be. So is Doctor
+Channing, with whom I have had an interesting correspondence since I
+saw him last at Boston. Halleck is a merry little man. Bryant a sad one,
+and very reserved. Washington Allston the painter (who wrote _Monaldi_)
+is a fine specimen of a glorious old genius. Longfellow, whose volume of
+poems I have got for you, is a frank accomplished man as well as a fine
+writer, and will be in town 'next fall.' Tell Macready that I suspect
+prices here must have rather altered since his time. I paid our
+fortnight's bill here, last night. We have dined out every day (except
+when I was laid up with a sore throat), and only had in all four bottles
+of wine. The bill was 70_l._ English!!!
+
+"You will see, by my other letter, how we have been feted and feasted;
+and how there is war to the knife about the international copyright; and
+how I _will_ speak about it, and decline to be put down. . . .
+
+"Oh for news from home! I think of your letters so full of heart and
+friendship, with perhaps a little scrawl of Charley's or Mamey's, lying
+at the bottom of the deep sea; and am as full of sorrow as if they had
+once been living creatures.--Well! they _may_ come, yet."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+They did reach him, but not by the Caledonia. His fears as to that
+vessel were but too well founded. On the very day when she was due in
+Boston (the 18th of February) it was learned in London that she had
+undergone misadventure; that, her decks having been swept and her rudder
+torn away, though happily no lives were lost, she had returned disabled
+to Cork; and that the Acadia, having received her passengers and mails,
+was to sail with them from Liverpool next day.
+
+Of the main subject of that letter written on the day preceding,--of the
+quite unpremeditated impulse, out of which sprang his advocacy of claims
+which he felt to be represented in his person,--of the injustice done by
+his entertainers to their guest in ascribing such advocacy to
+selfishness,--and of the graver wrong done by them to their own highest
+interests, nay, even to their commonest and most vulgar interests, in
+continuing to reject those claims, I will add nothing now to what all
+those years ago I labored very hard to lay before many readers. It will
+be enough if I here print, from the authors' letters I sent out to him
+by the next following mail, in compliance with his wish, this which
+follows from a very dear friend of his and mine. I fortunately had it
+transcribed before I posted it to him; Mr. Carlyle having in some haste
+written from "Templand, 26 March, 1842," and taken no copy.
+
+"We learn by the newspapers that you everywhere in America stir up the
+question of international copyright, and thereby awaken huge dissonance
+where all else were triumphant unison for you. I am asked my opinion of
+the matter, and requested to write it down in words.
+
+"Several years ago, if memory err not, I was one of many English writers
+who, under the auspices of Miss Martineau, did already sign a petition
+to congress praying for an international copyright between the two
+Nations,--which properly are not two Nations, but one; _indivisible_ by
+parliament, congress, or any kind of human law or diplomacy, being
+already _united_ by Heaven's Act of Parliament, and the everlasting law
+of Nature and Fact. To that opinion I still adhere, and am like to
+continue adhering.
+
+"In discussion of the matter before any congress or parliament, manifold
+considerations and argumentations will necessarily arise; which to me
+are not interesting, nor essential for helping me to a decision. They
+respect the time and manner in which the thing should be; not at all
+whether the thing should be or not. In an ancient book, reverenced I
+should hope on both sides of the Ocean, it was thousands of years ago
+written down in the most decisive and explicit manner, 'Thou _shalt not_
+steal.' That thou belongest to a different 'Nation,' and canst steal
+without being certainly hanged for it, gives thee no permission to
+steal! Thou shalt _not_ in anywise steal at all! So it is written down,
+for Nations and for Men, in the Law-Book of the Maker of this Universe.
+Nay, poor Jeremy Bentham and others step in here, and will demonstrate
+that it is actually our true convenience and expediency not to steal;
+which I for my share, on the great scale and on the small, and in all
+conceivable scales and shapes, do also firmly believe it to be. For
+example, if Nations abstained from stealing, what need were there of
+fighting,--with its butcherings and burnings, decidedly the most
+expensive thing in this world? How much more two Nations, which, as I
+said, are but one Nation; knit in a thousand ways by Nature and
+Practical Intercourse; indivisible brother elements of the same great
+SAXONDOM, to which in all honorable ways be long life!
+
+"When Mr. Robert Roy M'Gregor lived in the district of Menteith on the
+Highland border two centuries ago, he for his part found it more
+convenient to supply himself with beef by stealing it alive from the
+adjacent glens, than by buying it killed in the Stirling butchers'
+market. It was Mr. Roy's plan of supplying himself with beef in those
+days, this of stealing it. In many a little 'Congress' in the district
+of Menteith, there was debating, doubt it not, and much specious
+argumentation this way and that, before they could ascertain that,
+really and truly, buying was the best way to get your beef; which,
+however, in the long run they did with one assent find it indisputably
+to be: and accordingly they hold by it to this day."
+
+This brave letter was an important service rendered at a critical time,
+and Dickens was very grateful for it. But, as time went on, he had other
+and higher causes for gratitude to its writer. Admiration of Carlyle
+increased in him with his years; and there was no one whom in later life
+he honored so much, or had a more profound regard for.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[47] On the 22d of May, 1842.
+
+[48] The dinner was on the 10th of May, and early the following morning
+I had a letter about it from Mr. Blanchard, containing these words:
+"Washington Irving couldn't utter a word for trembling, and Moore was as
+little as usual. But, poor Tom Campbell--great Heavens! what a
+spectacle! Amid roars of laughter he began a sentence three times about
+something that Dugald Stewart or Lord Bacon had said, and never could
+get beyond those words. The Prince was capital, though deucedly
+frightened. He seems unaffected and amiable, as well as very clever."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+PHILADELPHIA, WASHINGTON, AND THE SOUTH.
+
+1842.
+
+ At Philadelphia--Rule in Printing
+ Letters--Promise as to Railroads--Experience of
+ them--Railway-cars--Charcoal Stoves--Ladies'
+ Cars--Spittoons--Massachusetts and New
+ York--Police-cells and Prisons--House of
+ Detention and Inmates--Women and Boy
+ Prisoners--Capital Punishment--A House of
+ Correction--Four Hundred Single
+ Cells--Comparison with English Prisons--Inns
+ and Landlords--At Washington--Hotel
+ Extortion--Philadelphia Penitentiary--The
+ Solitary System--Solitary Prisoners--Talk with
+ Inspectors--Bookseller Carey--Changes of
+ Temperature--Henry Clay--Proposed
+ Journeyings--Letters from England--Congress and
+ Senate--Leading American Statesmen--The People
+ of America--Englishmen "located" there--"Surgit
+ amari aliquid"--The Copyright Petition--At
+ Richmond--Irving appointed to Spain--Experience
+ of a Slave City--Incidents of Slave
+ Life--Discussion with a Slaveholder--Feeling of
+ South to England--Levees at Richmond--One more
+ Banquet accepted--My Gift of _Shakspeare_--Home
+ Letters and Fancies--Self-reproach of a Noble
+ Nature--Washington Irving's Leave-taking.
+
+
+DICKENS'S next letter was begun in the "United States Hotel,
+Philadelphia," and bore date "Sunday, sixth March, 1842." It treated of
+much dealt with afterwards at greater length in the _Notes_, but the
+freshness and vivacity of the first impressions in it have surprised me.
+I do not, however, print any passage here which has not its own interest
+independently of anything contained in that book. The rule will be
+continued, as in the portions of letters already given, of not
+transcribing anything before printed, or anything having even but a near
+resemblance to descriptions that appear in the _Notes_.
+
+". . . . . . As this is likely to be the only quiet day I shall have for a
+long time, I devote it to writing to you. We have heard nothing from
+you[49] yet, and only have for our consolation the reflection that the
+Columbia[50] is now on her way out. No news had been heard of the
+Caledonia yesterday afternoon, when we left New York. We _were_ to have
+quitted that place last Tuesday, but have been detained there all the
+week by Kate having so bad a sore throat that she was obliged to keep
+her bed. We left yesterday afternoon at five o'clock, and arrived here
+at eleven last night. Let me say, by the way, that this is a very trying
+climate.
+
+"I have often asked Americans in London which were the better
+railroads,--ours or theirs? They have taken time for reflection, and
+generally replied on mature consideration that they rather thought we
+excelled; in respect of the punctuality with which we arrived at our
+stations, and the smoothness of our traveling. I wish you could see what
+an American railroad is, in some parts where I now have seen them. I
+won't say I wish you could feel what it is, because that would be an
+unchristian and savage aspiration. It is never inclosed, or warded off.
+You walk down the main street of a large town; and, slap-dash,
+headlong, pell-mell, down the middle of the street, with pigs burrowing,
+and boys flying kites and playing marbles, and men smoking, and women
+talking, and children crawling, close to the very rails, there comes
+tearing along a mad locomotive with its train of cars, scattering a
+red-hot shower of sparks (from its _wood_ fire) in all directions;
+screeching, hissing, yelling, and panting; and nobody one atom more
+concerned than if it were a hundred miles away. You cross a
+turnpike-road; and there is no gate, no policeman, no signal--nothing to
+keep the wayfarer or quiet traveler out of the way, but a wooden arch on
+which is written, in great letters, 'Look out for the locomotive.' And
+if any man, woman, or child don't look out, why, it's his or her fault,
+and there's an end of it.
+
+"The cars are like very shabby omnibuses,--only larger; holding sixty or
+seventy people. The seats, instead of being placed long ways, are put
+cross-wise, back to front. Each holds two. There is a long row of these
+on each side of the caravan, and a narrow passage up the centre. The
+windows are usually all closed, and there is very often, in addition, a
+hot, close, most intolerable charcoal stove in a red-hot glow. The heat
+and closeness are quite insupportable. But this is the characteristic of
+all American houses, of all the public institutions, chapels, theatres,
+and prisons. From the constant use of the hard anthracite coal in these
+beastly furnaces, a perfectly new class of diseases is springing up in
+the country. Their effect upon an Englishman is briefly told. He is
+always very sick and very faint; and has an intolerable headache,
+morning, noon, and night.
+
+"In the ladies' car, there is no smoking of tobacco allowed. All
+gentlemen who have ladies with them sit in this car; and it is usually
+very full. Before it, is the gentlemen's car; which is something
+narrower. As I had a window close to me yesterday which commanded this
+gentlemen's car, I looked at it pretty often, perforce. The flashes of
+saliva flew so perpetually and incessantly out of the windows all the
+way, that it looked as though they were ripping open feather-beds
+inside, and letting the wind dispose of the feathers.[51] But this
+spitting is universal. In the courts of law, the judge has his spittoon
+on the bench, the counsel have theirs, the witness has his, the prisoner
+his, and the crier his. The jury are accommodated at the rate of three
+men to a spittoon (or spit-box as they call it here); and the spectators
+in the gallery are provided for, as so many men who in the course of
+nature expectorate without cessation. There are spit-boxes in every
+steamboat, bar-room, public dining-room, house of office, and place of
+general resort, no matter what it be. In the hospitals, the students are
+requested, by placard, to use the boxes provided for them, and not to
+spit upon the stairs. I have twice seen gentlemen, at evening parties in
+New York, turn aside when they were not engaged in conversation, and
+spit upon the drawing-room carpet. And in every bar-room and hotel
+passage the stone floor looks as if it were paved with open
+oysters--from the quantity of this kind of deposit which tessellates it
+all over. . . .
+
+"The institutions at Boston, and at Hartford, are most admirable. It
+would be very difficult indeed to improve upon them. But this is not so
+at New York; where there is an ill-managed lunatic asylum, a bad jail, a
+dismal workhouse, and a perfectly intolerable place of police-imprisonment.
+A man is found drunk in the streets, and is thrown into a cell below the
+surface of the earth; profoundly dark; so full of noisome vapors that
+when you enter it with a candle you see a ring about the light, like
+that which surrounds the moon in wet and cloudy weather; and so
+offensive and disgusting in its filthy odors that you _cannot bear_ its
+stench. He is shut up within an iron door, in a series of vaulted
+passages where no one stays; has no drop of water, or ray of light, or
+visitor, or help of any kind; and there he remains until the
+magistrate's arrival. If he die (as one man did not long ago), he is
+half eaten by the rats in an hour's time (as this man was). I expressed,
+on seeing these places the other night, the disgust I felt, and which it
+would be impossible to repress. 'Well, I don't know,' said the night
+constable--that's a national answer, by-the-by,--'well, I don't know.
+I've had six-and-twenty young women locked up here together, and
+beautiful ones too, and that's a fact.' The cell was certainly no larger
+than the wine-cellar in Devonshire Terrace; at least three feet lower;
+and stunk like a common sewer. There was one woman in it then. The
+magistrate begins his examinations at five o'clock in the morning; the
+watch is set at seven at night; if the prisoners have been given in
+charge by an officer, they are not taken out before nine or ten; and in
+the interval they remain in these places, where they could no more be
+heard to cry for help, in case of a fit or swoon among them, than a
+man's voice could be heard after he was coffined up in his grave.
+
+"There is a prison in this same city, and indeed in the same building,
+where prisoners for grave offenses await their trial, and to which they
+are sent back when under remand. It sometimes happens that a man or
+woman will remain here for twelve months, waiting the result of motions
+for new trial, and in arrest of judgment, and what not. I went into it
+the other day: without any notice or preparation, otherwise I find it
+difficult to catch them in their work-a-day aspect. I stood in a long,
+high, narrow building, consisting of four galleries one above the other,
+with a bridge across each, on which sat a turnkey, sleeping or reading
+as the case might be. From the roof, a couple of wind-sails dangled and
+drooped, limp and useless; the sky-light being fast closed, and they
+only designed for summer use. In the centre of the building was the
+eternal stove; and along both sides of every gallery was a long row of
+iron doors--looking like furnace-doors, being very small, but black and
+cold as if the fires within had gone out.
+
+"A man with keys appears, to show us round. A good-looking fellow, and,
+in his way, civil and obliging." (I omit a dialogue of which the
+substance has been printed,[52] and give only that which appears for the
+first time here.)
+
+"'Suppose a man's here for twelve months. Do you mean to say he never
+comes out at that little iron door?'
+
+"'He _may_ walk some, perhaps--not much.'
+
+"'Will you show me a few of them?'
+
+"'Ah! All, if you like.'
+
+"He threw open a door, and I looked in. An old man was sitting on his
+bed, reading. The light came in through a small chink, very high up in
+the wall. Across the room ran a thick iron pipe to carry off filth; this
+was bored for the reception of something like a big funnel in shape; and
+over the funnel was a watercock. This was his washing apparatus and
+water-closet. It was not savory, but not very offensive. He looked up at
+me; gave himself an odd, dogged kind of shake; and fixed his eyes on his
+book again. I came out, and the door was shut and locked. He had been
+there a month, and would have to wait another month for his trial. 'Has
+he ever walked out now, for instance?' 'No.'. . .
+
+"'In England, if a man is under sentence of death even, he has a yard to
+walk in at certain times.'
+
+"'Possible?'
+
+". . . Making me this answer with a coolness which is perfectly
+untranslatable and inexpressible, and which is quite peculiar to the
+soil, he took me to the women's side, telling me, upon the way, all
+about this man, who, it seems, murdered his wife, and will certainly be
+hanged. The women's doors have a small square aperture in them; I looked
+through one, and saw a pretty boy about ten or twelve years old, who
+seemed lonely and miserable enough--as well he might. 'What's _he_ been
+doing?' says I. 'Nothing,' says my friend. 'Nothing!' says I. 'No,' says
+he. 'He's here for safe keeping. He saw his father kill his mother, and
+is detained to give evidence against him--that was his father you saw
+just now.' 'But that's rather hard treatment for a witness, isn't it?'
+'Well, I don't know. It a'n't a very rowdy life, and _that's_ a fact.'
+So my friend, who was an excellent fellow in his way, and very obliging,
+and a handsome young man to boot, took me off to show me some more
+curiosities; and I was very much obliged to him, for the place was so
+hot, and I so giddy, that I could scarcely stand. . . .
+
+"When a man is hanged in New York, he is walked out of one of these
+cells, without any condemned sermon or other religious formalities,
+straight into the narrow jail-yard, which may be about the width of
+Cranbourn Alley. There, a gibbet is erected, which is of curious
+construction; for the culprit stands on the earth with the rope about
+his neck, which passes through a pulley in the top of the 'Tree' (see
+_Newgate Calendar_ passim), and is attached to a weight something
+heavier than the man. This weight, being suddenly let go, drags the rope
+down with it, and sends the criminal flying up fourteen feet into the
+air; while the judge, and jury, and five-and-twenty citizens (whose
+presence is required by the law), stand by, that they may afterwards
+certify to the fact. This yard is a very dismal place; and when I looked
+at it, I thought the practice infinitely superior to ours: much more
+solemn, and far less degrading and indecent.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"There is another prison near New York which is a house of correction.
+The convicts labor in stone-quarries near at hand, but the jail has no
+covered yards or shops, so that when the weather is wet (as it was when
+I was there) each man is shut up in his own little cell, all the
+live-long day. These cells, in all the correction-houses I have seen,
+are on one uniform plan,--thus: A, B, C, and D, are the walls of the
+building with windows in them, high up in the wall. The shaded place in
+the centre represents four tiers of cells, one above the other, with
+doors of grated iron, and a light grated gallery to each tier. Four
+tiers front to B, and four to D, so that by this means you may be said,
+in walking round, to see eight tiers in all. The intermediate blank
+space you walk in, looking up at these galleries; so that, coming in at
+the door E, and going either to the right or left till you come back to
+the door again, you see all the cells under one roof and in one high
+room. Imagine them in number 400, and in every one a man locked up; this
+one with his hands through the bars of his grate, this one in bed (in
+the middle of the day, remember), and this one flung down in a heap upon
+the ground with his head against the bars like a wild beast. Make the
+rain pour down in torrents outside. Put the everlasting stove in the
+midst; hot, suffocating, and vaporous, as a witch's cauldron. Add a
+smell like that of a thousand old mildewed umbrellas wet through, and a
+thousand dirty-clothes-bags musty, moist, and fusty, and you will have
+some idea--a very feeble one, my dear friend, on my word--of this place
+yesterday week. You know of course that we adopted our improvements in
+prison-discipline from the American pattern; but I am confident that the
+writers who have the most lustily lauded the American prisons have never
+seen Chesterton's domain or Tracey's.[53] There is no more comparison
+between these two prisons of ours, and any I have seen here YET, than
+there is between the keepers here, and those two gentlemen. Putting out
+of sight the difficulty we have in England of finding _useful_ labor for
+the prisoners (which of course arises from our being an older country
+and having vast numbers of artisans unemployed), our system is more
+complete, more impressive, and more satisfactory in every respect. It is
+very possible that I have not come to the best, not having yet seen
+Mount Auburn. I will tell you when I have. And also when I have come to
+those inns, mentioned--vaguely rather--by Miss Martineau, where they
+undercharge literary people for the love the landlords bear them. My
+experience, so far, has been of establishments where (perhaps for the
+same reason) they very monstrously and violently overcharge a man whose
+position forbids remonstrance.
+
+
+ "WASHINGTON, Sunday, March the Thirteenth, 1842.
+
+"In allusion to the last sentence, my dear friend, I must tell you a
+slight experience I had in Philadelphia. My rooms had been ordered for a
+week, but, in consequence of Kate's illness, only Mr. Q. and the luggage
+had gone on. Mr. Q. always lives at the table-d'hote, so that while we
+were in New York our rooms were empty. The landlord not only charged me
+half the full rent for the time during which the rooms were reserved for
+us (which was quite right), but charged me also _for board for myself
+and Kate and Anne, at the rate of nine dollars per day_ for the same
+period, when we were actually living, at the same expense, in New
+York!!! I _did_ remonstrate upon this head, but was coolly told it was
+the custom (which I have since been assured is a lie), and had nothing
+for it but to pay the amount. What else could I do? I was going away by
+the steamboat at five o'clock in the morning; and the landlord knew
+perfectly well that my disputing an item of his bill would draw down
+upon me the sacred wrath of the newspapers, which would one and all
+demand in capitals if THIS was the gratitude of the man whom America had
+received as she had never received any other man but La Fayette?
+
+"I went last Tuesday to the Eastern Penitentiary near Philadelphia,
+which is the only prison in the States, or I believe in the world, on
+the principle of hopeless, strict, and unrelaxed solitary confinement,
+during the whole term of the sentence. It is wonderfully kept, but a
+most dreadful, fearful place. The inspectors, immediately on my arrival
+in Philadelphia, invited me to pass the day in the jail, and to dine
+with them when I had finished my inspection, that they might hear my
+opinion of the system. Accordingly I passed the whole day in going from
+cell to cell, and conversing with the prisoners. Every facility was
+given me, and no constraint whatever imposed upon any man's free speech.
+If I were to write you a letter of twenty sheets, I could not tell you
+this one day's work; so I will reserve it until that happy time when we
+shall sit round the table a Jack Straw's--you, and I, and Mac--and go
+over my diary. I never shall be able to dismiss from my mind the
+impressions of that day. Making notes of them, as I have done, is an
+absurdity, for they are written, beyond all power of erasure, in my
+brain. I saw men who had been there, five years, six years, eleven
+years, two years, two months, two days; some whose term was nearly over,
+and some whose term had only just begun. Women too, under the same
+variety of circumstances. Every prisoner who comes into the jail comes
+at night; is put into a bath, and dressed in the prison-garb; and then a
+black hood is drawn over his face and head, and he is led to the cell
+from which he never stirs again until his whole period of confinement
+has expired. I looked at some of them with the same awe as I should have
+looked at men who had been buried alive and dug up again.
+
+"We dined in the jail: and I told them after dinner how much the sight
+had affected me, and what an awful punishment it was. I dwelt upon this;
+for, although the inspectors are extremely kind and benevolent men, I
+question whether they are sufficiently acquainted with the human mind to
+know what it is they are doing. Indeed, I am sure they do not know. I
+bore testimony, as every one who sees it must, to the admirable
+government of the institution (Stanfield is the keeper: grown a little
+younger, that's all); but added that nothing could justify such a
+punishment but its working a reformation in the prisoners. That for
+short terms--say two years for the maximum--I conceived, especially
+after what they had told me of its good effects in certain cases, it
+might perhaps be highly beneficial; but that, carried to so great an
+extent, I thought it cruel and unjustifiable; and, further, that their
+sentences for small offenses were very rigorous, not to say savage. All
+this they took like men who were really anxious to have one's free
+opinion and to do right. And we were very much pleased with each other,
+and parted in the friendliest way.
+
+"They sent me back to Philadelphia in a carriage they had sent for me in
+the morning; and then I had to dress in a hurry, and follow Kate to
+Carey's the bookseller's, where there was a party. He married a sister
+of Leslie's. There are three Miss Leslies here, very accomplished; and
+one of them has copied all her brother's principal pictures. These
+copies hang about the room. We got away from this as soon as we could;
+and next morning had to turn out at five. In the morning I had received
+and shaken hands with five hundred people, so you may suppose that I was
+pretty well tired. Indeed, I am obliged to be very careful of myself; to
+avoid smoking and drinking; to get to bed soon; and to be particular in
+respect of what I eat. . . . You cannot think how bilious and trying the
+climate is. One day it is hot summer, without a breath of air; the next,
+twenty degrees below freezing, with a wind blowing that cuts your skin
+like steel. These changes have occurred here several times since last
+Wednesday night.
+
+"I have altered my route, and don't mean to go to Charleston. The
+country, all the way from here, is nothing but a dismal swamp; there is
+a bad night of sea-coasting in the journey; the equinoctial gales are
+blowing hard; and Clay (a most _charming_ fellow, by-the-by), whom I
+have consulted, strongly dissuades me. The weather is intensely hot
+there; the spring fever is coming on; and there is very little to see,
+after all. We therefore go next Wednesday night to Richmond, which we
+shall reach on Thursday. There we shall stop three days; my object being
+to see some tobacco-plantations. Then we shall go by James River back to
+Baltimore, which we have already passed through, and where we shall stay
+two days. Then we shall go West at once, straight through the most
+gigantic part of this continent: across the Alleghany Mountains, and
+over a prairie.
+
+"STILL AT WASHINGTON, Fifteenth March, 1842. . . . It is impossible, my
+dear friend, to tell you what we felt when Mr. Q. (who is a fearfully
+sentimental genius, but heartily interested in all that concerns us)
+came to where we were dining last Sunday, and sent in a note to the
+effect that the Caledonia[54] had arrived! Being really assured of her
+safety, we felt as if the distance between us and home were diminished
+by at least one-half. There was great joy everywhere here, for she had
+been quite despaired of, but our joy was beyond all telling. This news
+came on by express. Last night your letters reached us. I was dining
+with a club (for I can't avoid a dinner of that sort, now and then), and
+Kate sent me a note about nine o'clock to say they were here. But she
+didn't open them--which I consider heroic--until I came home. That was
+about half-past ten; and we read them until nearly two in the morning.
+
+"I won't say a word about your letters; except that Kate and I have come
+to a conclusion which makes me tremble in my shoes, for we decide that
+humorous narrative is your forte, and not statesmen of the commonwealth.
+I won't say a word about your news; for how could I in that case, while
+you want to hear what we are doing, resist the temptation of expending
+pages on those darling children? . . .
+
+"I have the privilege of appearing on the floor of both Houses here, and
+go to them every day. They are very handsome and commodious. There is a
+great deal of bad speaking, but there are a great many very remarkable
+men, in the legislature: such as John Quincy Adams, Clay, Preston,
+Calhoun, and others: with whom I need scarcely add I have been placed in
+the friendliest relations. Adams is a fine old fellow--seventy-six years
+old, but with most surprising vigor, memory, readiness, and pluck. Clay
+is perfectly enchanting; an irresistible man. There are some very
+notable specimens, too, out of the West. Splendid men to look at, hard
+to deceive, prompt to act, lions in energy, Crichtons in varied
+accomplishments, Indians in quickness of eye and gesture, Americans in
+affectionate and generous impulse. It would be difficult to exaggerate
+the nobility of some of these glorious fellows.
+
+"When Clay retires, as he does this month, Preston will become the
+leader of the Whig party. He so solemnly assures me that the
+international copyright shall and will be passed, that I almost begin to
+hope; and I shall be entitled to say, if it be, that I have brought it
+about. You have no idea how universal the discussion of its merits and
+demerits has become, or how eager for the change I have made a portion
+of the people.
+
+"You remember what ---- was, in England. If you _could_ but see him
+here! If you could only have seen him when he called on us the other
+day,--feigning abstraction in the dreadful pressure of affairs of state;
+rubbing his forehead as one who was aweary of the world; and exhibiting
+a sublime caricature of Lord Burleigh. He is the only thoroughly unreal
+man I have seen on this side the ocean. Heaven help the President! All
+parties are against him, and he appears truly wretched. We go to a levee
+at his house to-night. He has invited me to dinner on Friday, but I am
+obliged to decline; for we leave, per steamboat, to-morrow night.
+
+"I said I wouldn't write anything more concerning the American people,
+for two months. Second thoughts are best. I shall not change, and may as
+well speak out--to _you_. They are friendly, earnest, hospitable, kind,
+frank, very often accomplished, far less prejudiced than you would
+suppose, warm-hearted, fervent, and enthusiastic. They are chivalrous in
+their universal politeness to women, courteous, obliging, disinterested;
+and, when they conceive a perfect affection for a man (as I may venture
+to say of myself), entirely devoted to him. I have received thousands of
+people of all ranks and grades, and have never once been asked an
+offensive or unpolite question,--except by Englishmen, who, when they
+have been 'located' here for some years, are worse than the devil in
+his blackest painting. The State is a parent to its people; has a
+parental care and watch over all poor children, women laboring of child,
+sick persons, and captives. The common men render you assistance in the
+streets, and would revolt from the offer of a piece of money. The desire
+to oblige is universal; and I have never once traveled in a public
+conveyance without making some generous acquaintance whom I have been
+sorry to part from, and who has in many cases come on miles, to see us
+again. But I don't like the country. I would not live here, on any
+consideration. It goes against the grain with me. It would with you. I
+think it impossible, utterly impossible, for any Englishman to live here
+and be happy. I have a confidence that I must be right, because I have
+everything, God knows, to lead me to the opposite conclusion; and yet I
+cannot resist coming to this one. As to the causes, they are too many to
+enter upon here. . . .
+
+"One of two petitions for an international copyright which I brought
+here from American authors, with Irving at their head, has been
+presented to the House of Representatives. Clay retains the other for
+presentation to the Senate after I have left Washington. The presented
+one has been referred to a committee; the Speaker has nominated as its
+chairman Mr. Kennedy, member for Baltimore, who is himself an author and
+notoriously favorable to such a law; and I am going to assist him in his
+report.
+
+
+ "RICHMOND, IN VIRGINIA. Thursday Night, March 17.
+
+"Irving was with me at Washington yesterday, and _wept heartily_ at
+parting. He is a fine fellow, when you know him well; and you would
+relish him, my dear friend, of all things. We have laughed together at
+some absurdities we have encountered in company, quite in my vociferous
+Devonshire-Terrace style. The 'Merrikin' government has treated him, he
+says, most liberally and handsomely in every respect. He thinks of
+sailing for Liverpool on the 7th of April, passing a short time in
+London, and then going to Paris. Perhaps you may meet him. If you do, he
+will know that you are my dearest friend, and will open his whole heart
+to you at once. His secretary of legation, Mr. Coggleswell, is a man of
+very remarkable information, a great traveler, a good talker, and a
+scholar.
+
+"I am going to sketch you our trip here from Washington, as it involves
+nine miles of a 'Virginny Road.' That done, I must be brief, good
+brother.". . .
+
+The reader of the _American Notes_ will remember the admirable and most
+humorous description of the night steamer on the Potomac, and of the
+black driver over the Virginia road. Both were in this letter; which,
+after three days, he resumed "At Washington again, Monday, March the
+twenty-first:
+
+"We had intended to go to Baltimore from Richmond, by a place called
+Norfolk; but, one of the boats being under repair, I found we should
+probably be detained at this Norfolk two days. Therefore we came back
+here yesterday, by the road we had traveled before; lay here last night;
+and go on to Baltimore this afternoon, at four o'clock. It is a journey
+of only two hours and a half. Richmond is a prettily situated town, but,
+like other towns in slave districts (as the planters themselves admit),
+has an aspect of decay and gloom which to an unaccustomed eye is _most_
+distressing. In the black car (for they don't let them sit with the
+whites), on the railroad as we went there, were a mother and family,
+whom the steamer was conveying away, to sell; retaining the man (the
+husband and father, I mean) on his plantation. The children cried the
+whole way. Yesterday, on board the boat, a slave-owner and two
+constables were our fellow-passengers. They were coming here in search
+of two negroes who had run away on the previous day. On the bridge at
+Richmond there is a notice against fast driving over it, as it is rotten
+and crazy: penalty--for whites, five dollars; for slaves, fifteen
+stripes. My heart is lightened as if a great load had been taken from
+it, when I think that we are turning our backs on this accursed and
+detested system. I really don't think I could have borne it any longer.
+It is all very well to say 'be silent on the subject.' They won't let
+you be silent. They _will_ ask you what you think of it; and _will_
+expatiate on slavery as if it were one of the greatest blessings of
+mankind. 'It's not,' said a hard, bad-looking fellow to me the other
+day, 'it's not the interest of a man to use his slaves ill. It's damned
+nonsense that you hear in England.'--I told him quietly that it was not
+a man's interest to get drunk, or to steal, or to game, or to indulge in
+any other vice, but he _did_ indulge in it for all that; that cruelty,
+and the abuse of irresponsible power, were two of the bad passions of
+human nature, with the gratification of which, considerations of
+interest or of ruin, had nothing whatever to do; and that, while every
+candid man must admit that even a slave might be happy enough with a
+good master, all human beings knew that bad masters, cruel masters, and
+masters who disgraced the form they bore, were matters of experience and
+history, whose existence was as undisputed as that of slaves themselves.
+He was a little taken aback by this, and asked me if I believed in the
+Bible. Yes, I said, but if any man could prove to me that it sanctioned
+slavery, I would place no further credence in it. 'Well then,' he said,
+'by God, sir, the niggers must be kept down, and the whites have put
+down the colored people wherever they have found them.' 'That's the
+whole question,' said I. 'Yes, and by God,' says he, 'the British had
+better not stand out on that point when Lord Ashburton comes over, for I
+never felt so warlike as I do now,--and that's a fact.' I was obliged to
+accept a public supper in this Richmond, and I saw plainly enough there
+that the hatred which these Southern States bear to us as a nation has
+been fanned up and revived again by this Creole business, and can
+scarcely be exaggerated.
+
+. . . . "We were desperately tired at Richmond, as we went to a great many
+places and received a very great number of visitors. We appoint usually
+two hours in every day for this latter purpose, and have our room so
+full at that period that it is difficult to move or breathe. Before we
+left Richmond, a gentleman told me, when I really was so exhausted that
+I could hardly stand, that 'three people of great fashion' were much
+offended by having been told, when they called last evening, that I was
+tired and not visible, then, but would be 'at home' from twelve to two
+next day! Another gentleman (no doubt of great fashion also) sent a
+letter to me two hours after I had gone to bed, preparatory to rising at
+four next morning, with instructions to the slave who brought it to
+knock me up and wait for an answer!
+
+"I am going to break my resolution of accepting no more public
+entertainments, in favor of the originators of the printed document
+overleaf. They live upon the confines of the Indian territory, some two
+thousand miles or more west of New York! Think of my dining there! And
+yet, please God, the festival will come off--I should say about the 12th
+or 15th of next month.". . .
+
+The printed document was a series of resolutions, moved at a public
+meeting attended by all the principal citizens, judges, professors, and
+doctors of St. Louis, urgently inviting to that city of the Far West the
+distinguished writer then the guest of America, eulogizing his genius,
+and tendering to him their warmest hospitalities. He was at Baltimore
+when he closed his letter.
+
+
+ "BALTIMORE, _Tuesday, March 22d._
+
+"I have a great diffidence in running counter to any impression formed
+by a man of Maclise's genius, on a subject he has fully considered."
+(Referring, apparently, to some remark by myself on the picture of the
+Play-scene in _Hamlet_, exhibited this year.) "But I quite agree with
+you about the King in _Hamlet_. Talking of Hamlet, I constantly carry in
+my great-coat pocket the _Shakspeare_ you bought for me in Liverpool.
+What an unspeakable source of delight that book is to me!
+
+"Your Ontario letter I found here to-night: sent on by the vigilant and
+faithful Colden, who makes every thing having reference to us or our
+affairs a labor of the heartiest love. We devoured its contents,
+greedily. Good Heaven, my dear fellow, how I miss you! and how I count
+the time 'twixt this and coming home again! Shall I ever forget the day
+of our parting at Liverpool! when even ---- became jolly and radiant in
+his sympathy with our separation! Never, never shall I forget that time.
+Ah! how seriously I thought then, and how seriously I have thought many,
+many times since, of the terrible folly of ever quarreling with a true
+friend, on good-for-nothing trifles! Every little hasty word that has
+ever passed between us rose up before me like a reproachful ghost. At
+this great distance, I seem to look back upon any miserable small
+interruption of our affectionate intercourse, though only for the
+instant it has never outlived, with a sort of pity for myself as if I
+were another creature.
+
+"I have bought another accordion. The steward lent me one, on the
+passage out, and I regaled the ladies' cabin with my performances. You
+can't think with what feeling I play _Home Sweet Home_ every night, or
+how pleasantly sad it makes us. . . . And so God bless you. . . . I leave
+space for a short postscript before sealing this, but it will probably
+contain nothing. The dear, dear children! what a happiness it is to know
+that they are in such hands!
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"P.S. Twenty-third March, 1842. Nothing new. And all well. I have not
+heard that the Columbia is in, but she is hourly expected. Washington
+Irving has come on for another leave-taking,[55] and dines with me
+to-day. We start for the West, at half-after eight to-morrow morning. I
+send you a newspaper, the most respectable in the States, with a very
+just copyright article."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[49] At the top of the sheet, above the address and date, are the words
+"Read on. We _have_ your precious letters, but you'll think at first we
+have not. C. D."
+
+[50] The ship next in rotation to the Caledonia from Liverpool.
+
+[51] This comparison is employed in another descriptive passage to be
+found in the _Notes_ (p. 57).
+
+[52] _Notes_, p. 49.
+
+[53] See _ante_, p. 280.
+
+[54] This was the Acadia with the Caledonia mails.
+
+[55] At his second visit to America, when in Washington in February,
+1868, Dickens, replying to a letter in which Irving was named, thus
+describes the last meeting and leave-taking to which he alludes above:
+"Your reference to my dear friend Washington Irving renews the vivid
+impressions reawakened in my mind at Baltimore but the other day. I saw
+his fine face for the last time in that city. He came there from New
+York to pass a day or two with me before I went westward; and they were
+made among the most memorable of my life by his delightful fancy and
+genial humor. Some unknown admirer of his books and mine sent to the
+hotel a most enormous mint-julep, wreathed with flowers. We sat, one on
+either side of it, with great solemnity (it filled a respectably-sized
+round table), but the solemnity was of very short duration. It was quite
+an enchanted julep, and carried us among innumerable people and places
+that we both knew. The julep held out far into the night, and my memory
+never saw him afterwards otherwise than as bending over it, with his
+straw, with an attempted air of gravity (after some anecdote involving
+some wonderfully droll and delicate observation of character), and then,
+as his eye caught mine, melting into that captivating laugh of his,
+which was the brightest and best I have ever heard."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+CANAL-BOAT JOURNEYS: BOUND FAR WEST.
+
+1842.
+
+ Character in the Letters--The _Notes_ less
+ satisfactory--Personal Narrative in Letters--The
+ Copyright Differences--Social
+ Dissatisfactions--A Fact to be
+ remembered--Literary Merits of the
+ Letters--Personal Character portrayed--On Board
+ for Pittsburgh--Choicest Passages of
+ _Notes_--Queer Stage-coach--Something revealed
+ on the Top--At Harrisburg--Treaties with
+ Indians--Local Legislatures--A Levee--Morning
+ and Night in Canal-boat--At and after
+ Breakfast--Making the best of it--Hardy
+ Habits--By Rail across Mountain--Mountain
+ Scenery--New Settlements--Original of Eden in
+ _Chuzzlewit_--A Useful Word--Party in
+ America--Home News--Meets an Early
+ Acquaintance--"Smallness of the World"--Queer
+ Customers at Levees--Our Anniversary--The
+ Cincinnati Steamer--Frugality in Water and
+ Linen--Magnetic
+ Experiments--Life-preservers--Bores--Habits of
+ Neatness--Wearying for Home--Another Solitary
+ Prison--New Terror to Loneliness--Arrival at
+ Cincinnati--Two Judges in Attendance--The City
+ described--On the Pavement.
+
+
+It would not be possible that a more vivid or exact impression than that
+which is derivable from these letters could be given of either the
+genius or the character of the writer. The whole man is here in the
+supreme hour of his life, and in all the enjoyment of its highest
+sensations. Inexpressibly sad to me has been the task of going over
+them, but the surprise has equaled the sadness. I had forgotten what was
+in them. That they contained, in their first vividness, all the most
+prominent descriptions of his published book, I knew. But the
+reproduction of any part of these was not permissible here; and,
+believing that the substance of them had been thus almost wholly
+embodied in the _American Notes_, when they were lent to assist in its
+composition, I turned to them with very small expectation of finding
+anything available for present use. Yet the difficulty has been, not to
+find, but to reject; and the rejection when most unavoidable has not
+been most easy. Even where the subjects recur that are in the printed
+volume, there is a freshness of first impressions in the letters that
+renders it no small trial to act strictly on the rule adhered to in
+these extracts from them. In the _Notes_ there is of course very much,
+masterly in observation and description, of which there is elsewhere no
+trace; but the passages amplified from the letters have not been
+improved, and the manly force and directness of some of their views and
+reflections, conveyed by touches of a picturesque completeness that no
+elaboration could give, have here and there not been strengthened by
+rhetorical additions in the printed work. There is also a charm in the
+letters which the plan adopted in the book necessarily excluded from it.
+It will always, of course, have value as a deliberate expression of the
+results gathered from the American experiences, but the _personal
+narrative_ of this famous visit to America is in the letters alone. In
+what way his experiences arose, the desire at the outset to see nothing
+that was not favorable, the slowness with which adverse impressions were
+formed, and the eager recognition of every truthful and noble quality
+that arose and remained above the fault-finding, are discoverable only
+in the letters.
+
+Already it is manifest from them that the before-mentioned
+disappointments, as well of the guest in his entertainers as of the
+entertainers in their guest, had their beginning in the copyright
+differences; but it is not less plain that the social dissatisfactions
+on his side were of even earlier date, and with the country itself had
+certainly nothing to do. It was objected to him, I well remember, that
+in making such unfavorable remarks as his published book did on many
+points, he was assailing the democratic institutions that had formed the
+character of the nation; but the answer is obvious, that, democratic
+institutions being universal in America, they were as fairly entitled to
+share in the good as in the bad; and in what he praised, of which there
+is here abundant testimony, he must be held to have exalted those
+institutions as much, as in what he blamed he could be held to
+depreciate them. He never sets himself up in judgment on the entire
+people. As we see, from the way the letters show us that the opinions he
+afterwards published were formed, he does not draw conclusions while his
+observation is only half concluded; and he refrains throughout from the
+example too strongly set him, even in the very terms of his welcome by
+the writers of America,[56] of flinging one nation in the other's face.
+He leaves each upon its own ground. His great business in his
+publication, as in the first impressions recorded here, is to exhibit
+social influences at work as he saw them himself; and it would surely
+have been of all bad compliments the worst, when resolving, in the tone
+and with the purpose of a friend, to make public what he had observed in
+America, if he had supposed that such a country would take truth amiss.
+
+There is, however, one thing to be especially remembered, as well in
+reading the letters as in judging of the book which was founded on them.
+It is a point to which I believe Mr. Emerson directed the attention of
+his countrymen. Everything of an objectionable kind, whether the author
+would have it so or not, stands out more prominently and distinctly than
+matter of the opposite description. The social sin is a more tangible
+thing than the social virtue. Pertinaciously to insist upon the
+charities and graces of life, is to outrage their quiet and unobtrusive
+character; but we incur the danger of extending the vulgarities and
+indecencies if we seem to countenance by omitting to expose them. And if
+this is only kept in view in reading what is here given, the proportion
+of censure will be found not to overbalance the just admiration and
+unexaggerated praise.
+
+Apart from such considerations, it is to be also said, the letters, from
+which I am now printing exactly as they were written, have claims, as
+mere literature, of an unusual kind. Unrivaled quickness of observation,
+the rare faculty of seizing out of a multitude of things the thing only
+that is essential, the irresistible play of humor, such pathos as only
+humorists of this high order possess, and the unwearied unforced
+vivacity of ever fresh, buoyant, bounding animal spirits, never found
+more natural, variously easy, or picturesque expression. Written amid
+such distraction, fatigue, and weariness as they describe, amid the
+jarring noises of hotels and streets, aboard steamers, on canal-boats,
+and in log huts, there is not an erasure in them. Not external objects
+only, but feelings, reflections, and thoughts, are photographed into
+visible forms with the same unexampled ease. They borrow no help from
+the matters of which they treat. They would have given, to the subjects
+described, old acquaintance and engrossing interest if they had been
+about a people in the moon. Of the personal character at the same time
+self-portrayed, others, whose emotions it less vividly awakens, will
+judge more calmly and clearly than myself. Yet to myself only can it be
+known how small were the services of friendship that sufficed to rouse
+all the sensibilities of this beautiful and noble nature. Throughout our
+life-long intercourse it was the same. His keenness of discrimination
+failed him never excepting here, when it was lost in the limitless
+extent of his appreciation of all kindly things; and never did he
+receive what was meant for a benefit that he was not eager to return it
+a hundredfold. No man more truly generous ever lived.
+
+His next letter was begun from "on board the canal-boat. Going to
+Pittsburgh. Monday, March twenty-eighth, 1842;" and the difficulties of
+rejection, to which reference has just been made, have been nowhere felt
+by me so much. Several of the descriptive masterpieces of the book are
+in it, with such touches of original freshness as might fairly have
+justified a reproduction of them in their first form. Among these are
+the Harrisburg coach on its way through the Susquehanna valley; the
+railroad across the mountain; the brown-forester of the Mississippi, the
+interrogative man in pepper-and-salt, and the affecting scene of the
+emigrants put ashore as the steamer passes up the Ohio. But all that I
+may here give, bearing any resemblance to what is given in the _Notes_,
+are the opening sketch of the small creature on the top of the queer
+stage-coach, to which the printed version fails to do adequate justice,
+and an experience to which the interest belongs of having suggested the
+settlement of Eden in _Martin Chuzzlewit_. . . . "We left Baltimore last
+Thursday, the twenty-fourth, at half-past eight in the morning, by
+railroad; and got to a place called York, about twelve. There we dined,
+and took a stage-coach for Harrisburg; twenty-five miles further. This
+stage-coach was like nothing so much as the body of one of the swings
+you see at a fair set upon four wheels and roofed and covered at the
+sides with painted canvas. There were twelve _inside_! I, thank my
+stars, was on the box. The luggage was on the roof; among it, a
+good-sized dining-table, and a big rocking-chair. We also took up an
+intoxicated gentleman, who sat for ten miles between me and the
+coachman; and another intoxicated gentleman who got up behind, but in
+the course of a mile or two fell off without hurting himself, and was
+seen in the distant perspective reeling back to the grog-shop where we
+had found him. There were four horses to this land-ark, of course; but
+we did not perform the journey until after half-past six o'clock that
+night. . . . The first half of the journey was tame enough, but the second
+lay through the valley of the Susquehanah (I think I spell it right, but
+I haven't that American Geography at hand), which is very beautiful. . . .
+
+"I think I formerly made a casual remark to you touching the precocity
+of the youth of this country. When we changed horses on this journey I
+got down to stretch my legs, refresh myself with a glass of
+whiskey-and-water, and shake the wet off my great-coat,--for it was
+raining very heavily, and continued to do so, all night. Mounting to my
+seat again, I observed something lying on the roof of the coach, which I
+took to be a rather large fiddle in a brown bag. In the course of ten
+miles or so, however, I discovered that it had a pair of dirty shoes at
+one end, and a glazed cap at the other; and further observation
+demonstrated it to be a small boy, in a snuff-colored coat, with his
+arms quite pinioned to his sides by deep forcing into his pockets. He
+was, I presume, a relative or friend of the coachman's, as he lay atop
+of the luggage, with his face towards the rain; and, except when a
+change of position brought his shoes in contact with my hat, he appeared
+to be asleep. Sir, when we stopped to water the horses, about two miles
+from Harrisburg, this thing slowly upreared itself to the height of
+three foot eight, and, fixing its eyes on me with a mingled expression
+of complacency, patronage, national independence, and sympathy for all
+outer barbarians and foreigners, said, in shrill piping accents, 'Well
+now, stranger, I guess you find this a'most like an English
+a'ternoon,--hey?' It is unnecessary to add that I thirsted for his
+blood. . . .
+
+"We had all next morning in Harrisburg, as the canal-boat was not to
+start until three o'clock in the afternoon. The officials called upon
+me before I had finished breakfast; and, as the town is the seat of the
+Pennsylvanian legislature, I went up to the Capitol. I was very much
+interested in looking over a number of treaties made with the poor
+Indians, their signatures being rough drawings of the creatures or
+weapons they are called after; and the extraordinary drawing of these
+emblems, showing the queer, unused, shaky manner in which each man has
+held the pen, struck me very much.
+
+"You know my small respect for our House of Commons. These local
+legislatures are too insufferably apish of mighty legislation, to be
+seen without bile; for which reason, and because a great crowd of
+senators and ladies had assembled in both houses to behold the
+inimitable, and had already begun to pour in upon him even in the
+secretary's private room, I went back to the hotel, with all speed. The
+members of both branches of the legislature followed me there, however,
+so we had to hold the usual levee before our half-past one o'clock
+dinner. We received a great number of them. Pretty nearly every man spat
+upon the carpet, as usual; and one blew his nose with his fingers,--also
+on the carpet, which was a very neat one, the room given up to us being
+the private parlor of the landlord's wife. This has become so common
+since, however, that it scarcely seems worth mentioning. Please to
+observe that the gentleman in question was a member of the senate, which
+answers (as they very often tell me) to our House of Lords.
+
+"The innkeeper was the most attentive, civil, and obliging person I ever
+saw in my life. On being asked for his bill, he said there was no bill:
+the honor and pleasure, etc. being more than sufficient.[57] I did not
+permit this, of course, and begged Mr. Q. to explain to him that,
+traveling four strong, I could not hear of it on any account.
+
+"And now I come to the Canal-Boat. Bless your heart and soul, my dear
+fellow,--if you could only see us on board the canal-boat! Let me think,
+for a moment, at what time of the day or night I should best like you to
+see us. In the morning? Between five and six in the morning, shall I
+say? Well! you _would_ like to see me, standing on the deck, fishing the
+dirty water out of the canal with a tin ladle chained to the boat by a
+long chain; pouring the same into a tin basin (also chained up in like
+manner); and scrubbing my face with the jack towel. At night, shall I
+say? I don't know that you _would_ like to look into the cabin at night,
+only to see me lying on a temporary shelf exactly the width of this
+sheet of paper when it's open (_I measured it this morning_),[58] with
+one man above me, and another below; and, in all, eight-and-twenty in a
+low cabin, which you can't stand upright in with your hat on. I don't
+think you would like to look in at breakfast-time either, for then these
+shelves have only just been taken down and put away, and the atmosphere
+of the place is, as you may suppose, by no means fresh; though there
+_are_ upon the table tea and coffee, and bread and butter, and salmon,
+and shad, and liver, and steak, and potatoes, and pickles, and ham, and
+pudding, and sausages; and three-and-thirty people sitting round it,
+eating and drinking; and savory bottles of gin, and whiskey, and brandy,
+and rum, in the bar hard by; and seven-and-twenty out of the
+eight-and-twenty men, in foul linen, with yellow streams from
+half-chewed tobacco trickling down their chins. Perhaps the best time
+for you to take a peep would be the present: eleven o'clock in the
+forenoon: when the barber is at his shaving, and the gentlemen are
+lounging about the stove waiting for their turns, and not more than
+seventeen are spitting in concert, and two or three are walking overhead
+(lying down on the luggage every time the man at the helm calls
+'Bridge!'), and I am writing this in the ladies' cabin, which is a part
+of the gentlemen's, and only screened off by a red curtain. Indeed, it
+exactly resembles the dwarf's private apartment in a caravan at a fair;
+and the gentlemen, generally, represent the spectators at a penny a
+head. The place is just as clean and just as large as that caravan you
+and I were in at Greenwich Fair last past. Outside, it is exactly like
+any canal-boat you have seen near the Regent's Park, or elsewhere.
+
+"You never can conceive what the hawking and spitting is, the whole
+night through. Last night was the worst. _Upon my honor and word_ I was
+obliged, this morning, to lay my fur coat on the deck, and wipe the
+half-dried flakes of spittle from it with my handkerchief; and the only
+surprise seemed to be that I should consider it necessary to do so. When
+I turned in last night, I put it on a stool beside me, and there it lay,
+under a cross-fire from five men,--three opposite, one above, and one
+below. I make no complaints, and show no disgust. I am looked upon as
+highly facetious at night, for I crack jokes with everybody near me
+until we fall asleep. I am considered very hardy in the morning, for I
+run up, bare-necked, and plunge my head into the half-frozen water, by
+half-past five o'clock. I am respected for my activity, inasmuch as I
+jump from the boat to the towing-path, and walk five or six miles before
+breakfast; keeping up with the horses all the time. In a word, they are
+quite astonished to find a sedentary Englishman roughing it so well, and
+taking so much exercise; and question me very much on that head. The
+greater part of the men will sit and shiver round the stove all day,
+rather than put one foot before the other. As to having a window open,
+that's not to be thought of.
+
+"We expect to reach Pittsburgh to-night, between eight and nine o'clock;
+and there we ardently hope to find your March letters awaiting us. We
+have had, with the exception of Friday afternoon, exquisite weather, but
+cold. Clear starlight and moonlight nights. The canal has run, for the
+most part, by the side of the Susquehanah and Iwanata rivers; and has
+been carried through tremendous obstacles. Yesterday we crossed the
+mountain. This is done _by railroad_. . . . You dine at an inn upon the
+mountain; and, including the half-hour allowed for the meal, are rather
+more than five hours performing this strange part of the journey. The
+people north and 'down east' have terrible legends of its danger; but
+they appear to be exceedingly careful, and don't go to work at all
+wildly. There are some queer precipices close to the rails, certainly;
+but every precaution is taken, I am inclined to think, that such
+difficulties, and such a vast work, will admit of.
+
+"The scenery, before you reach the mountains, and when you are on them,
+and after you have left them, is very grand and fine; and the canal
+winds its way through some deep, sullen gorges, which, seen by
+moonlight, are very impressive: though immeasurably inferior to Glencoe,
+to whose terrors I have not seen the smallest _approach_. We have
+passed, both in the mountains and elsewhere, a great number of new
+settlements and detached log houses. Their utterly forlorn and miserable
+appearance baffles all description. I have not seen six cabins out of
+six hundred, where the windows have been whole. Old hats, old clothes,
+old boards, old fragments of blanket and paper, are stuffed into the
+broken glass; and their air is misery and desolation. It pains the eye
+to see the stumps of great trees thickly strewn in every field of wheat;
+and never to lose the eternal swamp and dull morass, with hundreds of
+rotten trunks, of elm and pine and sycamore and logwood, steeped in its
+unwholesome water; where the frogs so croak at night that after dark
+there is an incessant sound as if millions of phantom teams, with bells,
+were traveling through the upper air, at an enormous distance off. It is
+quite an oppressive circumstance, too, to _come_ upon great tracks,
+where settlers have been burning down the trees; and where their wounded
+bodies lie about, like those of murdered creatures; while here and there
+some charred and blackened giant rears two bare arms aloft, and seems to
+curse his enemies. The prettiest sight I have seen was yesterday, when
+we--on the heights of the mountain, and in a keen wind--looked down into
+a valley full of light and softness; catching glimpses of scattered
+cabins; children running to the doors; dogs bursting out to bark; pigs
+scampering home, like so many prodigal sons; families sitting out in
+their gardens; cows gazing upward, with a stupid indifference; men in
+their shirt-sleeves, looking on at their unfinished houses, and planning
+work for to-morrow;--and the train riding on, high above them, like a
+storm. But I know this is beautiful--very--very beautiful!
+
+"I wonder whether you and Mac mean to go to Greenwich Fair! Perhaps you
+dine at the Crown and Sceptre to-day, for it's Easter-Monday--who knows!
+I wish you drank punch, dear Forster. It's a shabby thing, not to be
+able to picture you with that cool green glass. . . .
+
+"I told you of the many uses of the word 'fix.' I ask Mr. Q. on board a
+steamboat if breakfast be nearly ready, and he tells me yes he should
+think so, for when he was last below the steward was 'fixing the
+tables'--in other words, laying the cloth. When we have been writing,
+and I beg him (do you remember anything of my love of order, at this
+distance of time?) to collect our papers, he answers that he'll 'fix 'em
+presently.' So when a man's dressing he's 'fixing' himself, and when you
+put yourself under a doctor he 'fixes' you in no time. T'other night,
+before we came on board here, when I had ordered a bottle of mulled
+claret and waited some time for it, it was put on table with an apology
+from the landlord (a lieutenant-colonel) that 'he feared it wasn't fixed
+properly.' And here, on Saturday morning, a Western man, handing the
+potatoes to Mr. Q. at breakfast, inquired if he wouldn't take some of
+'these fixings' with his meat. I remained as grave as a judge. I catch
+them looking at me sometimes, and feel that they think I don't take any
+notice. Politics are very high here; dreadfully strong; handbills,
+denunciations, invectives, threats, and quarrels. The question is, who
+shall be the next President. The election comes off in _three years and
+a half_ from this time."
+
+He resumed his letter, "on board the steamboat from Pittsburgh to
+Cincinnati, April the 1st, 1842. A very tremulous steamboat, which makes
+my hand shake. This morning, my dear friend, this very morning, which,
+passing by without bringing news from England, would have seen us on our
+way to St. Louis (via Cincinnati and Louisville) with sad hearts and
+dejected countenances, and the prospect of remaining for at least three
+weeks longer without any intelligence of those so inexpressibly dear to
+us--this very morning, bright and lucky morning that it was, a great
+packet was brought to our bedroom door, from HOME. How I have read and
+re-read your affectionate, hearty, interesting, funny, serious,
+delightful, and thoroughly Forsterian Columbia letter, I will not
+attempt to tell you; or how glad I am that you liked my first; or how
+afraid I am that my second was not written in such good spirits as it
+should have been; or how glad I am again to think that my third _was_;
+or how I hope you will find some amusement from my fourth: this present
+missive. All this, and more affectionate and earnest words than the
+post-office would convey at any price, though they have no sharp edges
+to hurt the stamping-clerk--you will understand, I know, without
+expression, or attempt at expression. So, having got over the first
+agitation of so much pleasure; and having walked the deck; and being now
+in the cabin, where one party are playing at chess, and another party
+are asleep, and another are talking round the stove, and all are
+spitting; and a persevering bore of a horrible New Englander with a
+droning voice like a gigantic bee _will_ sit down beside me, though I am
+writing, and talk incessantly, in my very ear, to Kate; here goes again.
+
+"Let me see. I should tell you, first, that we got to Pittsburgh between
+eight and nine o'clock of the evening of the day on which I left off at
+the top of this sheet; and were there received by a little man (a very
+little man) whom I knew years ago in London. He rejoiceth in the name of
+D. G.; and, when I knew him, was in partnership with his father on the
+Stock-Exchange, and lived handsomely at Dalston. They failed in business
+soon afterwards, and then this little man began to turn to account what
+had previously been his amusement and accomplishment, by painting little
+subjects for the fancy shops. So I lost sight of him, nearly ten years
+ago; and here he turned up t'other day, as a portrait-painter in
+Pittsburgh! He had previously written me a letter which moved me a good
+deal, by a kind of quiet independence and contentment it breathed, and
+still a painful sense of being alone, so very far from home. I received
+it in Philadelphia, and answered it. He dined with us every day of our
+stay in Pittsburgh (they were only three), and was truly gratified and
+delighted to find me unchanged,--more so than I can tell you. I am very
+glad to-night to think how much happiness we have fortunately been able
+to give him.
+
+"Pittsburgh is like Birmingham--at least its townsfolks say so; and I
+didn't contradict them. It is, in one respect. There is a great deal of
+smoke in it. I quite offended a man at our yesterday's levee, who
+supposed I was 'now quite at home,' by telling him that the notion of
+London being so dark a place was a popular mistake. We had very queer
+customers at our receptions, I do assure you. Not least among them, a
+gentleman with his inexpressibles imperfectly buttoned and his waistband
+resting on his thighs, who stood behind the half-opened door, and could
+by no temptation or inducement be prevailed upon to come out. There was
+also another gentleman, with one eye and one fixed gooseberry, who stood
+in a corner, motionless like an eight-day clock, and glared upon me, as
+I courteously received the Pittsburgians. There were also two red-headed
+brothers--boys--young dragons rather--who hovered about Kate, and
+wouldn't go. A great crowd they were, for three days; and a very queer
+one."
+
+
+ "STILL IN THE SAME BOAT. _April the Second, 1842._
+
+"Many, many happy returns of the day. It's only eight o'clock in the
+morning now, but we mean to drink your health after dinner, in a bumper;
+and scores of Richmond dinners to us! We have some wine (a present sent
+on board by our Pittsburgh landlord) in our own cabin; and we shall tap
+it to good purpose, I assure you; wishing you all manner and kinds of
+happiness, and a long life to ourselves that we may be partakers of it.
+We have wondered a hundred times already, whether you and Mac will dine
+anywhere together, in honor of the day. I say yes, but Kate says no. She
+predicts that you'll ask Mac, and he won't go. I have not yet heard from
+him.
+
+"We have a better cabin here than we had on board the Britannia; the
+berths being much wider, and the den having two doors: one opening on
+the ladies' cabin, and one upon a little gallery in the stern of the
+boat. We expect to be at Cincinnati some time on Monday morning, and we
+carry about fifty passengers. The cabin for meals goes right through the
+boat, from the prow to the stern, and is very long; only a small portion
+of it being divided off, by a partition of wood and ground glass, for
+the ladies. We breakfast at half-after seven, dine at one, and sup at
+six. Nobody will sit down to any one of these meals, though the dishes
+are smoking on the board, until the ladies have appeared and taken their
+chairs. It was the same in the canal-boat.
+
+"The washing department is a little more civilized than it was on the
+canal, but bad is the best. Indeed, the Americans when they are
+traveling, as Miss Martineau seems disposed to admit, are exceedingly
+negligent; not to say dirty. To the best of my making out, the ladies,
+under most circumstances, are content with smearing their hands and
+faces in a very small quantity of water. So are the men; who superadd to
+that mode of ablution a hasty use of the common brush and comb. It is
+quite a practice, too, to wear but one cotton shirt a week, and three or
+four fine linen _fronts_. Anne reports that this is Mr. Q.'s course of
+proceeding; and my portrait-painting friend told me that it was the
+case with pretty nearly all his sitters; so that when he bought a piece
+of cloth not long ago, and instructed the sempstress to make it _all_
+into shirts, not fronts, she thought him deranged.
+
+"My friend the New Englander, of whom I wrote last night, is perhaps the
+most intolerable bore on this vast continent. He drones, and snuffles,
+and writes poems, and talks small philosophy and metaphysics, and never
+_will_ be quiet, under any circumstances. He is going to a great
+temperance convention at Cincinnati; along with a doctor of whom I saw
+something at Pittsburgh. The doctor, in addition to being everything
+that the New Englander is, is a phrenologist besides. I dodge them about
+the boat. Whenever I appear on deck, I see them bearing down upon
+me--and fly. The New Englander was very anxious last night that he and I
+should 'form a magnetic chain,' and magnetize the doctor, for the
+benefit of all incredulous passengers; but I declined on the plea of
+tremendous occupation in the way of letter-writing.
+
+"And, speaking of magnetism, let me tell you that the other night at
+Pittsburgh, there being present only Mr. Q. and the portrait-painter,
+Kate sat down, laughing, for me to try my hand upon her. I had been
+holding forth upon the subject rather luminously, and asserting that I
+thought I could exercise the influence, but had never tried. In six
+minutes, I magnetized her into hysterics, and then into the magnetic
+sleep. I tried again next night, and she fell into the slumber in little
+more than two minutes. . . . I can wake her with perfect ease; but I
+confess (not being prepared for anything so sudden and complete) I was
+on the first occasion rather alarmed. . . . The Western parts being
+sometimes hazardous, I have fitted out the whole of my little company
+with LIFE-PRESERVERS, which I inflate with great solemnity when we get
+aboard any boat, and keep, as Mrs. Cluppins did her umbrella in the
+court of common pleas, ready for use upon a moment's notice.". . .
+
+He resumed his letter, on "Sunday, April the third," with allusion to a
+general who had called upon him in Washington with two literary ladies,
+and had written to him next day for an immediate interview, as "the two
+LL's" were ambitious of the honor of a personal introduction. "Besides
+the doctor and the dread New Englander, we have on board that valiant
+general who wrote to me about the 'two LL's.' He is an old, old man with
+a weazen face, and the remains of a pigeon-breast in his military
+surtout. He is acutely gentlemanly and officer-like. The breast has so
+subsided, and the face has become so strongly marked, that he seems,
+like a pigeon-pie, to show only the feet of the bird outside, and to
+keep the rest to himself. He is perhaps _the_ most horrible bore in this
+country. And I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there
+are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these
+United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of
+the word, without coming here. There are no particular characters on
+board, with these three exceptions. Indeed, I seldom see the passengers
+but at meal-times, as I read and write in our own little state-room. . . .
+I have smuggled two chairs into our crib, and write this on a book upon
+my knee. Everything is in the neatest order, of course; and my
+shaving-tackle, dressing-case, brushes, books, and papers, are arranged
+with as much precision as if we were going to remain here a month. Thank
+God we are not.
+
+"The average width of the river rather exceeds that of the Thames at
+Greenwich. In parts it is much broader; and then there is usually a
+green island, covered with trees, dividing it into two streams.
+Occasionally we stop for a few minutes at a small town, or village (I
+ought to say city, everything is a city here); but the banks are for the
+most part deep solitudes, overgrown with trees, which, in these western
+latitudes, are already in leaf, and very green. . . .
+
+"All this I see, as I write, from the little door into the stern-gallery
+which I mentioned just now. It don't happen six times in a day that any
+other passenger comes near it; and, as the weather is amply warm enough
+to admit of our sitting with it open, here we remain from morning until
+night: reading, writing, talking. What our theme of conversation is, I
+need not tell you. No beauty or variety makes us weary less for home. We
+count the days, and say, 'When May comes, and we can say--_next
+month_--the time will seem almost gone.' We are never tired of imagining
+what you are all about. I allow of no calculation for the difference of
+clocks, but insist on a corresponding minute in London. It is much the
+shortest way, and best. . . . Yesterday, we drank your health and many
+happy returns--in wine, after dinner; in a small milk-pot jug of
+gin-punch, at night. And when I made a temporary table, to hold the
+little candlestick, of one of my dressing-case trays; cunningly inserted
+under the mattress of my berth with a weight atop of it to keep it in
+its place, so that it made a perfectly exquisite bracket; we agreed,
+that, please God, this should be a joke at the Star and Garter on the
+second of April eighteen hundred and forty-three. If your blank _can_ be
+surpassed, . . . believe me ours transcends it. My heart gets, sometimes,
+SORE for home.
+
+"At Pittsburgh I saw another solitary confinement prison: Pittsburgh
+being also in Pennsylvania. A horrible thought occurred to me when I was
+recalling all I had seen, that night. _What if ghosts be one of the
+terrors of these jails?_ I have pondered on it often, since then. The
+utter solitude by day and night; the many hours of darkness; the silence
+of death; the mind forever brooding on melancholy themes, and having no
+relief; sometimes an evil conscience very busy; imagine a prisoner
+covering up his head in the bedclothes and looking out from time to
+time, with a ghastly dread of some inexplicable silent figure that
+always sits upon his bed, or stands (if a thing can be said to stand,
+that never walks as men do) in the same corner of his cell. The more I
+think of it, the more certain I feel that not a few of these men (during
+a portion of their imprisonment at least) are nightly visited by
+spectres. I did ask one man in this last jail, if he dreamed much. He
+gave me a most extraordinary look, and said--under his breath--in a
+whisper, 'No.'"
+
+
+ "CINCINNATI. _Fourth April, 1842._
+
+"We arrived here this morning: about three o'clock, I believe, but I was
+fast asleep in my berth. I turned out soon after six, dressed, and
+breakfasted on board. About half-after eight, we came ashore and drove
+to the hotel, to which we had written on from Pittsburgh ordering
+rooms; and which is within a stone's throw of the boat-wharf. Before I
+had issued an official notification that we were 'not at home,' two
+Judges called, on the part of the inhabitants, to know when we would
+receive the townspeople. We appointed to-morrow morning, from half-past
+eleven to one; arranged to go out, with these two gentlemen, to see the
+town, _at_ one; and were fixed for an evening party to-morrow night at
+the house of one of them. On Wednesday morning we go on by the mail-boat
+to Louisville, a trip of fourteen hours; and from that place proceed in
+the next good boat to St. Louis, which is a voyage of four days. Finding
+from my judicial friends (well-informed and most agreeable gentlemen)
+this morning that the prairie travel to Chicago is a very fatiguing one,
+and that the lakes are stormy, sea-sicky, and not over safe at this
+season, I wrote by our captain to St. Louis (for the boat that brought
+us here goes on there) to the effect, that I should not take the lake
+route, but should come back here; and should visit the prairies, which
+are within thirty miles of St. Louis, immediately on my arrival
+there. . . .
+
+"I have walked to the window, since I turned this page, to see what
+aspect the town wears. We are in a wide street: paved in the
+carriage-way with small white stones, and in the footway with small red
+tiles. The houses are for the most part one story high; some are of
+wood; others of a clean white brick. Nearly all have green blinds
+outside every window. The principal shops over the way are, according to
+the inscriptions over them, a Large Bread Bakery; a Book Bindery; a Dry
+Goods Store; and a Carriage Repository; the last-named establishment
+looking very like an exceedingly small retail coal-shed. On the pavement
+under our window, a black man is chopping wood; and another black man is
+talking (confidentially) to a pig. The public table, at this hotel and
+at the hotel opposite, has just now finished dinner. The diners are
+collected on the pavement, on both sides of the way, picking their
+teeth, and talking. The day being warm, some of them have brought chairs
+into the street. Some are on three chairs; some on two; and some, in
+defiance of all known laws of gravity, are sitting quite comfortably on
+one: with three of the chair's legs, and their own two, high up in the
+air. The loungers, underneath our window, are talking of a great
+Temperance convention which comes off here to-morrow. Others, about me.
+Others, about England. Sir Robert Peel is popular here, with
+everybody. . . ."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[56] See _ante_, pp. 307, 308.
+
+[57] Miss Martineau was perhaps partly right, then? _Ante_, p. 344.
+
+[58] Sixteen inches exactly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+THE FAR WEST: TO NIAGARA FALLS.
+
+1842.
+
+ Descriptions in Letters and in _Notes_--Outline
+ of Westward Travel--An Arabian Night City--A
+ Temperance Festival--A Party at Judge
+ Walker's--The Party from another View--Mournful
+ Results of Boredom--Young Lady's Description of
+ C. D.--Down the Mississippi--Listening and
+ Watching--A Levee at St.
+ Louis--Compliments--Lord Ashburton's
+ Arrival--Talk with a Judge on Slavery--A Negro
+ burnt alive--Feeling of Slaves
+ themselves--American Testimony--Pretty Little
+ Scene--A Mother and her Husband--The Baby--St.
+ Louis in Sight--Meeting of Wife and
+ Husband--Trip to a Prairie--On the Prairie at
+ Sunset--General Character of Scenery--The
+ Prairie described--Disappointment and
+ Enjoyment--Soiree at Planter's House Inn--Good
+ Fare--No Gray Heads in St. Louis--Dueling--Mrs.
+ Dickens as a Traveler--From Cincinnati to
+ Columbus--What a Levee is like--From Columbus
+ to Sandusky--The Travelers alone--A Log House
+ Inn--Making tidy--A Momentary Crisis--Americans
+ not a Humorous People--The Only
+ Recreations--From Sandusky to Buffalo--On Lake
+ Erie--Reception and Consolation of a
+ Mayor--From Buffalo to Niagara--Nearing the
+ Falls--The Horse-shoe--Effect upon him of
+ Niagara--The Old Recollection--Looking forward.
+
+
+THE next letter described his experiences in the Far West, his stay in
+St. Louis, his visit to a prairie, the return to Cincinnati, and, after
+a stage-coach ride from that city to Columbus, the travel thence to
+Sandusky, and so, by Lake Erie, to the Falls of Niagara. All these
+subjects appear in the _Notes_, but nothing printed there is repeated
+in the extracts now to be given. Of the closing passages of his journey,
+when he turned from Columbus in the direction of home, the story, here
+for the first time told, is in his most characteristic vein; the account
+that will be found of the prairie will probably be preferred to what is
+given in the _Notes_; the Cincinnati sketches are very pleasant; and
+even such a description as that of the Niagara Falls, of which so much
+is made in the book, has here an independent novelty and freshness. The
+first vividness is in his letter. The naturalness of associating no
+image or sense but of repose, with a grandeur so mighty and resistless,
+is best presented suddenly; and, in a few words, we have the material as
+well as moral beauty of a scene unrivaled in its kind upon the earth.
+The instant impression we find to be worth more than the eloquent
+recollection.
+
+The captain of the boat that had dropped them at Cincinnati and gone to
+St. Louis had stayed in the latter place until they were able to join
+and return with him; this letter bears date accordingly, "On board the
+Messenger again. Going from St. Louis back to Cincinnati. Friday,
+fifteenth April, 1842;" and its first paragraph is an outline of the
+movements which it afterwards describes in detail. "We remained in
+Cincinnati one whole day after the date of my last, and left on
+Wednesday morning, the 6th. We reached Louisville soon after midnight on
+the same night; and slept there. Next day at one o'clock we put
+ourselves on board another steamer, and traveled on until Sunday
+evening, the tenth; when we reached St. Louis at about nine o'clock. The
+next day we devoted to seeing the city. Next day, Tuesday, the twelfth,
+I started off with a party of men (we were fourteen in all) to see a
+prairie; returned to St. Louis about noon on the thirteenth; attended a
+soiree and ball--not a dinner--given in my honor that night; and
+yesterday afternoon at four o'clock we turned our faces homewards. Thank
+Heaven!
+
+"Cincinnati is only fifty years old, but is a very beautiful city; I
+think the prettiest place I have seen here, except Boston. It has risen
+out of the forest like an Arabian-Night city; is well laid out;
+ornamented in the suburbs with pretty villas; and above all, for this is
+a very rare feature in America, has smooth turf-plots and well-kept
+gardens. There happened to be a great temperance festival; and the
+procession mustered under, and passed, our windows early in the morning.
+I suppose they were twenty thousand strong, at least. Some of the
+banners were quaint and odd enough. The ship-carpenters, for instance,
+displayed on one side of their flag the good Ship Temperance in full
+sail; on the other, the Steamer Alcohol blowing up sky-high. The
+Irishmen had a portrait of Father Mathew, you may be sure. And
+Washington's broad lower jaw (by-the-by, Washington had not a pleasant
+face) figured in all parts of the ranks. In a kind of square at one
+outskirt of the city they divided into bodies, and were addressed by
+different speakers. Drier speaking I never heard. I own that I felt
+quite uncomfortable to think they could take the taste of it out of
+their mouths with nothing better than water.
+
+"In the evening we went to a party at Judge Walker's, and were
+introduced to at least one hundred and fifty first-rate bores,
+separately and singly. I was required to sit down by the greater part of
+them, and talk![59] In the night we were serenaded (as we usually are
+in every place we come to), and very well serenaded, I assure you. But
+we were very much knocked up. I really think my face has acquired a
+fixed expression of sadness from the constant and unmitigated boring I
+endure. The LL's have carried away all my cheerfulness. There is a line
+in my chin (on the right side of the under lip), indelibly fixed there
+by the New Englander I told you of in my last. I have the print of a
+crow's foot on the outside of my left eye, which I attribute to the
+literary characters of small towns. A dimple has vanished from my cheek,
+which I felt myself robbed of at the time by a wise legislator. But on
+the other hand I am really indebted for a good broad grin to P. . E. . ,
+literary critic of Philadelphia, and sole proprietor of the English
+language in its grammatical and idiomatical purity; to P. . E. . , with the
+shiny straight hair and turned-down shirt-collar, who taketh all of us
+English men of letters to task in print, roundly and uncompromisingly,
+but told me, at the same time, that I had 'awakened a new era' in his
+mind. . . .
+
+"The last 200 miles of the voyage from Cincinnati to St. Louis are upon
+the Mississippi, for you come down the Ohio to its mouth. It is well for
+society that this Mississippi, the renowned father of waters, had no
+children who take after him. It is the beastliest river in the
+world.". . . (His description is in the _Notes_.)
+
+"Conceive the pleasure of rushing down this stream by night (as we did
+last night) at the rate of fifteen miles an hour; striking against
+floating blocks of timber every instant; and dreading some infernal blow
+at every bump. The helmsman in these boats is in a little glass house
+upon the roof. In the Mississippi, another man stands in the very head
+of the vessel, listening and watching intently; listening, because they
+can tell in dark nights by the noise when any great obstruction is at
+hand. This man holds the rope of a large bell which hangs close to the
+wheel-house, and whenever he pulls it the engine is to stop directly,
+and not to stir until he rings again. Last night, this bell rang at
+least once in every five minutes; and at each alarm there was a
+concussion which nearly flung one out of bed. . . . While I have been
+writing this account, we have shot out of that hideous river, thanks be
+to God; never to see it again, I hope, but in a nightmare. We are now on
+the smooth Ohio, and the change is like the transition from pain to
+perfect ease.
+
+"We had a very crowded levee in St. Louis. Of course the paper had an
+account of it. If I were to drop a letter in the street, it would be in
+the newspaper next day, and nobody would think its publication an
+outrage. The editor objected to my hair, as not curling sufficiently. He
+admitted an eye; but objected again to dress, as being somewhat foppish,
+'and indeed perhaps rather flash.' 'But such,' he benevolently adds,
+'are the differences between American and English taste--rendered more
+apparent, perhaps, by all the other gentlemen present being dressed in
+black.' Oh that you could have seen the other gentlemen! . . .
+
+"A St. Louis lady complimented Kate upon her voice and manner of
+speaking, assuring her that she should never have suspected her of being
+Scotch, or even English. She was so obliging as to add that she would
+have taken her for an American, anywhere: which she (Kate) was no doubt
+aware was a very great compliment, as the Americans were admitted on all
+hands to have greatly refined upon the English language! I need not tell
+you that out of Boston and New York a nasal drawl is universal, but I
+may as well hint that the prevailing grammar is also more than doubtful;
+that the oddest vulgarisms are received idioms; that all the women who
+have been bred in slave-States speak more or less like negroes, from
+having been constantly in their childhood with black nurses; and that
+the most fashionable and aristocratic (these are two words in great
+use), instead of asking you in what place you were born, inquire where
+you 'hail from.' ! !
+
+"Lord Ashburton arrived at Annapolis t'other day, after a voyage of
+forty odd days in heavy weather. Straightway the newspapers state, on
+the authority of a correspondent who 'rowed round the ship' (I leave you
+to fancy her condition), that America need fear no superiority from
+England, in respect of her wooden walls. The same correspondent is
+'quite pleased' with the frank manner of the English officers; and
+patronizes them as being, for John Bulls, quite refined. My face, like
+Haji Baba's, turns upside down, and my liver is changed to water, when I
+come upon such things, and think who writes and who read them. . . .
+
+"They won't let me alone about slavery. A certain judge in St. Louis
+went so far yesterday that I fell upon him (to the indescribable horror
+of the man who brought him) and told him a piece of my mind. I said that
+I was very averse to speaking on the subject here, and always forbore,
+if possible; but when he pitied our national ignorance of the truths of
+slavery, I must remind him that we went upon indisputable records,
+obtained after many years of careful investigation, and at all sorts of
+self-sacrifice, and that I believed we were much more competent to judge
+of its atrocity and horror than he who had been brought up in the midst
+of it. I told him that I could sympathize with men who admitted it to be
+a dreadful evil, but frankly confessed their inability to devise a means
+of getting rid of it; but that men who spoke of it as a blessing, as a
+matter of course, as a state of things to be desired, were out of the
+pale of reason; and that for them to speak of ignorance or prejudice was
+an absurdity too ridiculous to be combated. . . .
+
+"It is not six years ago, since a slave in this very same St. Louis,
+being arrested (I forget for what), and knowing he had no chance of a
+fair trial, be his offense what it might, drew his bowie-knife and
+ripped the constable across the body. A scuffle ensuing, the desperate
+negro stabbed two others with the same weapon. The mob who gathered
+round (among whom were men of mark, wealth, and influence in the place)
+overpowered him by numbers; carried him away to a piece of open ground
+beyond the city; _and burned him alive_. This, I say, was done within
+six years, in broad day; in a city with its courts, lawyers, tipstaffs,
+judges, jails, and hangman; and not a hair on the head of one of those
+men has been hurt to this day. And it is, believe me, it is the
+miserable, wretched independence in small things, the paltry
+republicanism which recoils from honest service to an honest man, but
+does not shrink from every trick, artifice, and knavery in business,
+that makes these slaves necessary, and will render them so, until the
+indignation of other countries sets them free.
+
+"They say the slaves are fond of their masters. Look at this pretty
+vignette[60] (part of the stock in trade of a newspaper), and judge how
+you would feel, when men, looking in your face, told you such tales with
+the newspaper lying on the table. In all the slave-districts,
+advertisements for runaways are as much matters of course as the
+announcement of the play for the evening with us. The poor creatures
+themselves fairly worship English people: they would do anything for
+them. They are perfectly acquainted with all that takes place in
+reference to emancipation; and _of course_ their attachment to us grows
+out of their deep devotion to their owners. I cut this illustration out
+of a newspaper which had a leader in reference to _the abominable and
+hellish doctrine of Abolition--repugnant alike to every law of God and
+Nature_. 'I know something,' said a Dr. Bartlett (a very accomplished
+man), late a fellow-passenger of ours,--'I know something of their
+fondness for their masters. I live in Kentucky; and I can assert upon
+my honor that, in my neighborhood, it is as common for a runaway slave,
+retaken, to draw his bowie-knife and rip his owner's bowels open, as it
+is for you to see a drunken fight in London.'
+
+
+ "SAME BOAT, _Saturday, Sixteenth April, 1842._
+
+"Let me tell you, my dear Forster, before I forget it, a pretty little
+scene we had on board the boat between Louisville and St. Louis, as we
+were going to the latter place. It is not much to tell, but it was very
+pleasant and interesting to witness."
+
+What follows has been printed in the _Notes_, and ought not, by the rule
+I have laid down, to be given here. But, beautiful as the printed
+description is, it has not profited by the alteration of some touches
+and the omission of others in the first fresh version of it, which, for
+that reason, I here preserve,--one of the most charming soul-felt
+pictures of character and emotion that ever warmed the heart in fact or
+fiction. It was, I think, Jeffrey's favorite passage in all the writings
+of Dickens; and certainly, if any one would learn the secret of their
+popularity, it is to be read in the observation and description of this
+little incident.
+
+"There was a little woman on board, with a little baby; and both little
+woman and little child were cheerful, good-looking, bright-eyed, and
+fair to see. The little woman had been passing a long time with a sick
+mother in New York, and had left her home in St. Louis in that condition
+in which ladies who truly love their lords desire to be. The baby had
+been born in her mother's house, and she had not seen her husband (to
+whom she was now returning) for twelve months: having left him a month
+or two after their marriage. Well, to be sure, there never was a little
+woman so full of hope, and tenderness, and love, and anxiety, as this
+little woman was: and there she was, all the livelong day, wondering
+whether 'he' would be at the wharf; and whether 'he' had got her letter;
+and whether, if she sent the baby on shore by somebody else, _'he' would
+know it, meeting it in the street_: which, seeing that he had never set
+eyes upon it in his life, was not very likely in the abstract, but was
+probable enough to the young mother. She was such an artless little
+creature; and was in such a sunny, beaming, hopeful state; and let out
+all this matter, clinging close about her heart, so freely; that all the
+other lady passengers entered into the spirit of it as much as she: and
+the captain (who heard all about it from his wife) was wondrous sly, I
+promise you: inquiring, every time we met at table, whether she expected
+anybody to meet her at St. Louis, and supposing she wouldn't want to go
+ashore the night we reached it, and cutting many other dry jokes which
+convulsed all his hearers, but especially the ladies. There was one
+little, weazen, dried-apple old woman among them, who took occasion to
+doubt the constancy of husbands under such circumstances of bereavement;
+and there was another lady (with a lap-dog), old enough to moralize on
+the lightness of human affections, and yet not so old that she could
+help nursing the baby now and then, or laughing with the rest when the
+little woman called it by its father's name, and asked it all manner of
+fantastic questions concerning him, in the joy of her heart. It was
+something of a blow to the little woman that when we were within twenty
+miles of our destination it became clearly necessary to put the baby to
+bed; but she got over that with the same good humor, tied a little
+handkerchief over her little head, and came out into the gallery with
+the rest. Then, such an oracle as she became in reference to the
+localities! and such facetiousness as was displayed by the married
+ladies! and such sympathy as was shown by the single ones! and such
+peals of laughter as the little woman herself (who would just as soon
+have cried) greeted every jest with! At last, there were the lights of
+St. Louis--and here was the wharf--and those were the steps--and the
+little woman, covering her face with her hands, and laughing, or seeming
+to laugh, more than ever, ran into her own cabin, and shut herself up
+tight. I have no doubt that, in the charming inconsistency of such
+excitement, she stopped her ears lest she should hear 'him' asking for
+her; but I didn't see her do it. Then a great crowd of people rushed on
+board, though the boat was not yet made fast, and was staggering about
+among the other boats to find a landing-place; and everybody looked for
+the husband, and nobody saw him; when all of a sudden, right in the
+midst of them,--God knows how she ever got there,--there was the little
+woman hugging with both arms round the neck of a fine, good-looking,
+sturdy fellow! And in a moment afterwards, there she was again, dragging
+him through the small door of her small cabin, to look at the baby as he
+lay asleep!--What a good thing it is to know that so many of us would
+have been quite down-hearted and sorry if that husband had failed to
+come!"
+
+He then resumes; but in what follows nothing is repeated that will be
+found in his printed description of the jaunt to the looking-glass
+prairie:
+
+"But about the prairie--it is not, I must confess, so good in its way as
+this; but I'll tell you all about that too, and leave you to judge for
+yourself. Tuesday the 12th was the day fixed; and we were to start at
+five in the morning--sharp. I turned out at four; shaved and dressed;
+got some bread and milk; and, throwing up the window, looked down into
+the street. Deuce a coach was there, nor did anybody seem to be stirring
+in the house. I waited until half-past five; but no preparations being
+visible even then, I left Mr. Q. to look out, and lay down upon the bed
+again. There I slept until nearly seven, when I was called. . . . Exclusive
+of Mr. Q. and myself, there were twelve of my committee in the party:
+all lawyers except one. He was an intelligent, mild, well-informed
+gentleman of my own age,--the Unitarian minister of the place. With him,
+and two other companions, I got into the first coach. . . .
+
+"We halted at so good an inn at Lebanon that we resolved to return there
+at night, if possible. One would scarcely find a better village alehouse
+of a homely kind in England. During our halt I walked into the village,
+and met a _dwelling-house_ coming down-hill at a good round trot, drawn
+by some twenty oxen! We resumed our journey as soon as possible, and got
+upon the looking-glass prairie at sunset. We halted near a solitary log
+house for the sake of its water; unpacked the baskets; formed an
+encampment with the carriages; and dined.
+
+"Now, a prairie is undoubtedly worth seeing--but more, that one may say
+one has seen it, than for any sublimity it possesses in itself. Like
+most things, great or small, in this country, you hear of it with
+considerable exaggerations. Basil Hall was really quite right in
+depreciating the general character of the scenery. The widely-famed Far
+West is not to be compared with even the tamest portions of Scotland or
+Wales. You stand upon the prairie, and see the unbroken horizon all
+round you. You are on a great plain, which is like a sea without water.
+I am exceedingly fond of wild and lonely scenery, and believe that I
+have the faculty of being as much impressed by it as any man living. But
+the prairie fell, by far, short of my preconceived idea. I felt no such
+emotions as I do in crossing Salisbury Plain. The excessive flatness of
+the scene makes it dreary, but tame. Grandeur is certainly not its
+characteristic. I retired from the rest of the party, to understand my
+own feelings the better; and looked all round, again and again. It was
+fine. It was worth the ride. The sun was going down, very red and
+bright; and the prospect looked like that ruddy sketch of Catlin's,
+which attracted our attention (you remember?); except that there was not
+so much ground as he represents, between the spectator and the horizon.
+But to say (as the fashion is here) that the sight is a landmark in
+one's existence, and awakens a new set of sensations, is sheer gammon. I
+would say to every man who can't see a prairie--go to Salisbury Plain,
+Marlborough Downs, or any of the broad, high, open lands near the sea.
+Many of them are fully as impressive, and Salisbury Plain is _decidedly_
+more so.
+
+"We had brought roast fowls, buffalo's tongue, ham, bread, cheese,
+butter, biscuits, sherry, champagne, lemons and sugar for punch, and
+abundance of ice. It was a delicious meal; and, as they were most
+anxious that I should be pleased, I warmed myself into a state of
+surpassing jollity; proposed toasts from the coach-box (which was the
+chair); ate and drank with the best; and made, I believe, an excellent
+companion to a very friendly companionable party. In an hour or so we
+packed up, and drove back to the inn at Lebanon. While supper was
+preparing, I took a pleasant walk with my Unitarian friend; and when it
+was over (we drank nothing with it but tea and coffee) we went to bed.
+The clergyman and I had an exquisitely clean little chamber of our own;
+and the rest of the party were quartered overhead. . . .
+
+"We got back to St. Louis soon after twelve at noon; and I rested during
+the remainder of the day. The soiree came off at night, in a very good
+ball-room at our inn,--the Planter's House. The whole of the guests were
+introduced to us, singly. We were glad enough, you may believe, to come
+away at midnight; and were very tired. Yesterday, I wore a blouse.
+To-day, a fur coat. Trying changes!
+
+
+ "IN THE SAME BOAT,
+ "_Sunday, Sixteenth April, 1842._
+
+"The inns in these outlandish corners of the world would astonish you by
+their goodness. The Planter's House is as large as the Middlesex
+Hospital, and built very much on our hospital plan, with long wards
+abundantly ventilated, and plain whitewashed walls. They had a famous
+notion of sending up at breakfast-time large glasses of new milk with
+blocks of ice in them as clear as crystal. Our table was abundantly
+supplied indeed at every meal. One day when Kate and I were dining alone
+together, in our own room, we counted sixteen dishes on the table at the
+same time.
+
+"The society is pretty rough, and intolerably conceited. All the
+inhabitants are young. _I didn't see one gray head in St. Louis._ There
+is an island close by, called Bloody Island. It is the dueling-ground of
+St. Louis; and is so called from the last fatal duel which was fought
+there. It was a pistol duel, breast to breast, and both parties fell
+dead at the same time. One of our prairie party (a young man) had acted
+as second there, in several encounters. The last occasion was a duel
+with rifles, at forty paces; and coming home he told us how he had
+bought his man a coat of green linen to fight in, woolen being usually
+fatal to rifle-wounds. Prairie is variously called (on the refinement
+principle, I suppose) Para_a_rer; par_e_arer; and paro_a_rer. I am
+afraid, my dear fellow, you will have had great difficulty in reading
+all the foregoing text. I have written it, very laboriously, on my knee;
+and the engine throbs and starts as if the boat were possessed with a
+devil.
+
+
+ "SANDUSKY,
+ "_Sunday, Twenty-fourth April, 1842._
+
+"We went ashore at Louisville this night week, where I left off, two
+lines above; and slept at the hotel, in which we had put up before. The
+Messenger being abominably slow, we got our luggage out next morning,
+and started on again at eleven o'clock in the Benjamin Franklin
+mail-boat: a splendid vessel, with a cabin more than two hundred feet
+long, and little state-rooms affording proportionate conveniences. She
+got in at Cincinnati by one o'clock next morning, when we landed in the
+dark and went back to our old hotel. As we made our way on foot over the
+broken pavement, Anne measured her length upon the ground, but didn't
+hurt herself. I say nothing of Kate's troubles--but you recollect her
+propensity? She falls into, or out of, every coach or boat we enter;
+scrapes the skin off her legs; brings great sores and swellings on her
+feet; chips large fragments out of her ankle-bones; and makes herself
+blue with bruises. She really has, however, since we got over the first
+trial of being among circumstances so new and so fatiguing, made a _most
+admirable_ traveler in every respect. She has never screamed or
+expressed alarm under circumstances that would have fully justified her
+in doing so, even in my eyes; has never given way to despondency or
+fatigue, though we have now been traveling incessantly, through a very
+rough country, for more than a month, and have been at times, as you may
+readily suppose, most thoroughly tired; has always accommodated herself,
+well and cheerfully, to everything; and has pleased me very much, and
+proved herself perfectly game.
+
+"We remained at Cincinnati all Tuesday the nineteenth, and all that
+night. At eight o'clock on Wednesday morning the twentieth, we left in
+the mail-stage for Columbus: Anne, Kate, and Mr. Q. inside; I on the
+box. The distance is a hundred and twenty miles; the road macadamized;
+and, for an American road, very good. We were three-and-twenty hours
+performing the journey. We traveled all night; reached Columbus at seven
+in the morning; breakfasted; and went to bed until dinner-time. At
+night we held a levee for half an hour, and the people poured in as they
+always do: each gentleman with a lady on each arm, exactly like the
+Chorus to God Save the Queen. I wish you could see them, that you might
+know what a splendid comparison this is. They wear their clothes
+precisely as the chorus people do; and stand--supposing Kate and me to
+be in the centre of the stage, with our backs to the footlights--just as
+the company would, on the first night of the season. They shake hands
+exactly after the manner of the guests at a ball at the Adelphi or the
+Haymarket; receive any facetiousness on my part as if there were a stage
+direction 'all laugh;' and have rather more difficulty in 'getting off'
+than the last gentlemen, in white pantaloons, polished boots, and
+berlins, usually display, under the most trying circumstances.
+
+"Next morning, that is to say, on Friday, the 22d, at seven o'clock
+exactly, we resumed our journey. The stage from Columbus to this place
+only running thrice a week, and not on that day, I bargained for an
+'exclusive extra' with four horses; for which I paid forty dollars, or
+eight pounds English: the horses changing, as they would if it were the
+regular stage. To insure our getting on properly, the proprietors sent
+an agent on the box; and, with no other company but him and a hamper
+full of eatables and drinkables, we went upon our way. It is impossible
+to convey an adequate idea to you of the kind of road over which we
+traveled. I can only say that it was, at the best, but a track through
+the wild forest, and among the swamps, bogs, and morasses of the
+withered bush. A great portion of it was what is called a 'corduroy
+road:' which is made by throwing round logs or whole trees into a swamp,
+and leaving them to settle there. Good Heaven! if you only felt one of
+the least of the jolts with which the coach falls from log to log! It is
+like nothing but going up a steep flight of stairs in an omnibus. Now
+the coach flung us in a heap on its floor, and now crushed our heads
+against its roof. Now one side of it was deep in the mire, and we were
+holding on to the other. Now it was lying on the horses' tails, and now
+again upon its back. But it never, never was in any position, attitude,
+or kind of motion, to which we are accustomed in coaches; or made the
+smallest approach to our experience of the proceedings of any sort of
+vehicle that goes on wheels. Still, the day was beautiful, the air
+delicious, and we were _alone_; with no tobacco-spittle, or eternal
+prosy conversation about dollars and politics (the only two subjects
+they ever converse about, or can converse upon), to bore us. We really
+enjoyed it; made a joke of the being knocked about; and were quite
+merry. At two o'clock we stopped in the wood to open our hamper and
+dine; and we drank to our darlings and all friends at home. Then we
+started again and went on until ten o'clock at night: when we reached a
+place called Lower Sandusky, sixty-two miles from our starting-point.
+The last three hours of the journey were not very pleasant; for it
+lightened--awfully: every flash very vivid, very blue, and very long;
+and, the wood being so dense that the branches on _either_ side of the
+track rattled and broke _against_ the coach, it was rather a dangerous
+neighborhood for a thunder-storm.
+
+"The inn at which we halted was a rough log house. The people were all
+abed, and we had to knock them up. We had the queerest sleeping-room,
+with two doors, one opposite the other; both opening directly on the
+wild black country, and neither having any lock or bolt. The effect of
+these opposite doors was, that one was always blowing the other open: an
+ingenuity in the art of building, which I don't remember to have met
+with before. You should have seen me, in my shirt, blockading them with
+portmanteaus, and desperately endeavoring to make the room tidy! But the
+blockading was really needful, for in my dressing-case I have about
+250_l._ in gold; and for the amount of the middle figure in that scarce
+metal there are not a few men in the West who would murder their
+fathers. Apropos of this golden store, consider at your leisure the
+strange state of things in this country. It has _no money_; really no
+money. The bank-paper won't pass; the newspapers are full of
+advertisements from tradesmen who sell by barter; and American gold is
+not to be had, or purchased. I bought sovereigns, English sovereigns, at
+first; but as I could get none of them at Cincinnati, to this day, I
+have had to purchase French gold; 20-franc pieces; with which I am
+traveling as if I were in Paris!
+
+"But let's go back to Lower Sandusky. Mr. Q. went to bed up in the roof
+of the log house somewhere, but was so beset by bugs that he got up
+after an hour and _lay in the coach_, . . . where he was obliged to wait
+till breakfast-time. We breakfasted, driver and all, in the one common
+room. It was papered with newspapers, and was as rough a place as need
+be. At half-past seven we started again, and we reached Sandusky at six
+o'clock yesterday afternoon. It is on Lake Erie, twenty-four hours'
+journey by steamboat from Buffalo. We found no boat here, nor has there
+been one, since. We are waiting, with every thing packed up, ready to
+start on the shortest notice; and are anxiously looking out for smoke in
+the distance.
+
+"There was an old gentleman in the log inn at Lower Sandusky who treats
+with the Indians on the part of the American government, and has just
+concluded a treaty with the Wyandot Indians at that place to remove next
+year to some land provided for them west of the Mississippi, a little
+way beyond St. Louis. He described his negotiation to me, and their
+reluctance to go, exceedingly well. They are a fine people, but degraded
+and broken down. If you could see any of their men and women on a
+race-course in England, you would not know them from gipsies.
+
+"We are in a small house here, but a very comfortable one, and the
+people are exceedingly obliging. Their demeanor in these country parts
+is invariably morose, sullen, clownish, and repulsive. I should think
+there is not, on the face of the earth, a people so entirely destitute
+of humor, vivacity, or the capacity of enjoyment. It is most remarkable.
+I am quite serious when I say that I have not heard a hearty laugh these
+six weeks, except my own; nor have I seen a merry face on any shoulders
+but a black man's. Lounging listlessly about; idling in bar-rooms;
+smoking; spitting; and lolling on the pavement in rocking-chairs,
+outside the shop-doors; are the only recreations. I don't think the
+national shrewdness extends beyond the Yankees; that is, the Eastern
+men. The rest are heavy, dull, and ignorant. Our landlord here is from
+the East. He is a handsome, obliging, civil fellow. He comes into the
+room with his hat on; spits in the fireplace as he talks; sits down on
+the sofa with his hat on; pulls out his newspaper, and reads; but to all
+this I am accustomed. He is anxious to please--and that is enough.
+
+"We are wishing very much for a boat; for we hope to find our letters at
+Buffalo. It is half-past one; and, as there is no boat in sight, we are
+fain (sorely against our wills) to order an early dinner.
+
+
+ "_Tuesday, April Twenty-sixth, 1842._
+ "NIAGARA FALLS!!! (UPON THE ENGLISH[61] SIDE.)
+
+"I don't know at what length I might have written you from Sandusky, my
+beloved friend, if a steamer had not come in sight just as I finished
+the last unintelligible sheet! (oh! the ink in these parts!): whereupon
+I was obliged to pack up bag and baggage, to swallow a hasty apology for
+a dinner, and to hurry my train on board with all the speed I might. She
+was a fine steamship, four hundred tons burden, name the Constitution,
+had very few passengers on board, and had bountiful and handsome
+accommodation. It's all very fine talking about Lake Erie, but it won't
+do for persons who are liable to sea-sickness. We were all sick. It's
+almost as bad in that respect as the Atlantic. The waves are very short,
+and horribly constant. We reached Buffalo at six this morning; went
+ashore to breakfast; sent to the post-office forthwith; and
+received--oh! who or what can say with how much pleasure and what
+unspeakable delight!--our English letters!
+
+"We lay all Sunday night at a town (and a beautiful town too) called
+Cleveland; on Lake Erie. The people poured on board, in crowds, by six
+on Monday morning, to see me; and a party of 'gentlemen' actually
+planted themselves before our little cabin, and stared in at the door
+and windows _while I was washing, and Kate lay in bed_. I was so
+incensed at this, and at a certain newspaper published in that town
+which I had accidentally seen in Sandusky (advocating war with England
+to the death, saying that Britain must be 'whipped again,' and promising
+all true Americans that within two years they should sing Yankee Doodle
+in Hyde Park and Hail Columbia in the courts of Westminster), that when
+the mayor came on board to present himself to me, according to custom, I
+refused to see him, and bade Mr. Q. tell him why and wherefore. His
+honor took it very coolly, and retired to the top of the wharf, with a
+big stick and a whittling knife, with which he worked so lustily
+(staring at the closed door of our cabin all the time) that long before
+the boat left, the big stick was no bigger than a cribbage-peg!
+
+"I never in my life was in such a state of excitement as coming from
+Buffalo here, this morning. You come by railroad, and are nigh two hours
+upon the way. I looked out for the spray, and listened for the roar, as
+far beyond the bounds of possibility as though, landing in Liverpool, I
+were to listen for the music of your pleasant voice in Lincoln's Inn
+Fields. At last, when the train stopped, I saw two great white clouds
+rising up from the depths of the earth,--nothing more. They rose up
+slowly, gently, majestically, into the air. I dragged Kate down a deep
+and slippery path leading to the ferry-boat; bullied Anne for not coming
+fast enough; perspired at every pore; and felt, it is impossible to say
+how, as the sound grew louder and louder in my ears, and yet nothing
+could be seen for the mist.
+
+"There were two English officers with us (ah! what _gentlemen_, what
+noblemen of nature they seemed), and they hurried off with me; leaving
+Kate and Anne on a crag of ice; and clambered after me over the rocks at
+the foot of the small Fall, while the ferryman was getting the boat
+ready. I was not disappointed--but I could make out nothing. In an
+instant I was blinded by the spray, and wet to the skin. I saw the water
+tearing madly down from some immense height, but could get no idea of
+shape, or situation, or anything but vague immensity. But when we were
+seated in the boat, and crossing at the very foot of the cataract--then
+I began to feel what it was. Directly I had changed my clothes at the
+inn I went out again, taking Kate with me, and hurried to the Horse-shoe
+Fall. I went down alone, into the very basin. It would be hard for a man
+to stand nearer God than he does there. There was a bright rainbow at my
+feet; and from that I looked up to--great Heaven! to _what_ a fall of
+bright green water! The broad, deep, mighty stream seems to die in the
+act of falling; and from its unfathomable grave arises that tremendous
+ghost of spray and mist which is never laid, and has been haunting this
+place with the same dread solemnity--perhaps from the creation of the
+world.
+
+"We purpose remaining here a week. In my next I will try to give you
+some idea of my impressions, and to tell you how they change with every
+day. At present it is impossible. I can only say that the first effect
+of this tremendous spectacle on me was peace of mind--tranquillity--great
+thoughts of eternal rest and happiness--nothing of terror. I can shudder
+at the recollection of Glencoe (dear friend, with Heaven's leave we must
+see Glencoe together), but whenever I think of Niagara I shall think of
+its beauty.
+
+"If you could hear the roar that is in my ears as I write this. Both
+Falls are under our windows. From our sitting-room and bedroom we look
+down straight upon them. There is not a soul in the house but ourselves.
+What would I give if you and Mac were here to share the sensations of
+this time! I was going to add, what would I give if the dear girl whose
+ashes lie in Kensal Green had lived to come so far along with us--but
+she has been here many times, I doubt not, since her sweet face faded
+from my earthly sight.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"One word on the precious letters before I close. You are right, my dear
+fellow, about the papers; and you are right (I grieve to say) about the
+people. _Am I right?_ quoth the conjurer. _Yes!_ from gallery, pit, and
+boxes. I _did_ let out those things, at first, against my will, but when
+I come to tell you all--well; only wait--only wait--till the end of
+July. I say no more.
+
+"I do perceive a perplexingly divided and subdivided duty, in the matter
+of the book of travels. Oh! the sublimated essence of comicality that I
+_could_ distil, from the materials I have! . . . You are a part, and an
+essential part, of our home, dear friend, and I exhaust my imagination
+in picturing the circumstances under which I shall surprise you by
+walking into 58, Lincoln's Inn Fields. We are truly grateful to God for
+the health and happiness of our inexpressibly dear children and all our
+friends. But one letter more--only one. . . . I don't seem to have been
+half affectionate enough, but there _are_ thoughts, you know, that lie
+too deep for words."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[59] A young lady's account of this party, written next morning, and
+quoted in one of the American memoirs of Dickens, enables us to
+contemplate his suffering from the point of view of those who inflicted
+it: "I went last evening to a party at Judge Walker's, given to the hero
+of the day. . . . When we reached the house, Mr. Dickens had left the
+crowded rooms, and was in the hall with his wife, about taking his
+departure when we entered the door. We were introduced to him in our
+wrapping; and in the flurry and embarrassment of the meeting, one of the
+party dropped a parcel, containing shoes, gloves, etc. Mr. Dickens,
+stooping, gathered them up and restored them with a laughing remark, and
+we bounded up-stairs to get our things off. Hastening down again, we
+found him with Mrs. Dickens seated upon a sofa, surrounded by a group of
+ladies; Judge Walker having requested him to delay his departure for a
+few moments, for the gratification of some tardy friends who had just
+arrived, ourselves among the number. Declining to re-enter the rooms
+where he had already taken leave of the guests, he had seated himself in
+the hall. He is young and handsome, has a mellow, beautiful eye, fine
+brow, and abundant hair. His mouth is large, and his smile so bright it
+seemed to shed light and happiness all about him. His manner is easy,
+negligent, but not elegant. His dress was foppish; in fact, he was
+overdressed, yet his garments were worn so easily they appeared to be a
+necessary part of him. (!) He had a dark coat, with lighter pantaloons;
+a black waistcoat, embroidered with colored flowers; and about his neck,
+covering his white shirt-front, was a black neckcloth, also embroidered
+in colors, in which were placed two large diamond pins connected by a
+chain. A gold watch-chain, and a large red rose in his button-hole,
+completed his toilet. He appeared a little weary, but answered the
+remarks made to him--for he originated none--in an agreeable manner. Mr.
+Beard's portrait of Fagin was so placed in the room that we could see it
+from where we stood surrounding him. One of the ladies asked him if it
+was his idea of the Jew. He replied, 'Very nearly.' Another, laughingly,
+requested that he would give her the rose he wore, as a memento. He
+shook his head and said, 'That will not do; he could not give it to one;
+the others would be jealous.' A half-dozen then insisted on having it,
+whereupon he proposed to divide the leaves among them. In taking the
+rose from his coat, either by design or accident, the leaves loosened
+and fell upon the floor, and amid considerable laughter the ladies
+stooped and gathered them. He remained some twenty minutes, perhaps, in
+the hall, and then took his leave. I must confess to considerable
+disappointment in the personal of my idol. I felt that his throne was
+shaken, although it never could be destroyed." This appalling picture
+supplements and very sufficiently explains the mournful passage in the
+text.
+
+[60] "RUNAWAY NEGRO IN JAIL" was the heading of the advertisement
+inclosed, which had a woodcut of master and slave in its corner, and
+announced that Wilford Garner, sheriff and jailer of Chicot County,
+Arkansas, requested owner to come and prove property--or----
+
+[61] Ten dashes underneath the word.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+NIAGARA AND MONTREAL.
+
+1842.
+
+ Last Two Letters--Dickens vanquished--Obstacles
+ to Copyright--Two described--Value of Literary
+ Popularity--Substitute for Literature--The
+ Secretary described--His Paintings--The Lion
+ and ---- --Toryism of Toronto--Canadian
+ Attentions--Proposed Theatricals--Last
+ Letter--The Private Play--Stage Manager's
+ Report--The Lady Performers--Bill of the
+ Performance--A Touch of Crummles--HOME.
+
+
+MY friend was better than his word, and two more letters reached me
+before his return. The opening of the first was written from Niagara on
+the 3d, and its close from Montreal on the 12th, of May; from which
+latter city also, on the 26th of that month, the last of all was
+written.
+
+Much of the first of these letters had reference to the international
+copyright agitation, and gave strong expression to the indignation
+awakened in him (nor less in some of the best men of America) by the
+adoption, at a public meeting in Boston itself, of a memorial against
+any change of the law, in the course of which it was stated that, if
+English authors were invested with any control over the republication of
+their own books, it would be no longer possible for American editors to
+alter and adapt them to the American taste. This deliberate declaration,
+however, unsparing as Dickens's anger at it was, in effect vanquished
+him. He saw the hopelessness of pursuing further any present effort to
+bring about the change desired; and he took the determination not only
+to drop any allusion to it in his proposed book, but to try what effect
+might be produced, when he should again be in England, by a league of
+English authors to suspend further intercourse with American publishers
+while the law should remain as it is. On his return he made accordingly
+a public appeal to this effect, stating his own intention for the future
+to forego all profit derivable from the authorized transmission of early
+proofs across the Atlantic; but his hopes in this particular also were
+doomed to disappointment. I now leave the subject, quoting only from his
+present letter the general remarks with which it is dismissed by
+himself.
+
+
+ "NIAGARA FALLS,
+ "_Tuesday, Third May, 1842._
+
+"I'll tell you what the two obstacles to the passing of an international
+copyright law with England are: firstly, the national love of 'doing' a
+man in any bargain or matter of business; secondly, the national vanity.
+Both these characteristics prevail to an extent which no stranger can
+possibly estimate.
+
+"With regard to the first, I seriously believe that it is an essential
+part of the pleasure derived from the perusal of a popular English book,
+that the author gets nothing for it. It is so dar-nation 'cute--so
+knowing in Jonathan to get his reading on those terms. He has the
+Englishman so regularly on the hip that his eye twinkles with slyness,
+cunning, and delight; and he chuckles over the humor of the page with an
+appreciation of it quite inconsistent with, and apart from, its honest
+purchase. The raven hasn't more joy in eating a stolen piece of meat,
+than the American has in reading the English book which he gets for
+nothing.
+
+"With regard to the second, it reconciles that better and more elevated
+class who are above this sort of satisfaction, with surprising ease. The
+man's read in America! The Americans like him! They are glad to see him
+when he comes here! They flock about him, and tell him that they are
+grateful to him for spirits in sickness; for many hours of delight in
+health; for a hundred fanciful associations which are constantly
+interchanged between themselves and their wives and children at home! It
+is nothing that all this takes place in countries where he is _paid_; it
+is nothing that he has won fame for himself elsewhere, and profit too.
+The Americans read him; the free, enlightened, independent Americans;
+and what more _would_ he have? Here's reward enough for any man. The
+national vanity swallows up all other countries on the face of the
+earth, and leaves but this above the ocean. Now, mark what the real
+value of this American reading is. Find me in the whole range of
+literature one single solitary English book which becomes popular with
+them before, by going through the ordeal at home and becoming popular
+there, it has forced itself on their attention--and I am content that
+the law should remain as it is, forever and a day. I must make one
+exception. There _are_ some mawkish tales of fashionable life before
+which crowds fall down as they were gilded calves, which have been
+snugly enshrined in circulating libraries at home, from the date of
+their publication.
+
+"As to telling them they will have no literature of their own, the
+universal answer (out of Boston) is, 'We don't want one. Why should we
+pay for one when we can get it for nothing? Our people don't think of
+poetry, sir. Dollars, banks, and cotton are _our_ books, sir.' And they
+certainly are in one sense; for a lower average of general information
+than exists in this country on all other topics, it would be very hard
+to find. So much, at present, for international copyright."
+
+The same letter kept the promise made in its predecessor that one or two
+more sketches of character should be sent: "One of the most amusing
+phrases in use all through the country, for its constant repetition, and
+adaptation to every emergency, is 'Yes, Sir.' Let me give you a
+specimen." (The specimen was the dialogue, in the _Notes_, of straw-hat
+and brown-hat, during the stage-coach ride to Sandusky.) "I am not
+joking, upon my word. This is exactly the dialogue. Nothing else
+occurring to me at this moment, let me give you the secretary's
+portrait. Shall I?
+
+"He is of a sentimental turn--strongly sentimental; and tells Anne as
+June approaches that he hopes 'we shall sometimes think of him' in our
+own country. He wears a cloak, like Hamlet; and a very tall, big, limp,
+dusty black hat, which he exchanges on long journeys for a cap like
+Harlequin's. . . . He sings; and in some of our quarters, when his bedroom
+has been near ours, we have heard him grunting bass notes through the
+keyhole of his door, to attract our attention. His desire that I should
+formally ask him to sing, and his devices to make me do so, are
+irresistibly absurd. There was a piano in our room at Hartford (you
+recollect our being there, early in February?)--and he asked me one
+night, when we were alone, if 'Mrs. D.' played. 'Yes, Mr. Q.' 'Oh,
+indeed, Sir! _I_ sing: so whenever you want _a little soothing_--' You
+may imagine how hastily I left the room, on some false pretense, without
+hearing more.
+
+"He paints. . . . An enormous box of oil-colors is the main part of his
+luggage: and with these he blazes away, in his own room, for hours
+together. Anne got hold of some big-headed, pot-bellied sketches he made
+of the passengers on board the canal-boat (including me in my fur coat),
+the recollection of which brings the tears into my eyes at this minute.
+He painted the Falls, at Niagara, superbly; and is supposed now to be
+engaged on a full-length representation of me: waiters having reported
+that chamber-maids have said that there is a picture in his room which
+has a great deal of hair. One girl opined that it was 'the beginning of
+the King's Arms;' but I am pretty sure that the Lion is myself. . . .
+
+"Sometimes, but not often, he commences a conversation. That usually
+occurs when we are walking the deck after dark; or when we are alone
+together in a coach. It is his practice at such times to relate the most
+notorious and patriarchal Joe Miller, as something that occurred in his
+own family. When traveling by coach, he is particularly fond of
+imitating cows and pigs; and nearly challenged a fellow-passenger the
+other day, who had been moved by the display of this accomplishment
+into telling him that he was 'a Perfect Calf.' He thinks it an
+indispensable act of politeness and attention to inquire constantly
+whether we're not sleepy, or, to use his own words, whether we don't
+'suffer for sleep.' If we have taken a long nap of fourteen hours or so,
+after a long journey, he is sure to meet me at the bedroom door when I
+turn out in the morning, with this inquiry. But, apart from the
+amusement he gives us, I could not by possibility have lighted on any
+one who would have suited my purpose so well. I have raised his ten
+dollars per month to twenty; and mean to make it up for six months."
+
+The conclusion of this letter was dated from "Montreal, Thursday,
+twelfth May," and was little more than an eager yearning for home: "This
+will be a very short and stupid letter, my dear friend; for the post
+leaves here much earlier than I expected, and all my grand designs for
+being unusually brilliant fall to the ground. I will write you _one
+line_ by the next Cunard boat,--reserving all else until our happy and
+long long looked-for meeting.
+
+"We have been to Toronto and Kingston; experiencing attentions at each
+which I should have difficulty in describing. The wild and rabid toryism
+of Toronto is, I speak seriously, _appalling_. English kindness is very
+different from American. People send their horses and carriages for your
+use, but they don't exact as payment the right of being always under
+your nose. We had no less than _five_ carriages at Kingston waiting our
+pleasure at one time; not to mention the commodore's barge and crew, and
+a beautiful government steamer. We dined with Sir Charles Bagot last
+Sunday. Lord Mulgrave was to have met us yesterday at Lachine; but, as
+he was wind-bound in his yacht and couldn't get in, Sir Richard Jackson
+sent his drag four-in-hand, with two other young fellows who are also
+his aides, and in we came in grand style.
+
+"The Theatricals (I think I told you[62] I had been invited to play with
+the officers of the Coldstream Guards here) are _A Roland for an
+Oliver_; _Two o'Clock in the Morning_; and either the _Young Widow_, or
+_Deaf as a Post_. Ladies (unprofessional) are going to play, for the
+first time. I wrote to Mitchell at New York for a wig for Mr.
+Snobbington, which has arrived, and is brilliant. If they had done
+_Love, Law, and Physick_, as at first proposed, I was already 'up' in
+Flexible, having played it of old, before my authorship days; but if it
+should be Splash in the _Young Widow_, you will have to do me the favor
+to imagine me in a smart livery-coat, shiny black hat and cockade, white
+knee-cords, white top-boots, blue stock, small whip, red cheeks, and
+dark eyebrows. Conceive Topping's state of mind if I bring this dress
+home and put it on unexpectedly! . . . God bless you, dear friend. I can
+say nothing about the seventh, the day on which we sail. It is
+impossible. Words cannot express what we feel, now that the time is so
+near. . . ."
+
+His last letter, dated from "Peasco's Hotel, Montreal, Canada,
+twenty-sixth of May," described the private theatricals, and inclosed me
+a bill of the play.
+
+"This, like my last, will be a stupid letter, because both Kate and I
+are thrown into such a state of excitement by the near approach of the
+seventh of June that we can do nothing, and think of nothing.
+
+"The play came off last night. The audience, between five and six
+hundred strong, were invited as to a party; a regular table with
+refreshments being spread in the lobby and saloon. We had the band of
+the twenty-third (one of the finest in the service) in the orchestra,
+the theatre was lighted with gas, the scenery was excellent, and the
+properties were all brought from private houses. Sir Charles Bagot, Sir
+Richard Jackson, and their staffs were present; and as the military
+portion of the audience were all in full uniform, it was really a
+splendid scene.
+
+"We 'went' also splendidly; though with nothing very remarkable in the
+acting way. We had for Sir Mark Chase a genuine odd fish, with plenty of
+humor; but our Tristram Sappy was not up to the marvelous reputation he
+has somehow or other acquired here. I am not however, let me tell you,
+placarded as stage-manager for nothing. Everybody was told they would
+have to submit to the most iron despotism; and didn't I come Macready
+over them? Oh, no. By no means. Certainly not. The pains I have taken
+with them, and the perspiration I have expended, during the last ten
+days, exceed in amount anything you can imagine. I had regular plots of
+the scenery made out, and lists of the properties wanted; and had them
+nailed up by the prompter's chair. Every letter that was to be
+delivered, was written; every piece of money that had to be given,
+provided; and not a single thing lost sight of. I prompted, myself, when
+I was not on; when I was, I made the regular prompter of the theatre my
+deputy; and I never saw anything so perfectly touch and go, as the
+first two pieces. The bedroom scene in the interlude was as well
+furnished as Vestris had it; with a 'practicable' fireplace blazing away
+like mad, and everything in a concatenation accordingly. I really do
+believe that I was very funny: at least I know that I laughed heartily
+at myself, and made the part a character, such as you and I know very
+well: a mixture of T----, Harley, Yates, Keeley, and Jerry Sneak. It
+went with a roar, all through; and, as I am closing this, they have told
+me I was so well made up that Sir Charles Bagot, who sat in the
+stage-box, had no idea who played Mr. Snobbington, until the piece was
+over.
+
+[Illustration: Private Theatricals.]
+
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ =COMMITTEE.=
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ Mrs. TORRENS.
+ W. C. ERMATINGER, Esq.
+ Mrs. PERRY.
+ Captain TORRENS.
+ THE EARL OF MULGRAVE.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ STAGE MANAGER--MR. CHARLES DICKENS.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ QUEEN'S THEATRE, MONTREAL
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ ON WEDNESDAY EVENING, MAY 25TH, 1842,
+ WILL BE PERFORMED,
+
+ =ROLAND FOR AN OLIVER.=
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ MRS. SELBORNE. [Handwritten: Mrs. Torrens]
+ MARIA DARLINGTON. [Handwritten: Miss Griffin]
+ MRS. FIXTURE. [Handwritten: Miss Ermatinger.]
+
+ MR. SELBORNE. [Handwritten: Lord Mulgrave.]
+ ALFRED HIGHFLYER. [Handwritten: Mr. Charles Dickens]
+ SIR MARK CHASE. [Handwritten: Honourable Mr. Methuen]
+ FIXTURE. [Handwritten: Captain Willoughby.]
+ GAMEKEEPER. [Handwritten: Captain Granville]
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ AFTER WHICH, AN INTERLUDE IN ONE SCENE, (FROM THE FRENCH,) CALLED
+
+ =Past Two o'Clock in the Morning.=
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ THE STRANGER. [Handwritten: Captain Granville]
+ MR. SNOBBINGTON. [Handwritten: Mr. Charles Dickens]
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ TO CONCLUDE WITH THE FARCE, IN ONE ACT, ENTITLED
+
+ =DEAF AS A POST.=
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ MRS. PLUMPLEY. [Handwritten: Mrs. Torrens]
+ AMY TEMPLETON. [Handwritten: Mrs. Charles Dickens!!!!!!!!]
+ SOPHY WALTON. [Handwritten: Mrs. Perry.]
+ SALLY MAGGS. [Handwritten: Miss Griffin]
+
+ CAPTAIN TEMPLETON. [Handwritten: Captain Torrens]
+ MR. WALTON. [Handwritten: Captain Willoughby.]
+ TRISTRAM SAPPY. [Handwritten: Doctor Griffin]
+ CRUPPER. [Handwritten: Lord Mulgrave]
+ GALLOP. [Handwritten: Mr. Charles Dickens.]
+
+ MONTREAL, May 24, 1842. GAZETTE OFFICE.
+
+
+"But only think of Kate playing! and playing devilish well, I assure
+you! All the ladies were capital, and we had no wait or hitch for an
+instant. You may suppose this, when I tell you that we began at eight,
+and had the curtain down at eleven. It is their custom here, to prevent
+heart-burnings in a very heart-burning town, whenever they have played
+in private, to repeat the performances in public. So, on Saturday
+(substituting, of course, real actresses for the ladies), we repeat the
+two first pieces to a paying audience, for the manager's benefit. . . .
+
+"I send you a bill, to which I have appended a key.
+
+"I have not told you half enough. But I promise you I shall make you
+shake your sides about this play. Wasn't it worthy of Crummles that when
+Lord Mulgrave and I went out to the door to receive the
+Governor-general, the regular prompter followed us in agony with four
+tall candlesticks with wax candles in them, and besought us with a
+bleeding heart to carry two apiece, in accordance with all the
+precedents? . . .
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"I have hardly spoken of our letters, which reached us yesterday,
+shortly before the play began. A hundred thousand thanks for your
+delightful mainsail of that gallant little packet. I read it again and
+again; and had it all over again at breakfast-time this morning. I heard
+also, by the same ship, from Talfourd, Miss Coutts, Brougham, Rogers,
+and others. A delicious letter from Mac too, as good as his painting, I
+swear. Give my hearty love to him. . . . God bless you, my dear friend.
+As the time draws nearer, we get FEVERED with anxiety for home. . . .
+Kiss our darlings for us. We shall soon meet, please God, and be happier
+and merrier than ever we were, in all our lives. . . . Oh,
+home--home--home--home--home--home--HOME!!!!!!!!!!!"
+
+
+=END OF VOL. I.=
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[62] See _ante_, p. 303.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
+
+Page viii, "recoltions" changed to "recollections" (Another
+schoolfellow's recollections)
+
+Page ix, extraneous page number removed Original text read:
+
+ Writing _Pickwick_, Nos. 14 127
+ and 15 127
+
+Page 59, "t" changed to "it" (it as early as)
+
+Page 117, "reisssue" changed to "reissue" (Scheme to reissue)
+
+Page 224, "s" changed to "is" (there is little further)
+
+Page 224, "hab" changed to "habit" (his invariable habit)
+
+Page 242, "axing" changed to "taxing" (taxing ingenuity to)
+
+Page 242, "f" chagned to "of" (of sheer insanity)
+
+Page 286, word "I" inserted into text. (I have heard of)
+
+To retain the integrity of the original text, varied hyphenations,
+capitalizations, and, at times, spellings were retained.
+
+For example:
+
+Varied hyphenation and capitalization of Devonshire Terrace was
+retained. Also fac-simile and facsimile. Varied spelling of
+A'Beckett/A'Becket was retained.
+
+
+
+*****
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+For the reader: Italic text is surrounded by _underscores_, bold text is
+surrounded by =equal signs= and underlined text is surrounded by
+~tildes~. Two breves above the letter e are indicated by [)e] in the
+text.
+
+
+
+THE LIFE
+
+OF
+
+[Illustration: Signature: Charles Dickens]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+THE LIFE
+
+OF
+
+CHARLES DICKENS
+
+
+
+BY
+
+JOHN FORSTER.
+
+
+
+VOL. II.
+
+1842-1852.
+
+
+
+
+CORRECTIONS MADE IN THE LATER EDITIONS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+A NOTICE written under date of the 23rd December, 1871, appeared with
+the Tenth Edition. "Such has been the rapidity of the demand for
+successive impressions of this book, that I have found it impossible,
+until now, to correct at pages 31, 87, and 97 three errors of statement
+made in the former editions; and some few other mistakes, not in
+themselves important, at pages 96, 101, and 102. I take the opportunity
+of adding, that the mention at p. 83 is not an allusion to the
+well-known 'Penny' and 'Saturday' magazines, but to weekly periodicals
+of some years' earlier date resembling them in form. One of them, I have
+since found from a later mention by Dickens himself, was presumably of a
+less wholesome and instructive character. 'I used,' he says, 'when I was
+at school, to take in the _Terrific Register_, making myself unspeakably
+miserable, and frightening my very wits out of my head, for the small
+charge of a penny weekly; which, considering that there was an
+illustration to every number in which there was always a pool of blood,
+and at least one body, was cheap.' An obliging correspondent writes to
+me upon my reference to the Fox-under-the-hill, at p. 62: 'Will you
+permit me to say, that the house, shut up and almost ruinous, is still
+to be found at the bottom of a curious and most precipitous court, the
+entrance of which is just past Salisbury-street. . . . It was once, I
+think, the approach to the halfpenny boats. The house is now shut out
+from the water-side by the Embankment.'" I proceed to state in detail
+what the changes thus referred to were.
+
+The passage about James Lamert, beginning at the thirteenth line of p.
+31, now stands: "His chief ally and encourager in these displays was a
+youth of some ability, much older than himself, named James Lamert,
+stepson to his mother's sister and therefore a sort of cousin, who was
+his great patron and friend in his childish days. Mary, the eldest
+daughter of Charles Barrow, himself a lieutenant in the navy, had for
+her first husband a commander in the navy called Allen; on whose death
+by drowning at Rio Janeiro she had joined her sister, the navy-pay
+clerk's wife, at Chatham; in which place she subsequently took for her
+second husband Doctor Lamert, an army surgeon, whose son James, even
+after he had been sent to Sandhurst for his education, continued still
+to visit Chatham from time to time. He had a turn for private
+theatricals; and as his father's quarters were in the ordnance-hospital
+there, a great rambling place otherwise at that time almost uninhabited,
+he had plenty of room in which to get up his entertainments." Two other
+corrections were consequent on this change. At the 21st line of page 38,
+for "the elder cousin" read "the cousin by marriage;" and at the 31st
+line of p. 49, "cousin by his mother's side" should be "cousin by his
+aunt's marriage."
+
+At the 15th line of the 41st page, "his bachelor-uncle, fellow-clerk,"
+&c. should be "the uncle who was at this time fellow-clerk," &c. At the
+11th line of page 54, "Charles-court" should be "Clare-court." The
+allusion to one of his favourite localities at the 23d line of page 62
+should stand thus: "a little public-house by the water-side called the
+Fox-under-the-hill, approached by an underground passage which we once
+missed in looking for it together."
+
+The passage at p. 87, having reference to an early friend who had been
+with him, as I supposed, at his first school, should run thus: "In this
+however I have since discovered my own mistake: the truth being that it
+was this gentleman's connection, not with the Wellington-academy, but
+with a school kept by Mr. Dawson in Hunter-street, Brunswick-square,
+where the brothers of Dickens were subsequently placed, which led to
+their early knowledge of each other. I fancy that they were together
+also, for a short time, at Mr. Molloy's in New-square, Lincoln's-inn;
+but, whether or not this was so, Dickens certainly had not quitted
+school many months before his father had made sufficient interest with
+an attorney of Gray's-inn, Mr. Edward Blackmore, to obtain him regular
+employment in his office." There is subsequent allusion to the same
+gentleman (at p. 182) as his "school-companion at Mr. Dawson's in
+Henrietta-street," which ought to stand as "having known him when
+himself a law-clerk in Lincoln's-inn."
+
+At p. 96 I had stated that Mr. John Dickens reported for the _Morning
+Chronicle_; and at p. 101 that Mr. Thomas Beard reported for the
+_Morning Herald_; whereas Mr. Dickens, though in the gallery for other
+papers, did not report for the _Chronicle_, and Mr. Beard did report for
+that journal; and where (at p. 102) Dickens was spoken of as associated
+with Mr. Beard in a reporting party which represented respectively the
+_Chronicle_ and _Herald_, the passage ought simply to have described him
+as "connected with a reporting party, being Lord John Russell's
+Devonshire contest above-named, and his associate chief being Mr. Beard,
+entrusted with command for the _Chronicle_ in this particular express."
+
+At p. 97 I had made a mistake about his "first published piece of
+writing," in too hastily assuming that he had himself forgotten what the
+particular piece was. It struck an intelligent and kind correspondent as
+very unlikely that Dickens should have fallen into error on such a
+point; and, making personal search for himself (as I ought to have
+done), discovered that what I supposed to be another piece was merely
+the same under another title. The description of his first printed
+sketch should therefore be "(Mr. Minns and his Cousin, as he afterwards
+entitled it, but which appeared in the magazine as A Dinner at Poplar
+Walk)." There is another mistake at p. 159, of "bandy-legged" instead of
+"bulky-legged" and, at p. 177, of "fresh fields" for "fresh woods."
+
+Those several corrections were made in the Tenth Edition. To the
+Eleventh these words were prefixed (under date of the 23rd of January,
+1872): "Since the above mentioned edition went to press, a published
+letter has rendered necessary a brief additional note to the remarks
+made at pp. 155-6." The remark occurs in my notice of the silly story
+of Mr. Cruikshank having originated _Oliver Twist_, and, with the note
+referred to, now stands in the form subjoined. "Whether all Sir
+Benjamin's laurels however should fall to the person by whom the tale is
+told,* or whether any part belongs to the authority alleged for it, is
+unfortunately not quite clear. There would hardly have been a doubt, if
+the fable had been confined to the other side of the Atlantic; but it
+has been reproduced and widely circulated on this side also; and the
+distinguished artist whom it calumniates by attributing the invention to
+him has been left undefended from its slander. Dickens's letter spares
+me the necessity of characterizing, by the only word which would have
+been applicable to it, a tale of such incredible and monstrous absurdity
+as that one of the masterpieces of its author's genius had been merely
+an illustration of etchings by Mr. Cruikshank!" Note to the words
+"person by whom the tale is told:" "*This question has been partly
+solved, since my last edition, by Mr. Cruikshank's announcement in the
+_Times_, that, though Dr. Mackenzie had 'confused some circumstances
+with respect to Mr. Dickens looking over some drawings and sketches,'
+the substance of his information as to who it was that originated
+_Oliver Twist_, and all its characters, had been derived from Mr.
+Cruikshank himself. The worst part of the foregoing fable, therefore,
+has not Dr. Mackenzie for its author; and Mr. Cruikshank is to be
+congratulated on the prudence of his rigid silence respecting it as long
+as Mr. Dickens lived."
+
+In the Twelfth Edition I mentioned, in the note at p. 149, a little work
+of which all notice had been previously omitted; and the close of that
+note now runs: "He had before written for them, without his name,
+_Sunday under Three Heads_; and he added subsequently a volume of _Young
+Couples_." At p. 157, "parish abuses" is corrected in the same edition
+to "parish practices;" and at p. 173, "in his later works" to "in his
+latest works."
+
+I have received letters from several obliging correspondents, among them
+three or four who were scholars at the Wellington-house Academy before
+or after Dickens's time, and one who attended the school with him; but
+such remark as they suggest will more properly accompany my third and
+closing volume.
+
+ PALACE GATE HOUSE, KENSINGTON,
+ _29th of October, 1872._
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ PAGE
+ Autograph of Charles Dickens _Fly leaf_
+
+ Charles Dickens, aet. 47. From the portrait painted for the
+ author in 1859 by W. P. Frith, R.A. Engraved by Robert
+ Graves, A.R.A. _Frontispiece_
+
+ Charles Dickens, his Wife, and her Sister. Drawn by Daniel
+ Maclise R.A. in 1842. Engraved by C. H. Jeens 48
+
+ Sketch of the Villa Bagnerello (Albaro), by Angus Fletcher 121
+
+ Drawing of the Palazzo Peschiere (Genoa), by Mr. Batson 141
+
+ At 58, Lincoln's-inn-fields, Monday the 2nd of December, 1844.
+ From a drawing by Daniel Maclise, R.A. Engraved by C.
+ H. Jeens 174
+
+ Rosemont, Lausanne. From a drawing by the Hon. Mrs. Watson 229
+
+ M. Barthelemy's card 325
+
+ Seventeen "fancies" for Mr. Dombey. Designed by H. K.
+ Browne 345
+
+ Twelve more similar fancies. From the design of the same artist 346
+
+ Charles Dickens to George Cruikshank. Facsimile of a letter
+ written in 1838, concerning the later illustrations to _Oliver
+ Twist_ 349-50
+
+
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+CHAPTER I. 1842.
+
+Pages 21-39.
+
+AMERICAN NOTES. AET. 30.
+
+ PAGE
+ Return from America 21
+ Longfellow in England 22
+ At Broadstairs 23
+ Preparing _Notes_ 23
+ Fancy for opening of _Chuzzlewit_ 24
+ Attractions at Margate 25
+ Being, not always Believing 26
+ Burlesque of classic tragedy 26
+ A smart man and forged letter 26
+ A proposed dedication 27
+ Authorship and sea bathing 28
+ Easy-living rich and patient poor 28
+ Coming to the end 29
+ Rejected motto for _Notes_ 30
+ Home of the _Every Day Book_ 31
+ Scene at a funeral 32
+ An introductory chapter suppressed 33
+ Chapter first printed 33-37
+ Jeffrey's opinion of the _Notes_ 38
+ Later page anticipated 38
+ Experience of America in 1868 38
+
+
+CHAPTER II. 1843.
+
+Pages 40-62.
+
+FIRST YEAR OF MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. AET. 31.
+
+ A sunset at Land's-end 40
+ A holiday described by C. D. 41
+ The same described by Maclise 42
+ A landscape and a portrait 43
+ Names first given to _Chuzzlewit_ 44
+ Origin of the novel 45
+ Prologue to a play 45
+ On a tragedy by Browning 46
+ George Eliot's first book 47
+ Accompaniments of work 47
+ Miss Georgina Hogarth 48
+ Three portraits 49
+ A public benefactor 50
+ Controversy on _Notes_ 50
+ Original of Mrs. Gamp 51
+ What he will do with her 51
+ John Black 53
+ Macready and America 53
+ Apprehended disservice 54
+ Exertions for Elton family 55
+ Seaside life in ordinary 55
+ Public speeches 56
+ Ragged schools and results 57
+ Unitarianism 59
+ Return to Church of England 59
+ Language of his Will 59
+ _Christmas Carol_ 60
+ Birth of third son 61
+ Amusing letter 61
+
+
+CHAPTER III. 1843-1844.
+
+Pages 63-92.
+
+CHUZZLEWIT DISAPPOINTMENTS AND CHRISTMAS CAROL. AET. 31-32.
+
+ Falling-off in _Chuzzlewit_ sale 63
+ Publishers and authors 64
+ Premature fears 65
+ Resolve to change his publishers 66
+ Proposal to his printers 66
+ Desire to travel again 67
+ Ways and means 68
+ Objections to the scheme 69
+ Confidence in himself 70
+ Want of confidence in others 70
+ Bent on his plan 71
+ Turning point of his career 72
+ Grounds for course taken 73
+ On _Martin Chuzzlewit_ 74
+ American portions 75
+ The book's special superiority 76
+ News from America 76
+ American consolations 77
+ Why no Pecksniffs in France 78
+ Why Tartuffes in England 78
+ A favourite scene of Thackeray's 79
+ Process of creation in a novel 80
+ Intended motto for story 81
+ Leading characters 82
+ A superb masterpiece 83
+ Triumph of humorous art 84
+ Publication of _Christmas Carol_ 84
+ Unrealized hopes 85
+ Results of _Carol_ sale 86
+ Renewed negotiations with printers 87
+ Agreement with Bradbury and Evans 88
+ Letters about the _Carol_ 89
+ Spirit of the book 90
+ Something better than literature 91
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. 1844.
+
+Pages 93-110.
+
+YEAR OF DEPARTURE FOR ITALY. AET. 32.
+
+ Gore-house friends 93
+ Sensitive for his calling 94
+ A troublesome cheque 95
+ Education speeches 95
+ Sufferings from stage-adaptations 96
+ Wrongs from piracy 96
+ Proceedings in Chancery 97
+ A pirate's plea 97
+ Result of Chancery experience 99
+ Piracy preferred 99
+ Reliefs to work 100
+ The tempted and tempter 101
+ Favourite bit of humour 102
+ Criticized without humour 102
+ Taine on Dickens 102
+ Macready in New Orleans 103
+ Society in England 104
+ Writing in the _Chronicle_ 104
+ Conference with its new editor 104
+ Preparations for departure 105
+ In temporary quarters 106
+ Begging-letter case 106
+ The farewell dinner-party 107
+ "Evenings of a Working-man" 108
+ Greenwich dinner 109
+ J. M. W. Turner and Carlyle 110
+
+
+CHAPTER V. 1844.
+
+Pages 111-138.
+
+IDLENESS AT ALBARO: VILLA BAGNERELLO. AET. 32.
+
+ The travel to Italy 111
+ A bit of character 112
+ French thrown away 112
+ The Albaro villa 113
+ First experiences 114
+ Cloudy weather 115
+ Sunsets and scenery 116
+ Address to Maclise 116
+ The Mediterranean 117
+ Colours of sky and sea 117
+ Warning to Maclise 118
+ Perishing frescoes 118
+ French Consul at Genoa 119
+ Rooms in villa described 120
+ Surrounding scenery 121
+ Church-ruin on the rocks 121
+ Angus Fletcher's sketch 121
+ Work in abeyance 122
+ Learning Italian 122
+ Domestic news 123
+ His English servants 123
+ English residents 124
+ Genoa the superb 125
+ Church splendours and tinsel 126
+ Theatres 126
+ Italian plays 127
+ Dumas' _Kean_ 127
+ Religious houses 128
+ Sunday promenade 128
+ Winter residence chosen 129
+ A lucky arrival 129
+ Dinner at French Consul's 130
+ Verses in C. D.'s honour 130
+ Others in Prince Joinville's 131
+ Rumours of war with England 131
+ A Marquis's reception 132
+ Flight and tumble 133
+ Quiet enjoyments 134
+ English visitors and news 135
+ Talk with Lord Robertson 135
+ A suggestion for Jerrold 136
+ Visit of Frederick Dickens 136
+ An inn on the Alps 136
+ Dangers of sea-bathing 137
+ A change beginning 138
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. 1844.
+
+Pages 139-162.
+
+WORK IN GENOA: PALAZZO PESCHIERE. AET. 32.
+
+ Palace of the Fish-ponds 139
+ Rooms and frescoes 140
+ View over the city 141
+ Dancing and praying 142
+ Peschiere garden 142
+ Trying to write 143
+ A difficulty settled 143
+ Craving for streets 144
+ Design for his book 144
+ Governor's levee 144
+ Absence of the poet 145
+ Subject he is working at 145
+ C. D.'s politics 146
+ Choice of a hero 147
+ Master-passion 147
+ Religious sentiment 147
+ A dream 148
+ Dialogue in a vision 149
+ "What is the True religion?" 149
+ Fragments of reality in a vision 149
+ Trying regions of thought 150
+ Reverence for Doctor Arnold 150
+ First part of book finished 151
+ Anticipation of its close 151
+ Differences from published tale 152
+ First outline of the _Chimes_ 152-156
+ Liking for the subject 156
+ What the writing cost him 156
+ Realities of fictitious sorrow 157
+ Wild mountain weather 157
+ Banquet at the Whistle 158
+ Startling news 158
+ Coming to London 159
+ Secret of the visit 160
+ Eager to try effect of story 160
+ Plans a reading at my rooms 160
+ The tale finished 161
+ Proposed travel 161
+ Party for the Reading 162
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. 1844.
+
+Pages 163-178.
+
+ITALIAN TRAVEL. AET. 32.
+
+ Cities and people 163
+ Venice 164
+ Rapture of enjoyment 165
+ Aboard the city 165
+ What he saw and felt 165
+ Solitary thoughts 166
+ At Lodi 166
+ About paintings and engravings 167
+ Titian and Tintoretto 168
+ Conventionalities 169
+ Monks and painters 169
+ The inns 170
+ Compensation for discomfort 170
+ Brave C of his _Pictures_ 171
+ Louis Roche of Avignon 171
+ Dinner at the Peschiere 172
+ Custom-house officers 173
+ At Milan and Strasburg 173
+ Passing the Simplon 174
+ In London 174
+ A Reading in Lincoln's-inn-fields 174
+ Persons present 175
+ Success of the visit 175
+ In Paris with Macready 176
+ Origin of our private play 176
+ A recognition at Marseilles 177
+ Friendly Americans 177
+ On board for Genoa 177
+ Information for travellers 178
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. 1845.
+
+Pages 179-200.
+
+LAST MONTHS IN ITALY. AET. 33.
+
+ Birthday gift for eldest son 179
+ Suspicious "Characters" 180
+ Jesuit interferences 180
+ Birth of 1845 180
+ Travel southward 181
+ Carrara and Pisa 181
+ A wild journey 182
+ Birds of prey 183
+ A beggar and his staff 183
+ "My lord" loses temper 184
+ And has the worst of it 184
+ At Rome 184
+ The Campagna 185
+ Bay of Naples 185
+ Filth of Naples and Fondi 186
+ The Lazzaroni 186
+ False picturesque 187
+ Sad English news 187
+ True friends in calamity 188
+ At Florence 188
+ Wayside memorials and Landor's villa 189
+ Death of Bobus Smith 190
+ At Lord Holland's 190
+ Lord Palmerston's brother 190
+ Again at the Peschiere 190
+ To publish or not? 191
+ Thoughts of home 192
+ American friends 192
+ Deaths among English residents 193
+ Scarlet breeches out of place 193
+ Angus Fletcher 193
+ Complaint of a meek footman 194
+ Recalling Lady Holland 194
+ A touch of Portsmouth 195
+ Plans for meeting 196
+ Last letter from Genoa 196
+ Closing excitements and troubles 196
+ Italians hard at work 197
+ Returning by Switzerland 197
+ Passage of the St. Gothard 198
+ Splendours of Swiss scenery 198
+ Dangers of it 199
+ What is left behind the Alps 199
+ A week in Flanders 200
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. 1845-1846.
+
+Pages 201-221.
+
+AGAIN IN ENGLAND. AET. 33-34.
+
+ Old hopes revived 201
+ Notions for a periodical 201
+ Proposed prospectus 202
+ Chances for and against it 203
+ Swept away by larger venture 203
+ Christmas book of 1845 204
+ D'Orsay and the courier 204
+ Another passage of Autobiography 204
+ More of the story of early years 205
+ Wish to try the stage 205
+ Applies to manager of Covent Garden 205
+ Sister Fanny in the secret 206
+ Stage studies and rehearsings 206
+ Strange news for Macready 207
+ Requisites of author and actor 208
+ Play chosen for private performance 209
+ Fanny Kelly and her theatre 209
+ Every Man in his Humour 209
+ The company of actors 210
+ Enjoying a character 210
+ Troubles of management 210
+ First and second performances 211
+ Of the acting 211
+ C. D. as performer 212
+ C. D. as manager 212
+ Two human mysteries 213
+ The mysteries explained 213
+ Training for the stage 213
+ At Broadstairs 214
+ Ramsgate entertainments 214
+ Birth of fourth son 215
+ Second raven's death 215
+ Intended daily paper 215
+ Disturbing engagements 216
+ Old ways interrupted 216
+ My appeal against the enterprise 217
+ Reply and issue 217
+ Interruption and renewal 218
+ The beginning and the end 218
+ Forming new resolve 219
+ Back to old scenes 219
+ Editorship ceased 219
+ Going to Switzerland 220
+ A happy saying 221
+ Leaves England 221
+
+
+CHAPTER X. 1846.
+
+Pages 222-243.
+
+A HOME IN SWITZERLAND. AET. 34.
+
+ On the Rhine 222
+ German readers of Dickens 223
+ Travelling Englishmen 223
+ A hoaxing-match 224
+ House-hunting 224
+ Tempted by a mansion 225
+ Chooses a cottage 225
+ Earliest impressions 226
+ Lausanne described 227
+ Views from his farm 228
+ Under his windows 228
+ A sketch of Rosemont 229
+ Design as to work 230
+ The English colony 231
+ Unaccommodating carriage 232
+ A death in the lake 232
+ Boatman's narrative 233
+ The Theatre 233
+ The Prison 234
+ The Blind Institution 235
+ Interesting cases 235-240
+ Beginning work 240
+ First slip of New Novel 241
+ Sortes Shandyanae 242
+ The Christmas tale 242
+
+
+CHAPTER XI. 1846.
+
+Pages 244-260.
+
+SWISS PEOPLE AND SCENERY. AET. 34.
+
+ The mountains and lake 244
+ The people and their manners 245
+ A country fete 246
+ Family sketch 246
+ Rifle-shooting 247
+ A marriage on the farm 248
+ Gunpowder festivities 248
+ Bride and mother 248
+ First number of _Dombey_ 249
+ Christmas book 249
+ General idea for new story 250
+ Hints for illustration of it 250
+ Haldimands and Cerjats 251
+ Visit of Henry Hallam 251
+ Local news 252
+ Sight-seers from England 252
+ Trip to Chamounix 253
+ Mule-travelling 253
+ Mont Blanc range 254
+ Mer de Glace 255
+ Tete Noire pass 255
+ Help in an accident 256
+ English, French, and Prussian 256
+ Second number of _Dombey_ 257
+ Castle of Chillon described 257
+ Honour to New Constitution 258
+ Political celebration 258
+ Malcontents 259
+ Good conduct of the people 259
+ Protestant and Catholic cantons 260
+ A timely word on Ireland 260
+
+
+CHAPTER XII. 1846.
+
+Pages 261-276.
+
+SKETCHES CHIEFLY PERSONAL. AET. 34.
+
+ Home politics 261
+ The Whigs and Peel 261
+ Belief in emigration schemes 262
+ Mark Lemon 263
+ An incident of character 263
+ Hood's _Tylney Hall_ 264
+ Trait of the Duke of Wellington 264
+ Mr. Watson of Rockingham 264
+ A recollection of reporting days 265
+ Returns to _Dombey_ 265
+ Two English travellers 266
+ Party among the hills 267
+ A Smollett and Fielding hero 268
+ Milksop youths 268
+ Ogre and Lambs 268
+ Sir Joseph and his family 269
+ Lord Vernon 270
+ Passion for rifle-shooting 270
+ A wonderful carriage 270
+ The Ladies Taylor 271
+ Proposed Reading of first _Dombey_ 272
+ A sketch from life 272
+ Two sisters and their books 272
+ Trip to Great St. Bernard 273
+ Ascent of the mountain 274
+ The Convent 274
+ Scene at the mountain top 274
+ Bodies found in the snow 275
+ The holy fathers 275
+ A tavern all but sign 276
+ The monk and _Pickwick_ 276
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII. 1846.
+
+Pages 277-294.
+
+LITERARY LABOUR AT LAUSANNE. AET. 34.
+
+ A picture completed 277
+ Great present want 277
+ Daily life 278
+ Imaginative needs 278
+ Self-judgments 279
+ The Now and the Hereafter 279
+ Fancies for Christmas books 280
+ Second number of _Dombey_ 280
+ A personal revelation 281
+ Craving for streets 281
+ Food for fancy 282
+ Second _Dombey_ done 282
+ Curious wants of the mind 283
+ Success of the Reading 283
+ First thought of Public Readings 284
+ Two stories in hand 285
+ Unexpected difficulties 286
+ Work under sensitive conditions 286
+ Alarm for _Dombey_ 287
+ Doubts and misgivings 287
+ Change of scene to be tried 287
+ At Genoa 288
+ Disquietudes of authorship 288
+ Wanting counsel 289
+ At the worst 289
+ Report of Genoa 290
+ A new social experience 290
+ Feminine eccentricities 291
+ A ladies' dinner 291
+ Elephant-quellers 292
+ "Like a Manchester cotton mill" 292
+ Again at Rosemont 293
+ Visit of the Talfourds 293
+ Lodging his friends 294
+ Intentions and hope 294
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV. 1846.
+
+Pages 295-315.
+
+REVOLUTION AT GENEVA. CHRISTMAS BOOK AND LAST DAYS IN SWITZERLAND. AET.
+34.
+
+ An arrival of manuscript 295
+ A title 295
+ Large sale of _Dombey_ 296
+ Again at Geneva 296
+ Rising against the Jesuits 297
+ Back to Lausanne 297
+ The fight in Geneva 298
+ Rifle against cannon 299
+ True objection to Roman-Catholicism 299
+ Genevese "aristocracy" 299
+ A lesson 300
+ Traces left by revolution 300
+ Abettors of revolution 301
+ Where the shoe pinches 301
+ _Daily News'_ changes 302
+ My surrender of editorship 302
+ Thoughts for the future 303
+ Letters about _Battle of Life_ 303
+ Jeffrey's opinion 303
+ Sketch of story 304
+ A difficulty in plot 305
+ Old characteristics 305
+ His own comments 306
+ Reply to criticism 307
+ Stanfield illustrations 307
+ Doubts of third part 308
+ Strengthening the close 308
+ Objections invited 309
+ Tendency to blank verse 309
+ Grave mistake by Leech 310
+ How dealt with by C. D. 310
+ First impulse 311
+ Kindly afterthought 311
+ Lord Gobden and free trade 312
+ Needs while at work 312
+ Pleasures of autumn 313
+ Striking tents 314
+ Sadness of leave-taking 314
+ Travelling to Paris 314
+ At Paris 315
+
+
+CHAPTER XV. 1846-1847.
+
+Pages 316-333.
+
+THREE MONTHS IN PARIS. AET. 34-35.
+
+ A greeting from Lord Brougham 316
+ French Sunday 317
+ A house taken 317
+ Absurdity of the abode 318
+ Its former tenant 319
+ Sister Fanny's illness 319
+ Opinion of Elliotson 320
+ The king of the barricades 320
+ Unhealthy symptoms 321
+ Incident in the streets 321
+ The Parisian population 322
+ Americans and French 322
+ Unsettlement of plans 323
+ Eldest son's education 323
+ A true friend 323
+ Christmas tale on the stage 323
+ An alarming neighbour 325
+ Startling blue-devils 326
+ Approach to cannibalism 326
+ In London 326
+ Cheap edition of works 326
+ Suppressed dedication 326
+ Return to Paris 326
+ Begging-letter writers 327
+ Friendly services 327
+ Imaginary dialogue 328
+ A Boulogne reception 328
+ Cautions to a traveller 329
+ Citizen Dickens 330
+ Sight-seeing 330
+ At theatres 330
+ Visits to famous Frenchmen 331
+ Evening with Victor Hugo 331
+ Adventure with a coachman 332
+ Bibliotheque Royale 333
+ Premonitory symptoms 333
+ In London 334
+ A party at Gore-house 334
+ Illness of eldest son 335
+ Snuff-shop readings 336
+ Old charwoman's compliment 336
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI. 1846-1848.
+
+Pages 337-367.
+
+DOMBEY AND SON. AET. 34-36.
+
+ Drift of the tale 337
+ Why undervalued 338
+ Mistakes of critics 338
+ Adherence to first design 338
+ Plan for Paul and his sister 339
+ For Dombey and his daughter 339
+ Proposed course of the story 340
+ "The stock of the soup" 340
+ Walter Gay and his fate 341
+ Decided favourably 341
+ Six pages too much 342
+ Omissions objected to 342
+ New chapter written 343
+ Portions sacrificed 343
+ Anxiety for the face of his hero 344
+ A suggested type of city-gentleman 344
+ Artist-fancies for Mr. Dombey 345-6
+ Dickens and his illustrators 347
+ A silly story repeated 347
+ Why noticed again 348
+ Facsimile of letter to Cruikshank 349-50
+ Dickens's words at the time 349
+ Cruikshank's thirty-four years after 350
+ A masterpiece of Dickens's writing 351
+ Picture of him at work 352
+ An experience of Ben Jonson's 352
+ How objections are taken 352
+ Shall Paul's life be prolonged? 353
+ A Reading of the second number 353
+ A number to be added to Paul's life 354
+ Failure of an illustration 354
+ What it should have been 355
+ The Mrs. Pipchin of his childhood 355
+ First thought of his Autobiography 356
+ Opening his fourth number 356
+ At Doctor Blimber's 357
+ Paul's school life 357
+ Paul and Florence 357
+ Jeffrey's forecast of the tale 358
+ Beginning his fifth number 359
+ What he will do with it 359
+ A damper to the spirits 359
+ Close of Paul's life 360
+ Jeffrey on Paul's death 361
+ Thoughts for Edith 362
+ Florence and Little Nell 362
+ Judgments and comparisons 363
+ Edith's first destiny 363
+ Doubts suggested 364
+ An important change 364
+ Diogenes remembered 365
+ Other characters 365
+ Blimber establishment 366
+ Supposed originals 366
+ Surmises entirely wrong 367
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII. 1847-1852.
+
+Pages 368-402.
+
+SPLENDID STROLLING. AET. 35-40.
+
+ Birth of fifth son 368
+ Death of Lieut. Sydney Dickens 368
+ Proposed benefit for Leigh Hunt 369
+ The plays and actors 370
+ The manager 370
+ Troubles at rehearsals 371
+ Pains rewarded 371
+ Leigh Hunt's account 372
+ Receipts and expenses 373
+ Lord Lytton's prologue 373
+ Appearance of Mrs. Gamp 374
+ Fancy for a jeu d'esprit 374
+ Mrs. Gamp at the play 375
+ Failure of artists 375
+ An unfinished fancy 375
+ Mrs. Gamp with the strollers 376
+ Alarm of Mrs. Harris 376
+ Leigh Hunt and Poole 377
+ Ticklish society 378
+ Mrs. Gamp's cabman 378
+ George Cruikshank 379
+ Mr. Wilson the barber 379
+ Wig experiences 380
+ Fatigues of a powder ball 380
+ Manager's moustache and whiskers 381
+ Leech, Lemon, and Jerrold 381-2
+ Mrs. Gamp's dislike of "Dougladge" 382
+ Costello, Stone, and Egg 383
+ "Only the engine" 384
+ Cruikshank's _Bottle_ 384
+ Profits of _Dombey_ 385
+ Time come for savings 385
+ Proposed edition of old novels 385
+ Another dropped design 386
+ The Praslin tragedy 386
+ Penalty for seeing before others 387
+ Street-music 387
+ Margate theatre and manager 387
+ As to Christmas book 388
+ Delay found necessary 389
+ A literary Kitely 389
+ Meetings at Leeds and Glasgow 390
+ Book-friends 391
+ Sheriff Alison 391
+ Hospitable welcome 391
+ Scott-monument 392
+ Purchase of Shakespeare's house 392
+ Scheme to benefit Knowles 393
+ Plays rehearsed 394
+ _Merry Wives_ chosen 394
+ Performances and result 394
+ At Knebworth-park 395
+ Guild of Literature and Art 396
+ Unfortunate omission 396
+ The farce that was to be written 396
+ The farce that was substituted 397
+ _Not so Bad as we Seem_ 397
+ Travelling theatre and scenes 398
+ Success of the comedy 398
+ An incident at Sunderland 399
+ Troubles of a manager 399
+ Acting under difficulties 400
+ Scenery overturned 401
+ Effects of fright 401
+ Mr. Wilkie Collins 402
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII. 1848-1851.
+
+Pages 403-441.
+
+SEASIDE HOLIDAYS. AET. 36-39.
+
+ Louis Philippe dethroned 403
+ French missive from C. D. 404
+ Aspirations of Citizen Dickens 404
+ At Broadstairs 405
+ By rail to China 405
+ The Junk 406
+ Mariners on deck and in cabin 406
+ Perplexing questions 406
+ A toy-shop on the seas 407
+ Type of finality 407
+ A contrast 408
+ Home questions 408
+ Temperance agitations 409
+ The temptations to gin-shop 409
+ Necessity of dealing with _them_ 409
+ Stages anterior to drunkenness 410
+ Cruikshank's satire 410
+ Realities of his pencil 411
+ Its one-sidedness 411
+ Dickens on Hogarth 412
+ Cause as well as effect 412
+ Exit of Gin-lane 412
+ Wisdom of the great painter 413
+ Late, but never too late 413
+ Dickens on designs by Leech 414
+ Originality of Leech 414
+ Superiority of his method 415
+ The requisites for it 415
+ Excuses for the rising generation 416
+ Intellectual juvenility 416
+ A dangerous youth 417
+ What Leech will be remembered for 417
+ Odd adventures 418
+ Pony-chaise accident 418
+ Parallel to Squeers 419
+ Strenuous idleness 419
+ French philosophy 420
+ Hint for Mr. Taine 420
+ The better for idleness 421
+ A favourite spot 421
+ At Brighton 421
+ With mad folks and doctors 422
+ A name for his new book 422
+ At Broadstairs 422
+ Troubles in his writing 423
+ A letter in character 423
+ At Bonchurch 425
+ The Rev. James White 425
+ Mirth and melancholy 425
+ Mrs. James White 426
+ First impressions of Undercliff 426
+ Talfourd made a judge 427
+ Dickens's affection for him 427
+ Church-school examination 428
+ Dinners and pic-nics 428
+ The comedian Regnier 429
+ When acting is genuine 429
+ Doubts as to health 429
+ Arrivals and departures 430
+ A startling revelation 431
+ Effects of Bonchurch climate 431
+ Utter prostration 431
+ Difficulties of existing there 432
+ Distrust of doctors 433
+ Other side of picture 433
+ What I observed at the time 434
+ From the _Copperfield_ MS. 434
+ Mr. Browne's sketch of Micawber 435
+ Accident to John Leech 435
+ Its consequences 435
+ Depressing influences 436
+ At Broadstairs 436
+ Railway travellers 437
+ The exhibition year 438
+ A _Copperfield_ banquet 438
+ C. D. on money values 439
+ His leisure reading 439
+ A correction for Carlyle 440
+ Good criticism 441
+ Thoughts of a new book 441
+ The old restlessness 441
+ Beginning on a Friday 441
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX. 1848-1850.
+
+Pages 442-456.
+
+HAUNTED MAN AND HOUSEHOLD WORDS. AET. 36-40.
+
+ Maturing book for Christmas 442
+ Friendly plea for Mr. Macrone 442
+ Completion of Christmas story 443
+ Dropped motto 443
+ The "ghost" and the "bargain" 444
+ The Tetterby family 445
+ Teachings of the little tale 445
+ His own statement of its intention 446
+ Forgive that you may forget 446
+ _Copperfield_ sales 447
+ A letter from Russia 448
+ Translation into Russian 448
+ Sympathy of Siberia 448
+ The Periodical taking form 449
+ A design for it described 449
+ Original and selected matter 449
+ A Shadow for everywhere 450
+ Hopes of success 450
+ Doubts respecting it 451
+ Incompatibility of design 451
+ New design chosen 452
+ Assistant editor appointed 453
+ Titles proposed 453
+ Appearance of first number 454
+ Earliest contributors 454
+ Opinion of Mr. Sala 454
+ Child's dream of a star 455
+ A fancy derived from childhood 456
+
+
+CHAPTER XX. 1848-1851.
+
+Pages 457-494.
+
+LAST YEARS IN DEVONSHIRE TERRACE. AET. 36-39.
+
+ Sentiment about places 457
+ Confidences 458
+ Personal revelations 458
+ Early memories 459
+ At his sister's sick-bed 459
+ Last thoughts 460
+ Sister's death 460
+ Book to be written in first person 461
+ Riding over Salisbury Plain 461
+ Visiting scene of a tragedy 462
+ First sees Yarmouth 462
+ Birth of sixth son 462
+ Notion for a character 463
+ Choosing a title 463
+ "Mag's Diversions" 464
+ "Copperfield" chosen 464
+ Varieties of it proposed 465
+ Title finally determined 466
+ Difficulties of opening 466
+ Rogers and Benedict 466
+ Wit of Fonblanque 467
+ Procter and Macready 467
+ The Sheridans 468
+ Lord Byron's Ada 469
+ Dinner to Halevy and Scribe 469
+ Brougham and "the _Punch_ people" 469
+ The Duke at Vauxhall 470
+ Carlyle and Thackeray 470
+ Judicious change of a "tag" 471
+ A fact for a biographer 471
+ Marryat's delight with children 472
+ Bulwer Lytton and Monckton Milnes 472
+ Lords Nugent and Dudley Stuart 472-3
+ Kemble, Harness, and Dyce 473
+ Mrs. Siddons and John Kemble 473
+ Comparison and good distinction 474
+ Mazzini and Edinburgh friends 474
+ Artist-acquaintance 475
+ Visitors at his house 475
+ Friends from America 476
+ M. Van de Weyer 476
+ Ambition to see into heaven 477
+ Literature and art in the city 477
+ Doubtful compliment 478
+ A hint for London citizens 478
+ Letter against public executions 479
+ American observer in England 479
+ Marvels of English manners 480
+ A letter from Rockingham 481
+ Private theatricals 481
+ Major Bentley and General Boxall 481-2
+ A family scene 482
+ Doing too much 483
+ Death of Francis Jeffrey 483
+ Progress of work 484
+ The child-wife 484
+ A run to Paris 484
+ Banker or proctor 485
+ Doubts as to Dora settled 486
+ Of Rogers and Landor 486
+ A third daughter born 487
+ At Great Malvern 487
+ Macready's farewell 488
+ Experience of a brother author 488
+ The Home at Shepherd's-bush 488
+ Father's illness 489
+ Death of John Dickens 489
+ Tribute by his son 490
+ Theatrical-fund dinner 490
+ Plea for small actors 491
+ Remembering the forgotten 491
+ Death of his little daughter 492
+ Difficult tasks in life 492
+ Dora's grave 493
+ Advocating sanitary reform 493
+ Lord Shaftesbury 494
+ Realities of his books to Dickens 494
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFE
+
+OF
+
+CHARLES DICKENS.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+AMERICAN NOTES.
+
+1842.
+
+ Return from America--Longfellow in
+ England--Thirty Years Ago--At
+ Broadstairs--Preparing _Notes_--Fancy for the
+ Opening of _Chuzzlewit_--Reading
+ Tennyson--Theatricals at Margate--A New
+ Protege--Proposed Dedication--Sea-bathing and
+ Authorship--Emigrants in Canada--Coming to the
+ End--Rejected Motto for _Notes_--Return to
+ London--Cheerless Visit--The Mingled
+ Yarn--Scene at a Funeral--The Suppressed
+ Introductory Chapter to the _Notes_, now first
+ printed--Jeffrey's Opinion of the
+ _Notes_--Dickens's Experience of America in
+ 1868.
+
+
+THE reality did not fall short of the anticipation of home. His return
+was the occasion of unbounded enjoyment; and what he had planned before
+sailing as the way we should meet, received literal fulfilment. By the
+sound of his cheery voice I first knew that he was come; and from my
+house we went together to Maclise, also "without a moment's warning." A
+Greenwich dinner in which several friends (Talfourd, Milnes, Procter,
+Maclise, Stanfield, Marryat, Barham, Hood, and Cruikshank among them)
+took part, and other immediate greetings, followed; but the most special
+celebration was reserved for autumn, when, by way of challenge to what
+he had seen while abroad, a home-journey was arranged with Stanfield,
+Maclise, and myself for his companions, into such of the most striking
+scenes of a picturesque English county as the majority of us might not
+before have visited: Cornwall being ultimately chosen.
+
+Before our departure he was occupied by his preparation of the _American
+Notes_; and to the same interval belongs the arrival in London of Mr.
+Longfellow, who became his guest, and (for both of us I am privileged to
+add) our attached friend. Longfellow's name was not then the pleasant
+and familiar word it has since been in England; but he had already
+written several of his most felicitous pieces, and he possessed all the
+qualities of delightful companionship, the culture and the charm, which
+have no higher type or example than the accomplished and genial
+American. He reminded me, when lately again in England, of two
+experiences out of many we had enjoyed together this quarter of a
+century before. One of them was a day at Rochester, when, met by one of
+those prohibitions which are the wonder of visitors and the shame of
+Englishmen, we overleapt gates and barriers, and, setting at defiance
+repeated threats of all the terrors of law coarsely expressed to us by
+the custodian of the place, explored minutely the castle ruins. The
+other was a night among those portions of the population which outrage
+law and defy its terrors all the days of their lives, the tramps and
+thieves of London; when, under guidance and protection of the most
+trusted officers of the two great metropolitan prisons afforded to us by
+Mr. Chesterton and Lieut. Tracey, we went over the worst haunts of the
+most dangerous classes. Nor will it be unworthy of remark, in proof that
+attention is not drawn vainly to such scenes, that, upon Dickens going
+over them a dozen years later when he wrote a paper about them for his
+_Household Words_, he found important changes effected whereby these
+human dens, if not less dangerous, were become certainly more decent. On
+the night of our earlier visit, Maclise, who accompanied us, was struck
+with such sickness on entering the first of the Mint lodging-houses in
+the borough, that he had to remain, for the time we were in them, under
+guardianship of the police outside. Longfellow returned home by the
+Great Western from Bristol on the 21st of October, enjoying as he passed
+through Bath the hospitality of Landor; and at the end of the following
+week we started on our Cornish travel.
+
+But what before this had occupied Dickens in the writing way must now be
+told. Not long after his reappearance amongst us, his house being still
+in the occupation of Sir John Wilson, he went to Broadstairs, taking
+with him the letters from which I have quoted so largely to help him in
+preparing his _American Notes_; and one of his first announcements to me
+(18th of July) shows not only this labour in progress, but the story he
+was under engagement to begin in November working in his mind. "The
+subjects at the beginning of the book are of that kind that I can't
+_dash_ at them, and now and then they fret me in consequence. When I
+come to Washington, I am all right. The solitary prison at Philadelphia
+is a good subject, though; I forgot that for the moment. Have you seen
+the Boston chapter yet? . . . I have never been in Cornwall either. A mine
+certainly; and a letter for that purpose shall be got from Southwood
+Smith. I have some notion of opening the new book in the lantern of a
+lighthouse!" A letter a couple of months later (16th of Sept.) recurs to
+that proposed opening of his story which after all he laid aside; and
+shows how rapidly he was getting his _American Notes_ into shape. "At
+the Isle of Thanet races yesterday I saw--oh! who shall say what an
+immense amount of character in the way of inconceivable villainy and
+blackguardism! I even got some new wrinkles in the way of showmen,
+conjurors, pea-and-thimblers, and trampers generally. I think of opening
+my new book on the coast of Cornwall, in some terribly dreary iron-bound
+spot. I hope to have finished the American book before the end of next
+month; and we will then together fly down into that desolate region."
+Our friends having Academy engagements to detain them, we had to delay a
+little; and I meanwhile turn back to his letters to observe his progress
+with his _Notes_, and other employments or enjoyments of the interval.
+They require no illustration that they will not themselves supply: but I
+may remark that the then collected _Poems_ of Tennyson had become very
+favourite reading with him; and that while in America Mr. Mitchell the
+comedian had given him a small white shaggy terrier, who bore at first
+the imposing name of Timber Doodle, and became a great domestic pet and
+companion.
+
+"I have been reading" (7th of August) "Tennyson all this morning on the
+seashore. Among other trifling effects, the waters have dried up as they
+did of old, and shown me all the mermen and mermaids, at the bottom of
+the ocean; together with millions of queer creatures, half-fish and
+half-fungus, looking down into all manner of coral caves and seaweed
+conservatories; and staring in with their great dull eyes at every open
+nook and loop-hole. Who else, too, could conjure up such a close to the
+extraordinary and as Landor would say 'most wonderful' series of
+pictures in the 'dream of fair women,' as--
+
+ "'Squadrons and squares of men in brazen plates,
+ Scaffolds, still sheets of water, divers woes,
+ Ranges of glimmering vaults with iron grates,
+ And hushed seraglios!'
+
+"I am getting on pretty well, but it was so glittering and sunshiny
+yesterday that I was forced to make holiday." Four days later: "I have
+not written a word this blessed day. I got to New York yesterday, and
+think it goes as it should . . . Little doggy improves rapidly, and now
+jumps over my stick at the word of command. I have changed his name to
+Snittle Timbery, as more sonorous and expressive. He unites with the
+rest of the family in cordial regards and loves. _Nota Bene_. The
+Margate theatre is open every evening, and the Four Patagonians (see
+Goldsmith's _Essays_) are performing thrice a week at Ranelagh . . ."
+
+A visit from me was at this time due, to which these were held out as
+inducements; and there followed what it was supposed I could not resist,
+a transformation into the broadest farce of a deep tragedy by a dear
+friend of ours. "Now you really must come. Seeing only is believing,
+very often isn't that, and even Being the thing falls a long way short
+of believing it. Mrs. Nickleby herself once asked me, as you know, if I
+really believed there ever was such a woman; but there'll be no more
+belief, either in me or my descriptions, after what I have to tell of
+our excellent friend's tragedy, if you don't come and have it played
+again for yourself 'by particular desire.' We saw it last night, and oh!
+if you had but been with us! Young Betty, doing what the mind of man
+without my help never _can_ conceive, with his legs like padded
+boot-trees wrapped up in faded yellow drawers, was the hero. The comic
+man of the company enveloped in a white sheet, with his head tied with
+red tape like a brief and greeted with yells of laughter whenever he
+appeared, was the venerable priest. A poor toothless old idiot at whom
+the very gallery roared with contempt when he was called a tyrant, was
+the remorseless and aged Creon. And Ismene being arrayed in spangled
+muslin trowsers very loose in the legs and very tight in the ankles,
+such as Fatima would wear in _Blue Beard_, was at her appearance
+immediately called upon for a song. After this, can you longer. . . ?"
+
+With the opening of September I had renewed report of his book, and of
+other matters. "The Philadelphia chapter I think very good, but I am
+sorry to say it has not made as much in print as I hoped . . . In America
+they have forged a letter with my signature, which they coolly declare
+appeared in the _Chronicle_ with the copyright circular; and in which I
+express myself in such terms as you may imagine, in reference to the
+dinners and so forth. It has been widely distributed all over the
+States; and the felon who invented it is a 'smart man' of course. You
+are to understand that it is not done as a joke, and is scurrilously
+reviewed. Mr. Park Benjamin begins a lucubration upon it with these
+capitals, DICKENS IS A FOOL, AND A LIAR. . . . I have a new protege, in the
+person of a wretched deaf and dumb boy whom I found upon the sands the
+other day, half dead, and have got (for the present) into the union
+infirmary at Minster. A most deplorable case."
+
+On the 14th he told me: "I have pleased myself very much to-day in the
+matter of Niagara. I have made the description very brief (as it should
+be), but I fancy it is good. I am beginning to think over the
+introductory chapter, and it has meanwhile occurred to me that I should
+like, at the beginning of the volumes, to put what follows on a blank
+page. _I dedicate this Book to those friends of mine in America, who,
+loving their country, can bear the truth, when it is written good
+humouredly and in a kind spirit._ What do you think? Do you see any
+objection?"
+
+My reply is to be inferred from what he sent back on the 20th. "I don't
+quite see my way towards an expression in the dedication of any feeling
+in reference to the American reception. Of course I have always intended
+to glance at it, gratefully, in the end of the book; and it will have
+its place in the introductory chapter, if we decide for that. Would it
+do to put in, after 'friends in America,' _who giving me a welcome I
+must ever gratefully and proudly remember, left my judgment free, and_
+who, loving, &c. If so, so be it."
+
+Before the end of the month he wrote: "For the last two or three days I
+have been rather slack in point of work; not being in the vein. To-day I
+had not written twenty lines before I rushed out (the weather being
+gorgeous) to bathe. And when I have done that, it is all up with me in
+the way of authorship until to-morrow. The little dog is in the highest
+spirits; and jumps, as Mr. Kenwigs would say, perpetivally. I have had
+letters by the Britannia from Felton, Prescott, Mr. Q, and others, all
+very earnest and kind. I think you will like what I have written on the
+poor emigrants and their ways as I literally and truly saw them on the
+boat from Quebec to Montreal."
+
+This was a passage, which, besides being in itself as attractive as any
+in his writings, gives such perfect expression to a feeling that
+underlies them all, that I subjoin it in a note.[63] On board this
+Canadian steamboat he encountered crowds of poor emigrants and their
+children; and such was their patient kindness and cheerful endurance, in
+circumstances where the easy-living rich could hardly fail to be
+monsters of impatience and selfishness, that it suggested to him a
+reflection than which it was not possible to have written anything more
+worthy of observation, or more absolutely true. Jeremy Taylor has the
+same philosophy in his lesson on opportunities, but here it was
+beautified by the example with all its fine touches. It made us read
+Rich and Poor by new translation.
+
+The printers were now hard at work, and in the last week of September he
+wrote: "I send you proofs as far as Niagara . . . I am rather
+holiday-making this week . . . taking principal part in a regatta here
+yesterday, very pretty and gay indeed. We think of coming up in time for
+Macready's opening, when perhaps you will give us a chop; and of course
+you and Mac will dine with _us_ the next day? I shall leave nothing of
+the book to do after coming home, please God, but the two chapters on
+slavery and the people which I could manage easily in a week, if need
+were . . . The policeman who supposed the Duke of Brunswick to be one of
+the swell mob, ought instantly to be made an inspector. The suspicion
+reflects the highest credit (I seriously think) on his penetration and
+judgment." Three days later: "For the last two days we have had gales
+blowing from the north-east, and seas rolling on us that drown the pier.
+To-day it is tremendous. Such a sea was never known here at this season,
+and it is running in at this moment in waves of twelve feet high. You
+would hardly know the place. But we shall be punctual to your dinner
+hour on Saturday. If the wind should hold in the same quarter, we may be
+obliged to come up by land; and in that case I should start the caravan
+at six in the morning. . . . What do you think of this for my
+title--_American Notes for General Circulation_; and of this motto?
+
+ "In reply to a question from the Bench, the
+ Solicitor for the Bank observed, that this kind
+ of notes circulated the most extensively, in
+ those parts of the world where they were stolen
+ and forged. _Old Bailey Report._"
+
+The motto was omitted, objection being made to it; and on the last day
+of the month I had the last of his letters during this Broadstairs
+visit. "Strange as it may appear to you" (25th of September), "the sea
+is running so high that we have no choice but to return by land. No
+steamer can come out of Ramsgate, and the Margate boat lay out all night
+on Wednesday with all her passengers on board. You may be sure of us
+therefore on Saturday at 5, for I have determined to leave here
+to-morrow, as we could not otherwise manage it in time; and have engaged
+an omnibus to bring the whole caravan by the overland route. . . . We
+cannot open a window, or a door; legs are of no use on the terrace; and
+the Margate boats can only take people aboard at Herne Bay!" He brought
+with him all that remained to be done of his second volume except the
+last two chapters, including that to which he has referred as
+"introductory;" and on the following Wednesday (5th of October) he told
+me that the first of these was done. "I want you very much to come and
+dine to-day that we may repair to Drury-lane together; and let us say
+half-past four, or there is no time to be comfortable. I am going out to
+Tottenham this morning, on a cheerless mission I would willingly have
+avoided. Hone, of the _Every Day Book_, is dying; and sent Cruikshank
+yesterday to beg me to go and see him, as, having read no books but mine
+of late, he wanted to see and shake hands with me before (as George
+said) 'he went.' There is no help for it, of course; so to Tottenham I
+repair, this morning. I worked all day, and till midnight; and finished
+the slavery chapter yesterday."
+
+The cheerless visit had its mournful sequel before the next month
+closed, when he went with the same companion to poor Hone's funeral; and
+one of his letters written at the time to Mr. Felton has so vividly
+recalled to me the tragi-comedy of an incident of that day, as for long
+after he used to describe it, and as I have heard the other principal
+actor in it good-naturedly admit to be perfectly true, that two or three
+sentences may be given here. The wonderful neighbourhood in this life of
+ours, of serious and humorous things, constitutes in itself very much of
+the genius of Dickens's writing; the laughter close to the pathos, but
+never touching it with ridicule; and this small occurrence may be taken
+in farther evidence of its reality.
+
+"We went into a little parlour where the funeral party was, and God
+knows it was miserable enough, for the widow and children were crying
+bitterly in one corner, and the other mourners (mere people of ceremony,
+who cared no more for the dead man than the hearse did) were talking
+quite coolly and carelessly together in another; and the contrast was as
+painful and distressing as anything I ever saw. There was an independent
+clergyman present, with his bands on and a bible under his arm, who, as
+soon as we were seated, addressed C thus, in a loud emphatic voice. 'Mr.
+C, have you seen a paragraph respecting our departed friend, which has
+gone the round of the morning papers?' 'Yes, sir,' says C, 'I have:'
+looking very hard at me the while, for he had told me with some pride
+coming down that it was his composition. 'Oh!' said the clergyman. 'Then
+you will agree with me, Mr. C, that it is not only an insult to me, who
+am the servant of the Almighty, but an insult to the Almighty, whose
+servant I am.' 'How is that, sir?' says C. 'It is stated, Mr. C, in that
+paragraph,' says the minister, 'that when Mr. Hone failed in business
+as a bookseller, he was persuaded by _me_ to try the pulpit; which is
+false, incorrect, unchristian, in a manner blasphemous, and in all
+respects contemptible. Let us pray.' With which, and in the same breath,
+I give you my word, he knelt down, as we all did, and began a very
+miserable jumble of an extemporary prayer. I was really penetrated with
+sorrow for the family" (he exerted himself zealously for them
+afterwards, as the kind-hearted C also did), "but when C, upon his knees
+and sobbing for the loss of an old friend, whispered me 'that if that
+wasn't a clergyman, and it wasn't a funeral, he'd have punched his
+head,' I felt as if nothing but convulsions could possibly relieve me."
+
+On the 10th of October I heard from him that the chapter intended to be
+introductory to the _Notes_ was written, and waiting our conference
+whether or not it should be printed. We decided against it; on his part
+so reluctantly, that I had to undertake for its publication when a more
+fitting time should come. This in my judgment has arrived, and the
+chapter first sees the light on this page. There is no danger at
+present, as there would have been when it was written, that its proper
+self-assertion should be mistaken for an apprehension of hostile
+judgments which he was anxious to deprecate or avoid. He is out of reach
+of all that now; and reveals to us here, as one whom fear or censure can
+touch no more, his honest purpose in the use of satire even where his
+humorous temptations were strongest. What he says will on other grounds
+also be read with unusual interest, for it will be found to connect
+itself impressively not with his first experiences only, but with his
+second visit to America at the close of his life. He held always the
+same high opinion of what was best in that country, and always the same
+contempt for what was worst in it.
+
+ "INTRODUCTORY. AND NECESSARY TO BE READ.
+
+ "I have placed the foregoing title at the head
+ of this page, because I challenge and deny the
+ right of any person to pass judgment on this
+ book, or to arrive at any reasonable conclusion
+ in reference to it, without first being at the
+ trouble of becoming acquainted with its design
+ and purpose.
+
+ "It is not statistical. Figures of arithmetic
+ have already been heaped upon America's devoted
+ head, almost as lavishly as figures of speech
+ have been piled above Shakespeare's grave.
+
+ "It comprehends no small talk concerning
+ individuals, and no violation of the social
+ confidences of private life. The very prevalent
+ practice of kidnapping live ladies and
+ gentlemen, forcing them into cabinets, and
+ labelling and ticketing them whether they will
+ or no, for the gratification of the idle and
+ the curious, is not to my taste. Therefore I
+ have avoided it.
+
+ "It has not a grain of any political ingredient
+ in its whole composition.
+
+ "Neither does it contain, nor have I intended
+ that it should contain, any lengthened and
+ minute account of my personal reception in the
+ United States: not because I am, or ever was,
+ insensible to that spontaneous effusion of
+ affection and generosity of heart, in a most
+ affectionate and generous-hearted people; but
+ because I conceive that it would ill become me
+ to flourish matter necessarily involving so
+ much of my own praises, in the eyes of my
+ unhappy readers.
+
+ "This book is simply what it claims to be--a
+ record of the impressions I received from day
+ to day, during my hasty travels in America, and
+ sometimes (but not always) of the conclusions
+ to which they, and after-reflection on them,
+ have led me; a description of the country I
+ passed through; of the institutions I visited;
+ of the kind of people among whom I journeyed;
+ and of the manners and customs that came within
+ my observation. Very many works having just the
+ same scope and range, have been already
+ published, but I think that these two volumes
+ stand in need of no apology on that account.
+ The interest of such productions, if they have
+ any, lies in the varying impressions made by
+ the same novel things on different minds; and
+ not in new discoveries or extraordinary
+ adventures.
+
+ "I can scarcely be supposed to be ignorant of
+ the hazard I run in writing of America at all.
+ I know perfectly well that there is, in that
+ country, a numerous class of well-intentioned
+ persons prone to be dissatisfied with all
+ accounts of the Republic whose citizens they
+ are, which are not couched in terms of exalted
+ and extravagant praise. I know perfectly well
+ that there is in America, as in most other
+ places laid down in maps of the great world, a
+ numerous class of persons so tenderly and
+ delicately constituted, that they cannot bear
+ the truth in any form. And I do not need the
+ gift of prophecy to discern afar off, that they
+ who will be aptest to detect malice, ill will,
+ and all uncharitableness in these pages, and to
+ show, beyond any doubt, that they are
+ perfectly inconsistent with that grateful and
+ enduring recollection which I profess to
+ entertain of the welcome I found awaiting me
+ beyond the Atlantic--will be certain native
+ journalists, veracious and gentlemanly, who
+ were at great pains to prove to me, on all
+ occasions during my stay there, that the
+ aforesaid welcome was utterly worthless.
+
+ "But, venturing to dissent even from these high
+ authorities, I formed my own opinion of its
+ value in the outset, and retain it to this
+ hour; and in asserting (as I invariably did on
+ all public occasions) my liberty and freedom of
+ speech while I was among the Americans, and in
+ maintaining it at home, I believe that I best
+ show my sense of the high worth of that
+ welcome, and of the honourable singleness of
+ purpose with which it was extended to me. From
+ first to last I saw, in the friends who crowded
+ round me in America, old readers, over-grateful
+ and over-partial perhaps, to whom I had happily
+ been the means of furnishing pleasure and
+ entertainment; not a vulgar herd who would
+ flatter and cajole a stranger into turning with
+ closed eyes from all the blemishes of the
+ nation, and into chaunting its praises with the
+ discrimination of a street ballad-singer. From
+ first to last I saw, in those hospitable hands,
+ a home-made wreath of laurel; and not an iron
+ muzzle disguised beneath a flower or two.
+
+ "Therefore I take--and hold myself not only
+ justified in taking, but bound to take--the
+ plain course of saying what I think, and noting
+ what I saw; and as it is not my custom to exalt
+ what in my judgment are foibles and abuses at
+ home, so I have no intention of softening down,
+ or glozing over, those that I have observed
+ abroad.
+
+ "If this book should fall into the hands of any
+ sensitive American who cannot bear to be told
+ that the working of the institutions of his
+ country is far from perfect; that in spite of
+ the advantage she has over all other nations in
+ the elastic freshness and vigour of her youth,
+ she is far from being a model for the earth to
+ copy; and that even in those pictures of the
+ national manners with which he quarrels most,
+ there is still (after the lapse of several
+ years, each of which may be fairly supposed to
+ have had its stride in improvement) much that
+ is just and true at this hour; let him lay it
+ down, now, for I shall not please him. Of the
+ intelligent, reflecting, and educated among his
+ countrymen, I have no fear; for I have ample
+ reason to believe, after many delightful
+ conversations not easily to be forgotten, that
+ there are very few topics (if any) on which
+ their sentiments differ materially from mine.
+
+ "I may be asked--'If you have been in any
+ respect disappointed in America, and are
+ assured beforehand that the expression of your
+ disappointment will give offence to any class,
+ why do you write at all?' My answer is, that I
+ went there expecting greater things than I
+ found, and resolved as far as in me lay to do
+ justice to the country, at the expense of any
+ (in my view) mistaken or prejudiced statements
+ that might have been made to its disparagement.
+ Coming home with a corrected and sobered
+ judgment, I consider myself no less bound to do
+ justice to what, according to my best means of
+ judgment, I found to be the truth."
+
+Of the book for whose opening page this matter introductory was written,
+it will be enough merely to add that it appeared on the 18th of October;
+that before the close of the year four large editions had been sold;
+and that in my opinion it thoroughly deserved the estimate formed of it
+by one connected with America by the strongest social affections, and
+otherwise in all respects an honourable, high-minded, upright judge.
+"You have been very tender," wrote Lord Jeffrey, "to our sensitive
+friends beyond sea, and my whole heart goes along with every word you
+have written. I think that you have perfectly accomplished all that you
+profess or undertake to do, and that the world has never yet seen a more
+faithful, graphic, amusing, kind-hearted narrative."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+I permit myself so far to anticipate a later page as to print here a
+brief extract from one of the letters of the last American visit.
+Without impairing the interest with which the narrative of that time
+will be read in its proper place, I shall thus indicate the extent to
+which present impressions were modified by the experience of twenty-six
+years later. He is writing from Philadelphia on the fourteenth of
+January, 1868.
+
+"I see _great changes_ for the better, socially. Politically, no.
+England governed by the Marylebone vestry and the penny papers, and
+England as she would be after years of such governing; is what I make of
+_that_. Socially, the change in manners is remarkable. There is much
+greater politeness and forbearance in all ways. . . . On the other hand
+there are still provincial oddities wonderfully quizzical; and the
+newspapers are constantly expressing the popular amazement at 'Mr.
+Dickens's extraordinary composure.' They seem to take it ill that I
+don't stagger on to the platform overpowered by the spectacle before me,
+and the national greatness. They are all so accustomed to do public
+things with a flourish of trumpets, that the notion of my coming in to
+read without somebody first flying up and delivering an 'Oration' about
+me, and flying down again and leading me in, is so very unaccountable to
+them, that sometimes they have no idea until I open my lips that it can
+possibly be Charles Dickens."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[63] "Cant as we may, and as we shall to the end of all things, it is
+very much harder for the poor to be virtuous than it is for the rich;
+and the good that is in them, shines the brighter for it. In many a
+noble mansion lives a man, the best of husbands and of fathers, whose
+private worth in both capacities is justly lauded to the skies. But
+bring him here, upon this crowded deck. Strip from his fair young wife
+her silken dress and jewels, unbind her braided hair, stamp early
+wrinkles on her brow, pinch her pale cheek with care and much privation,
+array her faded form in coarsely patched attire, let there be nothing
+but his love to set her forth or deck her out, and you shall put it to
+the proof indeed. So change his station in the world that he shall see,
+in those young things who climb about his knee, not records of his
+wealth and name, but little wrestlers with him for his daily bread; so
+many poachers on his scanty meal; so many units to divide his every sum
+of comfort, and farther to reduce its small amount. In lieu of the
+endearments of childhood in its sweetest aspect, heap upon him all its
+pains and wants, its sicknesses and ills, its fretfulness, caprice, and
+querulous endurance: let its prattle be, not of engaging infant fancies,
+but of cold, and thirst, and hunger: and if his fatherly affection
+outlive all this, and he be patient, watchful, tender; careful of his
+children's lives, and mindful always of their joys and sorrows; then
+send him back to parliament, and pulpit, and to quarter sessions, and
+when he hears fine talk of the depravity of those who live from hand to
+mouth, and labour hard to do it, let him speak up, as one who knows, and
+tell those holders-forth that they, by parallel with such a class,
+should be high angels in their daily lives, and lay but humble siege to
+heaven at last. . . . Which of us shall say what he would be, if such
+realities, with small relief or change all through his days, were his!
+Looking round upon these people: far from home, houseless, indigent,
+wandering, weary with travel and hard living: and seeing how patiently
+they nursed and tended their young children: how they consulted ever
+their wants first, then half supplied their own; what gentle ministers
+of hope and faith the women were; how the men profited by their example;
+and how very, very seldom even a moment's petulance or harsh complaint
+broke out among them: I felt a stronger love and honour of my kind come
+glowing on my heart, and wished to God there had been many atheists in
+the better part of human nature there, to read this simple lesson in the
+book of life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+FIRST YEAR OF MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT.
+
+1843.
+
+ A Sunset at Land's-end--Description of the
+ Cornish Tour--Letter from Maclise--Maclise to
+ J. F.--Names first given to _Chuzzlewit_--First
+ Number of _Chuzzlewit_--Prologue to a Play--A
+ Tragedy by Browning--Accompaniments of
+ Work--Miss Georgina Hogarth--American
+ Controversy--Cottage at Finchley--Origin of
+ Mrs. Gamp--Change of Editorship at
+ _Chronicle_--Macready bound for America--Works
+ of Charity and Mercy--Visit to
+ Broadstairs--Sea-side Life in Ordinary--Speech
+ at Opening of the Manchester
+ Athenaeum--Dickens's Interest in Ragged
+ Schools--His Sympathy with the Church of
+ England--Origin of his _Christmas Carol_--Third
+ Son born.
+
+
+THE Cornish trip had come off, meanwhile, with such unexpected and
+continued attraction for us that we were well into the third week of
+absence before we turned our faces homeward. Railways helped us then not
+much; but where the roads were inaccessible to post-horses, we walked.
+Tintagel was visited, and no part of mountain or sea consecrated by the
+legends of Arthur was left unexplored. We ascended to the cradle of the
+highest tower of Mount St. Michael, and descended into several mines.
+Land and sea yielded each its marvels to us; but of all the impressions
+brought away, of which some afterwards took forms as lasting as they
+could receive from the most delightful art, I doubt if any were the
+source of such deep emotion to us all as a sunset we saw at Land's-end.
+Stanfield knew the wonders of the Continent, the glories of Ireland
+were native to Maclise, I was familiar from boyhood with border and
+Scottish scenery, and Dickens was fresh from Niagara; but there was
+something in the sinking of the sun behind the Atlantic that autumn
+afternoon, as we viewed it together from the top of the rock projecting
+farthest into the sea, which each in his turn declared to have no
+parallel in memory.
+
+But with the varied and overflowing gladness of those three memorable
+weeks it would be unworthy now to associate only the saddened
+recollection of the sole survivor. "Blessed star of morning!" wrote
+Dickens to Felton while yet the glow of its enjoyment was upon him.
+"Such a trip as we had into Cornwall just after Longfellow went away! . . .
+Sometimes we travelled all night, sometimes all day, sometimes both. . . .
+Heavens! If you could have seen the necks of bottles, distracting in
+their immense varieties of shape, peering out of the carriage pockets!
+If you could have witnessed the deep devotion of the post-boys, the wild
+attachment of the hostlers, the maniac glee of the waiters! If you could
+have followed us into the earthy old churches we visited, and into the
+strange caverns on the gloomy sea-shore, and down into the depths of
+mines, and up to the tops of giddy heights where the unspeakable green
+water was roaring, I don't know how many hundred feet below! If you
+could have seen but one gleam of the bright fires by which we sat in the
+big rooms of ancient inns at night, until long after the small hours had
+come and gone. . . . I never laughed in my life as I did on this journey.
+It would have done you good to hear me. I was choking and gasping and
+bursting the buckle off the back of my stock, all the way. And Stanfield
+got into such apoplectic entanglements that we were often obliged to
+beat him on the back with portmanteaus before we could recover him.
+Seriously, I do believe there never was such a trip. And they made such
+sketches, those two men, in the most romantic of our halting-places,
+that you would have sworn we had the Spirit of Beauty with us, as well
+as the Spirit of Fun."[64]
+
+The Logan Stone, by Stanfield, was one of them; and it laughingly
+sketched both the charm of what was seen and the mirth of what was done,
+for it perched me on the top of the stone. It is historical, however,
+the ascent having been made; and of this and other examples of
+steadiness at heights which deterred the rest, as well as of a subject
+suggested for a painting of which Dickens became the unknown purchaser,
+Maclise reminded me in some pleasant allusions many years later, which,
+notwithstanding their tribute to my athletic achievements, the
+good-natured reader must forgive my printing. They complete the little
+picture of our trip. Something I had written to him of recent travel
+among the mountain scenery of the wilder coasts of Donegal had touched
+the chord of these old remembrances. "As to your clambering," he
+replied, "don't I know what happened of old? Don't I still see the Logan
+Stone, and you perched on the giddy top, while we, rocking it on its
+pivot, shrank from all that lay concealed below! Should I ever have
+blundered on the waterfall of St. Wighton, if you had not piloted the
+way? And when we got to Land's-end, with the green sea far under us
+lapping into solitary rocky nooks where the mermaids live, who but you
+only had the courage to stretch over, to see those diamond jets of
+brightness that I swore then, and believe still, were the flappings of
+their tails! And don't I recall you again, sitting on the tip-top stone
+of the cradle-turret over the highest battlement of the castle of St.
+Michael's Mount, with not a ledge or coigne of vantage 'twixt you and
+the fathomless ocean under you, distant three thousand feet? Last, do I
+forget you clambering up the goat-path to King Arthur's castle of
+Tintagel, when, in my vain wish to follow, I grovelled and clung to the
+soil like a Caliban, and you, in the manner of a tricksy spirit and
+stout Ariel, actually danced up and down before me!"
+
+The waterfall I led him to was among the records of the famous holiday,
+celebrated also by Thackeray in one of his pen-and-ink pleasantries,
+which were sent by both painters to the next year's Academy; and so
+eager was Dickens to possess this landscape by Maclise which included
+the likeness of a member of his family, yet so anxious that our friend
+should be spared the sacrifice which he knew would follow an avowal of
+his wish, that he bought it under a feigned name before the Academy
+opened, and steadily refused to take back the money which on discovery
+of the artifice Maclise pressed upon him.[65] Our friend, who already
+had munificently given him a charming drawing of his four eldest
+children to accompany him and his wife to America, had his generous way
+nevertheless; and as a voluntary offering four years later, painted Mrs.
+Dickens on a canvas of the same size as the picture of her husband in
+1839.
+
+"Behold finally the title of the new book," was the first note I had
+from Dickens (12th of November) after our return; "don't lose it, for I
+have no copy." Title and even story had been undetermined while we
+travelled, from the lingering wish he still had to begin it among those
+Cornish scenes; but this intention had now been finally abandoned, and
+the reader lost nothing by his substitution for the lighthouse or mine
+in Cornwall, of the Wiltshire-village forge on the windy autumn evening
+which opens the tale of _Martin Chuzzlewit_. Into that name he finally
+settled, but only after much deliberation, as a mention of his changes
+will show. Martin was the prefix to all, but the surname varied from its
+first form of Sweezleden, Sweezleback, and Sweezlewag, to those of
+Chuzzletoe, Chuzzleboy, Chubblewig, and Chuzzlewig; nor was Chuzzlewit
+chosen at last until after more hesitation and discussion. What he had
+sent me in his letter as finally adopted, ran thus: "The Life and
+Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewig, his family, friends, and enemies.
+Comprising all his wills and his ways. With an historical record of what
+he did and what he didn't. The whole forming a complete key to the house
+of Chuzzlewig." All which latter portion of the title was of course
+dropped as the work became modified, in its progress, by changes at
+first not contemplated; but as early as the third number he sent me the
+plan of "old Martin's plot to degrade and punish Pecksniff," and the
+difficulties he encountered in departing from other portions of his
+scheme were such as to render him, in his subsequent stories, more bent
+upon constructive care at the outset, and adherence as far as might be
+to any design he had formed.
+
+The first number, which appeared in January 1843, had not been quite
+finished when he wrote to me on the 8th of December: "The Chuzzlewit
+copy makes so much more than I supposed, that the number is nearly done.
+Thank God!" Beginning so hurriedly as at last he did, altering his
+course at the opening and seeing little as yet of the main track of his
+design, perhaps no story was ever begun by him with stronger heart or
+confidence. Illness kept me to my rooms for some days, and he was so
+eager to try the effect of Pecksniff and Pinch that he came down with
+the ink hardly dry on the last slip to read the manuscript to me. Well
+did Sydney Smith, in writing to say how very much the number had pleased
+him, foresee the promise there was in those characters. "Pecksniff and
+his daughters, and Pinch, are admirable--quite first-rate painting, such
+as no one but yourself can execute!" And let me here at once remark that
+the notion of taking Pecksniff for a type of character was really the
+origin of the book; the design being to show, more or less by every
+person introduced, the number and variety of humours and vices that have
+their root in selfishness.
+
+Another piece of his writing that claims mention at the close of 1842
+was a prologue contributed to the _Patrician's Daughter_, Mr. Westland
+Marston's first dramatic effort, which had attracted him by the beauty
+of its composition less than by the courage with which its subject had
+been chosen from the actual life of the time.
+
+ "Not light its import, and not poor its mien;
+ Yourselves the actors, and your homes the scene."
+
+This was the date, too, of Mr. Browning's tragedy of the _Blot on the
+'Scutcheon_, which I took upon myself, after reading it in the
+manuscript, privately to impart to Dickens; and I was not mistaken in
+the belief that it would profoundly touch him. "Browning's play," he
+wrote (25th of November), "has thrown me into a perfect passion of
+sorrow. To say that there is anything in its subject save what is
+lovely, true, deeply affecting, full of the best emotion, the most
+earnest feeling, and the most true and tender source of interest, is to
+say that there is no light in the sun, and no heat in blood. It is full
+of genius, natural and great thoughts, profound and yet simple and
+beautiful in its vigour. I know nothing that is so affecting, nothing in
+any book I have ever read, as Mildred's recurrence to that 'I was so
+young--I had no mother.' I know no love like it, no passion like it, no
+moulding of a splendid thing after its conception, like it. And I swear
+it is a tragedy that MUST be played; and must be played, moreover, by
+Macready. There are some things I would have changed if I could (they
+are very slight, mostly broken lines); and I assuredly would have the
+old servant _begin his tale upon the scene_; and be taken by the throat,
+or drawn upon, by his master, in its commencement. But the tragedy I
+never shall forget, or less vividly remember than I do now. And if you
+tell Browning that I have seen it, tell him that I believe from my soul
+there is no man living (and not many dead) who could produce such a
+work.--Macready likes the altered prologue very much.". . . There will
+come a more convenient time to speak of his general literary likings, or
+special regard for contemporary books; but I will say now that nothing
+interested him more than successes won honestly in his own field, and
+that in his large and open nature there was no hiding-place for little
+jealousies. An instance occurs to me which may be named at once, when,
+many years after the present date, he called my attention very earnestly
+to two tales then in course of publication in _Blackwood's Magazine_,
+and afterwards collected under the title of _Scenes of Clerical Life_.
+"Do read them," he wrote. "They are the best things I have seen since I
+began my course."
+
+Eighteen hundred and forty-three[66] opened with the most vigorous
+prosecution of his _Chuzzlewit_ labour. "I hope the number will be very
+good," he wrote to me of number two (8th of January). "I have been
+hammering away, and at home all day. Ditto yesterday; except for two
+hours in the afternoon, when I ploughed through snow half a foot deep,
+round about the wilds of Willesden." For the present, however, I shall
+glance only briefly from time to time at his progress with the earlier
+portions of the story on which he was thus engaged until the midsummer
+of 1844. Disappointments arose in connection with it, unexpected and
+strange, which had important influence upon him: but, I reserve the
+mention of these for awhile, that I may speak of the leading incidents
+of 1843.
+
+"I am in a difficulty," he wrote (12th of February), "and am coming down
+to you some time to-day or to-night. I couldn't write a line yesterday;
+not a word, though I really tried hard. In a kind of despair I started
+off at half-past two with my pair of petticoats to Richmond; and dined
+there!! Oh what a lovely day it was in those parts." His pair of
+petticoats were Mrs. Dickens and her sister Georgina: the latter, since
+his return from America, having become part of his household, of which
+she remained a member until his death; and he had just reason to be
+proud of the steadiness, depth, and devotion of her friendship. In a
+note-book begun by him in January 1855, where, for the first time in his
+life, he jotted down hints and fancies proposed to be made available in
+future writings, I find a character sketched of which, if the whole was
+not suggested by his sister-in-law, the most part was applicable to her.
+"She--sacrificed to children, and sufficiently rewarded. From a child
+herself, always 'the children' (of somebody else) to engross her. And so
+it comes to pass that she is never married; never herself has a child;
+is always devoted 'to the children' (of somebody else); and they love
+her; and she has always youth dependent on her till her death--and dies
+quite happily." Not many days after that holiday at Richmond, a slight
+unstudied outline in pencil was made by Maclise of the three who formed
+the party there, as we all sat together; and never did a touch so light
+carry with it more truth of observation. The likenesses of all are
+excellent; and I here preserve the drawing because nothing ever done of
+Dickens himself has conveyed more vividly his look and bearing at this
+yet youthful time. He is in his most pleasing aspect; flattered, if you
+will; but nothing that is known to me gives a general impression so
+life-like and true of the then frank, eager, handsome face.
+
+It was a year of much illness with me, which had ever-helpful and active
+sympathy from him. "Send me word how you are," he wrote, two days later.
+"But not so much for that I now write, as to tell you, peremptorily,
+that I insist on your wrapping yourself up and coming here in a
+hackney-coach, with a big portmanteau, to-morrow. It surely is better to
+be unwell with a Quick and Cheerful (and Co) in the neighbourhood, than
+in the dreary vastness of Lincoln's-inn-fields. Here is the snuggest
+tent-bedstead in the world, and there you are with the drawing-room for
+your workshop, the Q and C for your pal, and 'every-think in a
+concatenation accordingly.' I begin to have hopes of the regeneration of
+mankind after the reception of Gregory last night, though I have none of
+the _Chronicle_ for not denouncing the villain. Have you seen the note
+touching my _Notes_ in the blue and yellow?"
+
+The first of these closing allusions was to the editor of the infamous
+_Satirist_ having been hissed from the Drury-lane stage, on which he had
+presented himself in the character of Hamlet; and I remember with what
+infinite pleasure I afterwards heard Chief Justice Tindal in court,
+charging the jury in an action brought by this malefactor against a
+publican of St. Giles's for having paid men to take part in the hissing
+of him, avow the pride he felt in "living in the same parish with a man
+of that humble station of life of the defendant's," who was capable of
+paying money out of his own pocket to punish what he believed to be an
+outrage to decency. The second allusion was to a statement of the
+reviewer of the _American Notes_ in the _Edinburgh_ to the effect, that,
+if he had been rightly informed, Dickens had gone to America as a kind
+of missionary in the cause of international copyright; to which a prompt
+contradiction had been given in the _Times_. "I deny it," wrote Dickens,
+"wholly. He is wrongly informed; and reports, without enquiry, a piece
+of information which I could only characterize by using one of the
+shortest and strongest words in the language."
+
+The disputes that had arisen out of the American book, I may add,
+stretched over great part of the year. It will quite suffice, however,
+to say here that the ground taken by him in his letters written on the
+spot, and printed in my former volume, which in all the more material
+statements his book invited public judgment upon and which he was moved
+to reopen in _Chuzzlewit_, was so kept by him against all comers, that
+none of the counter-statements or arguments dislodged him from a square
+inch of it. But the controversy is dead now; and he took occasion, on
+his later visit to America, to write its epitaph.
+
+Though I did not, to revert to his February letter, obey its cordial
+bidding by immediately taking up quarters with him, I soon after joined
+him at a cottage he rented in Finchley; and here, walking and talking in
+the green lanes as the midsummer months were coming on, his introduction
+of Mrs. Gamp, and the uses to which he should apply that remarkable
+personage, first occurred to him. In his preface to the book he speaks
+of her as a fair representation, at the time it was published, of the
+hired attendant on the poor in sickness: but he might have added that
+the rich were no better off, for Mrs. Gamp's original was in reality a
+person hired by a most distinguished friend of his own, a lady, to take
+charge of an invalid very dear to her; and the common habit of this
+nurse in the sick room, among other Gampish peculiarities, was to rub
+her nose along the top of the tall fender. Whether or not, on that first
+mention of her, I had any doubts whether such a character could be made
+a central figure in his story, I do not now remember; but if there were
+any at the time, they did not outlive the contents of the packet which
+introduced her to me in the flesh a few weeks after our return. "Tell
+me," he wrote from Yorkshire, where he had been meanwhile passing
+pleasant holiday with a friend, "what you think of Mrs. Gamp? You'll not
+find it easy to get through the hundreds of misprints in her
+conversation, but I want your opinion at once. I think you know already
+something of mine. I mean to make a mark with her." The same letter
+enclosed me a clever and pointed little parable in verse which he had
+written for an annual edited by Lady Blessington.[67]
+
+Another allusion in the February letter reminds me of the interest which
+his old work for the _Chronicle_ gave him in everything affecting its
+credit, and that this was the year when Mr. John Black ceased to be its
+editor, in circumstances reviving strongly all Dickens's sympathies. "I
+am deeply grieved" (3rd of May, 1843) "about Black. Sorry from my
+heart's core. If I could find him out, I would go and comfort him this
+moment." He did find him out; and he and a certain number of us did also
+comfort this excellent man after a fashion extremely English, by giving
+him a Greenwich dinner on the 20th of May; when Dickens had arranged and
+ordered all to perfection, and the dinner succeeded in its purpose, as
+in other ways, quite wonderfully. Among the entertainers were Sheil and
+Thackeray, Fonblanque and Charles Buller, Southwood Smith and William
+Johnson Fox, Macready and Maclise, as well as myself and Dickens.
+
+There followed another similar celebration, in which one of these
+entertainers was the guest and which owed hardly less to Dickens's
+exertions, when, at the Star-and-garter at Richmond in the autumn, we
+wished Macready good-speed on his way to America. Dickens took the chair
+at that dinner; and with Stanfield, Maclise, and myself, was in the
+following week to have accompanied the great actor to Liverpool to say
+good-bye to him on board the Cunard ship, and bring his wife back to
+London after their leave-taking; when a word from our excellent friend
+Captain Marryat, startling to all of us except Dickens himself, struck
+him out of our party. Marryat thought that Macready might suffer in the
+States by any public mention of his having been attended on his way by
+the author of the _American Notes_ and _Martin Chuzzlewit_, and our
+friend at once agreed with him. "Your main and foremost reason," he
+wrote to me, "for doubting Marryat's judgment, I can at once destroy. It
+has occurred to me many times; I have mentioned the thing to Kate more
+than once; and I had intended _not_ to go on board, charging Radley to
+let nothing be said of my being in his house. I have been prevented from
+giving any expression to my fears by a misgiving that I should seem to
+attach, if I did so, too much importance to my own doings. But now that
+I have Marryat at my back, I have not the least hesitation in saying
+that I am certain he is right. I have very great apprehensions that the
+_Nickleby_ dedication will damage Macready. Marryat is wrong in
+supposing it is not printed in the American editions, for I have myself
+seen it in the shop windows of several cities. If I were to go on board
+with him, I have not the least doubt that the fact would be placarded
+all over New York, before he had shaved himself in Boston. And that
+there are thousands of men in America who would pick a quarrel with him
+on the mere statement of his being my friend, I have no more doubt than
+I have of my existence. You have only doubted Marryat because it is
+impossible for _any man_ to know what they are in their own country, who
+has not seen them there."
+
+This letter was written from Broadstairs, whither he had gone in August,
+after such help as he only could give, and never took such delight as in
+giving, to a work of practical humanity. Earlier in the year he had
+presided at a dinner for the Printers' Pension-fund, which Thomas Hood,
+Douglas Jerrold, and myself attended with him; and upon the terrible
+summer-evening accident at sea by which Mr. Elton the actor lost his
+life, it was mainly by Dickens's unremitting exertions, seconded
+admirably by Mr. Serle and warmly taken up by Mr. Elton's own profession
+(the most generous in the world), that ample provision was made for the
+many children. At the close of August I had news of him from his
+favourite watering-place, too characteristic to be omitted. The day
+before had been a day of "terrific heat," yet this had not deterred him
+from doing what he was too often suddenly prone to do in the midst of
+his hardest work. "I performed an insane match against time of eighteen
+miles by the milestones in four hours and a half, under a burning sun
+the whole way. I could get" (he is writing next morning) "no sleep at
+night, and really began to be afraid I was going to have a fever. You
+may judge in what kind of authorship-training I am to-day. I could as
+soon eat the cliff as write about anything." A few days later, however,
+all was well again; and another sketch from himself, to his American
+friend, will show his sea-side life in ordinary. "In a bay-window in a
+one-pair sits, from nine o'clock to one, a gentleman with rather long
+hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins as if he thought he were
+very funny indeed. At one he disappears, presently emerges from a
+bathing-machine, and may be seen, a kind of salmon-coloured porpoise,
+splashing about in the ocean. After that he may be viewed in another
+bay-window on the ground floor, eating a strong lunch; and after that,
+walking a dozen miles or so, or lying on his back in the sand reading a
+book. Nobody bothers him unless they know he is disposed to be talked
+to; and I am told he is very comfortable indeed. He's as brown as a
+berry, and they _do_ say is a small fortune to the innkeeper who sells
+beer and cold punch. But this is mere rumour. Sometimes he goes up to
+London (eighty miles or so away), and then I'm told there is a sound in
+Lincoln's-inn-fields at night, as of men laughing, together with a
+clinking of knives and forks and wine-glasses."[68]
+
+He returned to town "for good" on Monday the 2nd of October, and from
+the Wednesday to the Friday of that week was at Manchester, presiding at
+the opening of its great Athenaeum, when Mr. Cobden and Mr. Disraeli also
+"assisted." Here he spoke mainly on a matter always nearest his heart,
+the education of the very poor. He protested against the danger of
+calling a little learning dangerous; declared his preference for the
+very least of the little over none at all; proposed to substitute for
+the old a new doggerel,
+
+ Though house and lands be never got,
+ Learning can give what they can _not_;
+
+told his listeners of the real and paramount danger we had lately taken
+Longfellow to see in the nightly refuges of London, "thousands of
+immortal creatures condemned without alternative or choice to tread, not
+what our great poet calls the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire,
+but one of jagged flints and stones laid down by brutal ignorance;" and
+contrasted this with the unspeakable consolation and blessings that a
+little knowledge had shed on men of the lowest estate and most hopeless
+means, "watching the stars with Ferguson the shepherd's boy, walking the
+streets with Crabbe, a poor barber here in Lancashire with Arkwright, a
+tallow-chandler's son with Franklin, shoemaking with Bloomfield in his
+garret, following the plough with Burns, and, high above the noise of
+loom and hammer, whispering courage in the ears of workers I could this
+day name in Sheffield and in Manchester."
+
+The same spirit impelled him to give eager welcome to the remarkable
+institution of Ragged schools, which, begun by a shoemaker of
+Southampton and a chimney-sweep of Windsor and carried on by a peer of
+the realm, has had results of incalculable importance to society. The
+year of which I am writing was its first, as this in which I write is
+its last; and in the interval, out of three hundred thousand children to
+whom it has given some sort of education, it is computed also to have
+given to a third of that number the means of honest employment.[69] "I
+sent Miss Coutts," he had written (24th of September), "a sledge hammer
+account of the Ragged schools; and as I saw her name for two hundred
+pounds in the clergy education subscription-list, took pains to show her
+that religious mysteries and difficult creeds wouldn't do for such
+pupils. I told her, too, that it was of immense importance they should
+be _washed_. She writes back to know what the rent of some large airy
+premises would be, and what the expense of erecting a regular bathing or
+purifying place; touching which points I am in correspondence with the
+authorities. I have no doubt she will do whatever I ask her in the
+matter. She is a most excellent creature, I protest to God, and I have a
+most perfect affection and respect for her."
+
+One of the last things he did at the close of the year, in the like
+spirit, was to offer to describe the Ragged schools for the _Edinburgh
+Review_. "I have told Napier," he wrote to me, "I will give a
+description of them in a paper on education, if the _Review_ is not
+afraid to take ground against the church catechism and other mere
+formularies and subtleties, in reference to the education of the young
+and ignorant. I fear it is extremely improbable it will consent to
+commit itself so far." His fears were well-founded; but the statements
+then made by him give me opportunity to add that it was his impatience
+of differences on this point with clergymen of the Established Church
+that had led him, for the past year or two, to take sittings in the
+Little Portland-street Unitarian chapel; for whose officiating minister,
+Mr. Edward Tagart, he had a friendly regard which continued long after
+he had ceased to be a member of his congregation. That he did so quit
+it, after two or three years, I can distinctly state; and of the
+frequent agitation of his mind and thoughts in connection with this
+all-important theme, there will be other occasions to speak. But upon
+essential points he had never any sympathy so strong as with the leading
+doctrine and discipline of the Church of England; to these, as time went
+on, he found himself able to accommodate all minor differences; and the
+unswerving faith in Christianity itself, apart from sects and schisms,
+which had never failed him at any period of his life, found expression
+at its close in the language of his will. Twelve months before his
+death, these words were written. "I direct that my name be inscribed in
+plain English letters on my tomb . . . I conjure my friends on no account
+to make me the subject of any monument, memorial, or testimonial
+whatever. I rest my claim to the remembrance of my country on my
+published works, and to the remembrance of my friends upon their
+experience of me in addition thereto. I commit my soul to the mercy of
+God, through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; and I exhort my dear
+children humbly to try to guide themselves by the teaching of the New
+Testament in its broad spirit, and to put no faith in any man's narrow
+construction of its letter here or there."
+
+Active as he had been in the now ending year, and great as were its
+varieties of employment; his genius in its highest mood, his energy
+unwearied in good work, and his capacity for enjoyment without limit; he
+was able to signalize its closing months by an achievement supremely
+fortunate, which but for disappointments the year had also brought might
+never have been thought of. He had not begun until a week after his
+return from Manchester, where the fancy first occurred to him, and
+before the end of November he had finished, his memorable _Christmas
+Carol_. It was the work of such odd moments of leisure as were left him
+out of the time taken up by two numbers of his _Chuzzlewit_; and though
+begun with but the special design of adding something to the
+_Chuzzlewit_ balance, I can testify to the accuracy of his own account
+of what befell him in its composition, with what a strange mastery it
+seized him for itself, how he wept over it, and laughed, and wept again,
+and excited himself to an extraordinary degree, and how he walked
+thinking of it fifteen and twenty miles about the black streets of
+London, many and many a night after all sober folks had gone to bed. And
+when it was done, as he told our friend Mr. Felton in America, he let
+himself loose like a madman. "Forster is out again," he added, by way of
+illustrating our practical comments on his celebration of the jovial
+old season, "and if he don't go in again after the manner in which we
+have been keeping Christmas, he must be very strong indeed. Such
+dinings, such dancings, such conjurings, such blind-man's-buffings, such
+theatre-goings, such kissings-out of old years and kissings-in of new
+ones, never took place in these parts before."
+
+Yet had it been to him, this closing year, a time also of much anxiety
+and strange disappointments of which I am now to speak; and before, with
+that view, we go back for a while to its earlier months, one step into
+the new year may be taken for what marked it with interest and
+importance to him. Eighteen hundred and forty-four was but fifteen days
+old when a third son (his fifth child, which received the name of its
+godfather Francis Jeffrey) was born; and here is an answer sent by him,
+two days later, to an invitation from Maclise, Stanfield, and myself to
+dine with us at Richmond. "DEVONSHIRE LODGE, _Seventeenth of January_,
+1844. FELLOW COUNTRYMEN! The appeal with which you have honoured me,
+awakens within my breast emotions that are more easily to be imagined
+than described. Heaven bless you. I shall indeed be proud, my friends,
+to respond to such a requisition. I had withdrawn from Public Life--I
+fondly thought forever--to pass the evening of my days in hydropathical
+pursuits, and the contemplation of virtue. For which latter purpose, I
+had bought a looking-glass.--But, my friends, private feeling must ever
+yield to a stern sense of public duty. The Man is lost in the Invited
+Guest, and I comply. Nurses, wet and dry; apothecaries; mothers-in-law;
+babbies; with all the sweet (and chaste) delights of private life;
+these, my countrymen, are hard to leave. But you have called me forth,
+and I will come. Fellow countrymen, your friend and faithful servant,
+CHARLES DICKENS."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[64] Printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_ shortly after his death, and
+since collected, by Mr. James T. Fields of Boston, with several of later
+date addressed to himself, and much correspondence having reference to
+other writers, into a pleasing volume entitled _Yesterdays with
+Authors_.
+
+[65] This is mentioned in Mr. O. Driscoll's agreeable little Memoir, but
+supposed to refer to Maclise's portrait of Dickens.
+
+[66] In one of the letters to his American friend Mr. Felton there is a
+glimpse of Christmas sports which had escaped my memory, and for which a
+corner may be found here, inasmuch as these gambols were characteristic
+of him at the pleasant old season, and were frequently renewed in future
+years. "The best of it is" (31 Dec. 1842) "that Forster and I have
+purchased between us the entire stock-in-trade of a conjuror, the
+practice and display whereof is entrusted to me. . . . In those tricks
+which require a confederate I am assisted (by reason of his
+imperturbable good humour) by Stanfield, who always does his part
+exactly the wrong way, to the unspeakable delight of all beholders. We
+come out on a small scale to-night, at Forster's, where we see the old
+year out and the new one in." _Atlantic Monthly_, July 1871.
+
+[67] "I have heard, as you have, from Lady Blessington, for whose behoof
+I have this morning penned the lines I send you herewith. But I have
+only done so to excuse myself, for I have not the least idea of their
+suiting her; and I hope she will send them back to you for the _Ex._" C.
+D. to J. F. July 1843. The lines are quite worth preserving.
+
+ A WORD IN SEASON.
+
+ They have a superstition in the East,
+ That Allah, written on a piece of paper,
+ Is better unction than can come of priest,
+ Of rolling incense, and of lighted taper:
+ Holding, that any scrap which bears that name
+ In any characters its front impress'd on,
+ Shall help the finder thro' the purging flame,
+ And give his toasted feet a place to rest on.
+
+ Accordingly, they make a mighty fuss
+ With every wretched tract and fierce oration,
+ And hoard the leaves--for they are not, like us
+ A highly civilized and thinking nation:
+ And, always stooping in the miry ways
+ To look for matter of this earthly leaven,
+ They seldom, in their dust-exploring days,
+ Have any leisure to look up to Heaven.
+
+ So have I known a country on the earth
+ Where darkness sat upon the living waters,
+ And brutal ignorance, and toil, and dearth
+ Were the hard portion of its sons and daughters:
+ And yet, where they who should have oped the door
+ Of charity and light, for all men's finding
+ Squabbled for words upon the altar-floor,
+ And rent The Book, in struggles for the binding.
+
+ The gentlest man among those pious Turks
+ God's living image ruthlessly defaces;
+ Their best High-Churchman, with no faith in works,
+ Bowstrings the Virtues in the market-places.
+ The Christian Pariah, whom both sects curse
+ (They curse all other men, and curse each other),
+ Walks thro' the world, not very much the worse,
+ Does all the good he can, and loves his brother.
+
+[68] C. D. to Professor Felton (1st Sept. 1843), in _Atlantic Monthly_
+for July 1871.
+
+[69] "After a period of 27 years, from a single school of five small
+infants, the work has grown into a cluster of some 300 schools, an
+aggregate of nearly 30,000 children, and a body of 3000 voluntary
+teachers, most of them the sons and daughters of toil. . . . Of more than
+300,000 children which, on the most moderate calculation, we have a
+right to conclude have passed through these schools since their
+commencement, I venture to affirm that more than 100,000 of both sexes
+have been placed out in various ways, in emigration, in the marine, in
+trades, and in domestic service. For many consecutive years I have
+contributed prizes to thousands of the scholars; and let no one omit to
+call to mind what these children were, whence they came, and whither
+they were going without this merciful intervention. They would have been
+added to the perilous swarm of the wild, the lawless, the wretched, and
+the ignorant, instead of being, as by God's blessing they are, decent
+and comfortable, earning an honest livelihood, and adorning the
+community to which they belong." _Letter of Lord Shaftesbury in the
+Times of the 13th of November, 1871._
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+CHUZZLEWIT DISAPPOINTMENTS AND CHRISTMAS CAROL.
+
+1843-1844.
+
+ Sale of _Chuzzlewit_--Publishers and
+ Authors--Unlucky Clause in _Chuzzlewit_
+ Agreement--Resolve to have other Publishers--A
+ Plan for seeing Foreign Cities--Confidence in
+ Himself--Preparation of _Carol_--Turning-point
+ of his Career--Work and its
+ Interruptions--Superiority of _Martin
+ Chuzzlewit_ to former Books--News from
+ America--A Favourite Scene of
+ Thackeray's--Grand Purpose of the Satire of
+ _Chuzzlewit_--Publication of _Christmas
+ Carol_--Unrealized Hopes--Agreement with
+ Bradbury and Evans.
+
+
+CHUZZLEWIT had fallen short of all the expectations formed of it in
+regard to sale. By much the most masterly of his writings hitherto, the
+public had rallied to it in far less numbers than to any of its
+predecessors. The primary cause of this, there is little doubt, had been
+the change to weekly issues in the form of publication of his last two
+stories; for into everything in this world mere habit enters more
+largely than we are apt to suppose. Nor had the temporary withdrawal to
+America been favourable to an immediate resumption by his readers of
+their old and intimate relations. This also is to be added, that the
+excitement by which a popular reputation is kept up to the highest
+selling mark, will always be subject to lulls too capricious for
+explanation. But whatever the causes, here was the undeniable fact of a
+grave depreciation of sale in his writings, unaccompanied by any falling
+off either in themselves or in the writer's reputation. It was very
+temporary; but it was present, and to be dealt with accordingly. The
+forty and fifty thousand purchasers of _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_, the
+sixty and seventy thousand of the early numbers of the enterprize in
+which the _Old Curiosity Shop_ and _Barnaby Rudge_ appeared, had fallen
+to little over twenty thousand. They rose somewhat on Martin's ominous
+announcement, at the end of the fourth number, that he'd _go to
+America_; but though it was believed that this resolve, which Dickens
+adopted as suddenly as his hero, might increase the number of his
+readers, that reason influenced him less than the challenge to make good
+his _Notes_ which every mail had been bringing him from unsparing
+assailants beyond the Atlantic. The substantial effect of the American
+episode upon the sale was yet by no means great. A couple of thousand
+additional purchasers were added, but the highest number at any time
+reached before the story closed was twenty-three thousand. Its sale,
+since, has ranked next after _Pickwick_ and _Copperfield_.
+
+We were now, however, to have a truth brought home to us which few that
+have had real or varied experience in such matters can have failed to be
+impressed by--that publishers are bitter bad judges of an author, and
+are seldom safe persons to consult in regard to the fate or fortunes
+that may probably await him. Describing the agreement for this book in
+September 1841, I spoke of a provision against the improbable event of
+its profits proving inadequate to certain necessary repayments. In this
+unlikely case, which was to be ascertained by the proceeds of the first
+five numbers, the publishers were to have power to appropriate fifty
+pounds a month out of the two hundred pounds payable for authorship in
+the expenses of each number; but though this had been introduced with my
+knowledge, I knew also too much of the antecedent relations of the
+parties to regard it as other than a mere form to satisfy the attorneys
+in the case. The fifth number, which landed Martin and Mark in America,
+and the sixth, which described their first experiences, were published;
+and on the eve of the seventh, in which Mrs. Gamp was to make her first
+appearance, I heard with infinite pain that from Mr. Hall, the younger
+partner of the firm which had enriched itself by _Pickwick_ and
+_Nickleby_, and a very kind well-disposed man, there had dropped an
+inconsiderate hint to the writer of those books that it might be
+desirable to put the clause in force. It had escaped him without his
+thinking of all that it involved; certainly the senior partner, whatever
+amount of as thoughtless sanction he had at the moment given to it,
+always much regretted it, and made endeavours to exhibit his regret; but
+the mischief was done, and for the time was irreparable.
+
+"I am so irritated," Dickens wrote to me on the 28th of June, "so rubbed
+in the tenderest part of my eyelids with bay-salt, by what I told you
+yesterday, that a wrong kind of fire is burning in my head, and I don't
+think I _can_ write. Nevertheless, I am trying. In case I should
+succeed, and should not come down to you this morning, shall you be at
+the club or elsewhere after dinner? I am bent on paying the money. And
+before going into the matter with anybody I should like you to propound
+from me the one preliminary question to Bradbury and Evans. It is more
+than a year and a half since Clowes wrote to urge me to give him a
+hearing, in case I should ever think of altering my plans. A printer is
+better than a bookseller, and it is quite as much the interest of one
+(if not more) to join me. But whoever it is, or whatever, I am bent upon
+paying Chapman and Hall _down_. And when I have done that, Mr. Hall
+shall have a piece of my mind."
+
+What he meant by the proposed repayment will be understood by what
+formerly was said of his arrangements with these gentlemen on the
+repurchase of his early copyrights. Feeling no surprise at this
+announcement, I yet prevailed with him to suspend proceedings until his
+return from Broadstairs in October; and what then I had to say led to
+memorable resolves. The communication he had desired me to make to his
+printers had taken them too much by surprise to enable them to form a
+clear judgment respecting it; and they replied by suggestions which were
+in effect a confession of that want of confidence in themselves. They
+enlarged upon the great results that would follow a reissue of his
+writings in a cheap form; they strongly urged such an undertaking; and
+they offered to invest to any desired amount in the establishment of a
+magazine or other periodical to be edited by him. The possible dangers,
+in short, incident to their assuming the position of publishers as well
+as printers of new works from his pen, seemed at first to be so much
+greater than on closer examination they were found to be, that at the
+outset they shrank from encountering them. And hence the remarkable
+letter I shall now quote (1st of November, 1843).
+
+"Don't be startled by the novelty and extent of my project. Both
+startled _me_ at first; but I am well assured of its wisdom and
+necessity. I am afraid of a magazine--just now. I don't think the time a
+good one, or the chances favourable. I am afraid of putting myself
+before the town as writing tooth and nail for bread, headlong, after the
+close of a book taking so much out of one as _Chuzzlewit_. I am afraid I
+could not do it, with justice to myself. I know that whatever we may say
+at first, a new magazine, or a new anything, would require so much
+propping, that I should be _forced_ (as in the _Clock_) to put myself
+into it, in my old shape. I am afraid of Bradbury and Evans's desire to
+force on the cheap issue of my books, or any of them, prematurely. I am
+sure if it took place yet awhile, it would damage me and damage the
+property, _enormously_. It is very natural in them to want it; but,
+since they do want it, I have no faith in their regarding me in any
+other respect than they would regard any other man in a speculation. I
+see that this is really your opinion as well; and I don't see what I
+gain, in such a case, by leaving Chapman and Hall. If I had made money,
+I should unquestionably fade away from the public eye for a year, and
+enlarge my stock of description and observation by seeing countries new
+to me; which it is most necessary to me that I should see, and which
+with an increasing family I can scarcely hope to see at all, unless I
+see them now. Already for some time I have had this hope and intention
+before me; and though not having made money yet, I find or fancy that I
+can put myself in the position to accomplish it. And this is the course
+I have before me. At the close of _Chuzzlewit_ (by which time the debt
+will have been materially reduced) I purpose drawing from Chapman and
+Hall my share of the subscription--bills, or money, will do equally
+well. I design to tell them that it is not likely I shall do anything
+for a year; that, in the meantime, I make no arrangement whatever with
+any one; and our business matters rest _in statu quo_. The same to
+Bradbury and Evans. I shall let the house if I can; if not, leave it to
+be let. I shall take all the family, and two servants--three at most--to
+some place which I know beforehand to be CHEAP and in a delightful
+climate, in Normandy or Brittany, to which I shall go over, first, and
+where I shall rent some house for six or eight months. During that time,
+I shall walk through Switzerland, cross the Alps, travel through France
+and Italy; take Kate perhaps to Rome and Venice, but not elsewhere; and
+in short see everything that is to be seen. I shall write my
+descriptions to you from time to time, exactly as I did in America; and
+you will be able to judge whether or not a new and attractive book may
+not be made on such ground. At the same time I shall be able to turn
+over the story I have in my mind, and which I have a strong notion might
+be published with great advantage, _first in Paris_--but that's another
+matter to be talked over. And of course I have not yet settled, either,
+whether any book about the travel, or this, should be the first. 'All
+very well,' you say, 'if you had money enough.' Well, but if I can see
+my way to what would be necessary without binding myself in any form to
+anything; without paying interest, or giving any security but one of my
+Eagle five thousand pounds; you would give up that objection. And I
+stand committed to no bookseller, printer, money-lender, banker, or
+patron whatever; and decidedly strengthen my position with my readers,
+instead of weakening it, drop by drop, as I otherwise must. Is it not
+so? and is not the way before me, plainly this? I infer that in reality
+you do yourself think, that what I first thought of is _not_ the way? I
+have told you my scheme very badly, as I said I would. I see its great
+points, against many prepossessions the other way--as, leaving England,
+home, friends, everything I am fond of--but it seems to me, at a
+critical time, _the_ step to set me right. A blessing on Mr. Mariotti my
+Italian master, and his pupil!--If you have any breath left, tell
+Topping how you are."
+
+I had certainly not much after reading this letter, written amid all the
+distractions of his work, with both the _Carol_ and _Chuzzlewit_ in
+hand; but such insufficient breath as was left to me I spent against the
+project, and in favour of far more consideration than he had given to
+it, before anything should be settled. "I expected you," he wrote next
+day (the 2nd of November), "to be startled. If I was startled myself,
+when I first got this project of foreign travel into my head, MONTHS
+AGO, how much more must you be, on whom it comes fresh: numbering only
+hours! Still, I am very resolute upon it--very. I am convinced that my
+expenses abroad would not be more than half of my expenses here; the
+influence of change and nature upon me, enormous. You know, as well as
+I, that I think _Chuzzlewit_ in a hundred points immeasurably the best
+of my stories. That I feel my power now, more than I ever did. That I
+have a greater confidence in myself than I ever had. That I _know_, if I
+have health, I could sustain my place in the minds of thinking men,
+though fifty writers started up to-morrow. But how many readers do _not_
+think! How many take it upon trust from knaves and idiots, that one
+writes too fast, or runs a thing to death! How coldly did this very book
+go on for months, until it forced itself up in people's opinion, without
+forcing itself up in sale! If I wrote for forty thousand Forsters, or
+for forty thousand people who know I write because I can't help it, I
+should have no need to leave the scene. But this very book warns me that
+if I _can_ leave it for a time, I had better do so, and must do so.
+Apart from that again, I feel that longer rest after this story would do
+me good. You say two or three months, because you have been used to see
+me for eight years never leaving off. But it is not rest enough. It is
+impossible to go on working the brain to that extent for ever. The very
+spirit of the thing, in doing it, leaves a horrible despondency behind,
+when it is done; which must be prejudicial to the mind, so soon renewed,
+and so seldom let alone. What would poor Scott have given to have gone
+abroad, of his own free will, a young man, instead of creeping there, a
+driveller, in his miserable decay! I said myself in my note to
+you--anticipating what you put to me--that it was a question _what_ I
+should come out with, first. The travel-book, if to be done at all,
+would cost me very little trouble; and surely would go very far to pay
+charges, whenever published. We have spoken of the baby, and of leaving
+it here with Catherine's mother. Moving the children into France could
+not, in any ordinary course of things, do them anything but good. And
+the question is, what it would do to that by which they live: not what
+it would do to them.--I had forgotten that point in the B. and E.
+negociation; but they certainly suggested instant publication of the
+reprints, or at all events of some of them; by which of course I know,
+and as you point out, I could provide of myself what is wanted. I take
+that as putting the thing distinctly as a matter of trade, and feeling
+it so. And, as a matter of trade with them or anybody else, as a matter
+of trade between me and the public, should I not be better off a year
+hence, with the reputation of having seen so much in the meantime? The
+reason which induces you to look upon this scheme with dislike--separation
+for so long a time--surely has equal weight with me. I see very little
+pleasure in it, beyond the natural desire to have been in those great
+scenes; I anticipate no enjoyment at the time. I have come to look upon
+it as a matter of policy and duty. I have a thousand other reasons, but
+shall very soon myself be with you."
+
+There were difficulties, still to be strongly urged, against taking any
+present step to a final resolve; and he gave way a little. But the
+pressure was soon renewed. "I have been," he wrote (10th of November),
+"all day in _Chuzzlewit_ agonies--conceiving only. I hope to bring forth
+to-morrow. Will you come here at six? I want to say a word or two about
+the cover of the _Carol_ and the advertising, and to consult you on a
+nice point in the tale. It will come wonderfully I think. Mac will call
+here soon after, and we can then all three go to Bulwer's together. And
+do, my dear fellow, do for God's sake turn over about Chapman and Hall,
+and look upon my project as a _settled thing_. If you object to see
+them, I must write to them." My reluctance as to the question affecting
+his old publishers was connected with the little story, which, amid all
+his perturbations and troubles and "_Chuzzlewit_ agonies," he was
+steadily carrying to its close; and which remains a splendid proof of
+how thoroughly he was borne out in the assertion just before made, of
+the sense of his power felt by him, and his confidence that it had never
+been greater than when his readers were thus falling off from him. He
+had entrusted the _Carol_ for publication on his own account, under the
+usual terms of commission, to the firm he had been so long associated
+with; and at such a moment to tell them, short of absolute necessity,
+his intention to quit them altogether, I thought a needless putting in
+peril of the little book's chances. He yielded to this argument; but the
+issue, as will be found, was less fortunate than I hoped.
+
+Let disappointments or annoyances, however, beset him as they might,
+once heartily in his work and all was forgotten. His temperament of
+course coloured everything, cheerful or sad, and his present outlook was
+disturbed by imaginary fears; but it was very certain that his labours
+and successes thus far had enriched others more than himself, and while
+he knew that his mode of living had been scrupulously governed by what
+he believed to be his means, the first suspicion that these might be
+inadequate made a change necessary to so upright a nature. It was the
+turning-point of his career; and the issue, though not immediately,
+ultimately justified him. Much of his present restlessness I was too
+ready myself to ascribe to that love of change in him which was always
+arising from his passionate desire to vary and extend his observation;
+but even as to this the result showed him right in believing that he
+should obtain decided intellectual advantage from the mere effects of
+such farther travel. Here indeed he spoke from experience, for already
+he had returned from America with wider views than when he started, and
+with a larger maturity of mind. The money difficulties on which he dwelt
+were also, it is now to be admitted, unquestionable. Beyond his own
+domestic expenses necessarily increasing, there were many,
+never-satisfied, constantly-recurring claims from family quarters, not
+the more easily avoidable because unreasonable and unjust; and it was
+after describing to me one such with great bitterness, a few days
+following the letter last quoted, that he thus replied on the following
+day (19th of November) to the comment I had made upon it. "I was most
+horribly put out for a little while; for I had got up early to go at it,
+and was full of interest in what I had to do. But having eased my mind
+by that note to you, and taken a turn or two up and down the room, I
+went at it again, and soon got so interested that I blazed away till 9
+last night; only stopping ten minutes for dinner! I suppose I wrote
+eight printed pages of _Chuzzlewit_ yesterday. The consequence is that I
+_could_ finish to-day, but am taking it easy, and making myself laugh
+very much." The very next day, unhappily, there came to himself a
+repetition of precisely similar trouble in exaggerated form, and to me a
+fresh reminder of what was gradually settling into a fixed resolve. "I
+am quite serious and sober when I say, that I have very grave thoughts
+of keeping my whole menagerie in Italy, three years."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Of the book which awoke such varied feelings and was the occasion of
+such vicissitudes of fortune, some notice is now due; and this,
+following still as yet my former rule, will be not so much critical as
+biographical. He had left for Italy before the completed tale was
+published, and its reception for a time was exactly what his just-quoted
+letter prefigures. It had forced itself up in public opinion without
+forcing itself up in sale. It was felt generally to be an advance upon
+his previous stories, and his own opinion is not to be questioned that
+it was in a hundred points immeasurably the best of them thus far; less
+upon the surface, and going deeper into springs of character. Nor would
+it be difficult to say, in a single word, where the excellence lay that
+gave it this superiority. It had brought his highest faculty into play:
+over and above other qualities it had given scope to his imagination;
+and it first expressed the distinction in this respect between his
+earlier and his later books. Apart wholly from this, too, his letters
+will have confirmed a remark already made upon the degree to which his
+mental power had been altogether deepened and enlarged by the effect of
+his visit to America.
+
+In construction and conduct of story _Martin Chuzzlewit_ is defective,
+character and description constituting the chief part of its strength.
+But what it lost as a story by the American episode it gained in the
+other direction; young Martin, by happy use of a bitter experience,
+casting off his slough of selfishness in the poisonous swamp of Eden.
+Dickens often confessed, however, the difficulty it had been to him to
+have to deal with this gap in the main course of his narrative; and I
+will give an instance from a letter he wrote to me when engaged upon the
+number in which Jonas brings his wife to her miserable home. "I write in
+haste" (28th of July 1843), "for I have been at work all day; and, it
+being against the grain with me to go back to America when my interest
+is strong in the other parts of the tale, have got on but slowly. I have
+a great notion to work out with Sydney's favourite,[70] and long to be
+at him again." But obstructions of this kind with Dickens measured only
+and always the degree of readiness and resource with which he rose to
+meet them, and never had his handling of character been so masterly as
+in _Chuzzlewit_. The persons delineated in former books had been more
+agreeable, but never so interpenetrated with meanings brought out with a
+grasp so large, easy, and firm. As well in this as in the passionate
+vividness of its descriptions, the imaginative power makes itself felt.
+The windy autumn night, with the mad desperation of the hunted leaves
+and the roaring mirth of the blazing village forge; the market-day at
+Salisbury; the winter walk, and the coach journey to London by night;
+the ship voyage over the Atlantic; the stormy midnight travel before the
+murder, the stealthy enterprise and cowardly return of the murderer;
+these are all instances of first-rate description, original in the
+design, imaginative in all the detail, and very complete in the
+execution. But the higher power to which I direct attention is even
+better discerned in the persons and dialogue. With nothing absent or
+abated in its sharp impressions of reality, there are more of the subtle
+requisites which satisfy reflection and thought. We have in this book
+for the most part, not only observation but the outcome of it, the
+knowledge as well as the fact. While we witness as vividly the life
+immediately passing, we are more conscious of the permanent life above
+and beyond it. Nothing nearly so effective therefore had yet been
+achieved by him. He had scrutinised as truly and satirised as keenly;
+but had never shown the imaginative insight with which he now sent his
+humour and his art into the core of the vices of the time.
+
+Sending me the second chapter of his eighth number on the 15th of
+August, he gave me the latest tidings from America. "I gather from a
+letter I have had this morning that Martin has made them all stark
+staring raving mad across the water. I wish you would consider this.
+Don't you think the time has come when I ought to state that such public
+entertainments as I received in the States were either accepted before I
+went out, or in the first week after my arrival there; and that as soon
+as I began to have any acquaintance with the country, I set my face
+against any public recognition whatever but that which was forced upon
+me to the destruction of my peace and comfort--and made no secret of my
+real sentiments." We did not agree as to this, and the notion was
+abandoned; though his correspondent had not overstated the violence of
+the outbreak in the States when those chapters exploded upon them. But
+though an angry they are a good humoured and a very placable people;
+and, as time moved on a little, the laughter on that side of the
+Atlantic became quite as great as our amusement on this side, at the
+astonishing fun and comicality of these scenes. With a little reflection
+the Americans had doubtless begun to find out that the advantage was not
+all with us, nor the laughter wholly against them.
+
+They had no Pecksniff at any rate. Bred in a more poisonous swamp than
+their Eden, of greatly older standing and much harder to be drained,
+Pecksniff was all our own. The confession is not encouraging to national
+pride, but this character is so far English, that though our countrymen
+as a rule are by no means Pecksniffs, the ruling weakness is to
+countenance and encourage the race. When people call the character
+exaggerated, and protest that the lines are too broad to deceive any
+one, they only refuse, naturally enough, to sanction in a book what half
+their lives is passed in tolerating if not in worshipping. Dickens,
+illustrating his never-failing experience of being obliged to subdue in
+his books what he knew to be real for fear it should be deemed
+impossible, had already made the remark in his preface to _Nickleby_,
+that the world, which is so very credulous in what professes to be true,
+is most incredulous in what professes to be imaginary. They agree to be
+deceived in a reality, and reward themselves by refusing to be deceived
+in a fiction. That a great many people who might have sat for Pecksniff,
+should condemn him for a grotesque impossibility, as Dickens averred to
+be the case, was no more than might be expected. A greater danger he has
+exposed more usefully in showing the greater numbers, who, desiring
+secretly to be thought better than they are, support eagerly pretensions
+that keep their own in countenance, and, without being Pecksniffs,
+render Pecksniffs possible. All impostures would have something too
+suspicious or forbidding in their look if we were not prepared to meet
+them half way.
+
+There is one thing favourable to us however, even in this view, which a
+French critic has lately suggested. Informing us that there are no
+Pecksniffs to be found in France, Mr. Taine explains this by the fact
+that his countrymen have ceased to affect virtue, and pretend only to
+vice; that a charlatan setting up morality would have no sort of
+following; that religion and the domestic virtues have gone so utterly
+to rags as not to be worth putting on for a deceitful garment; and that,
+no principles being left to parade, the only chance for the French
+modern Tartuffe is to confess and exaggerate weaknesses. We seem to have
+something of an advantage here. We require at least that the respectable
+homage of vice to virtue should not be omitted. "Charity, my dear," says
+our English Tartuffe, upon being bluntly called what he really is, "when
+I take my chamber-candlestick to-night, remind me to be more than
+usually particular in praying for Mr. Anthony Chuzzlewit, who has done
+me an injustice." No amount of self-indulgence weakens or lowers his
+pious and reflective tone. "Those are her daughters," he remarks, making
+maudlin overtures to Mrs. Todgers in memory of his deceased wife. "Mercy
+and Charity, Charity and Mercy, not unholy names I hope. She was
+beautiful. She had a small property." When his condition has fallen into
+something so much worse than maudlin that his friends have to put him to
+bed, they have not had time to descend the staircase when he is seen to
+be "fluttering" on the top landing, desiring to collect their sentiments
+on the nature of human life. "Let us be moral. Let us contemplate
+existence." He turns his old pupil out of doors in the attitude of
+blessing him, and when he has discharged that social duty retires to
+shed his personal tribute of a few tears in the back garden. No
+conceivable position, action, or utterance finds him without the vice in
+which his being is entirely steeped and saturated. Of such consummate
+consistency is its practice with him, that in his own house with his
+daughters he continues it to keep his hand in; and from the mere habit
+of keeping up appearances, even to himself, falls into the trap of
+Jonas. Thackeray used to say that there was nothing finer in rascaldom
+than this ruin of Pecksniff by his son-in-law at the very moment when
+the oily hypocrite believes himself to be achieving his masterpiece of
+dissembling over the more vulgar avowed ruffian. "'Jonas!' cried Mr.
+Pecksniff much affected, 'I am not a diplomatical character; my heart is
+in my hand. By far the greater part of the inconsiderable savings I have
+accumulated in the course of--I hope--a not dishonourable or useless
+career, is already given, devised, or bequeathed (correct me, my dear
+Jonas, if I am technically wrong), with expressions of confidence which
+I will not repeat; and in securities which it is unnecessary to mention;
+to a person whom I cannot, whom I will not, whom I need not, name.' Here
+he gave the hand of his son-in-law a fervent squeeze, as if he would
+have added, 'God bless you: be very careful of it when you get it!'"
+
+Certainly Dickens thus far had done nothing of which, as in this novel,
+the details were filled in with such minute and incomparable skill;
+where the wealth of comic circumstance was lavished in such overflowing
+abundance on single types of character; or where generally, as
+throughout the story, the intensity of his observation of individual
+humours and vices had taken so many varieties of imaginative form.
+Everything in _Chuzzlewit_ indeed had grown under treatment, as will be
+commonly the case in the handling of a man of genius, who never knows
+where any given conception may lead him, out of the wealth of resource
+in development and incident which it has itself created. "As to the
+way," he wrote to me of its two most prominent figures, as soon as all
+their capabilities were revealed to him, "As to the way in which these
+characters have opened out, that is, to me, one of the most surprising
+processes of the mind in this sort of invention. Given what one knows,
+what one does not know springs up; and I am as absolutely certain of its
+being true, as I am of the law of gravitation--if such a thing be
+possible, more so." The remark displays exactly what in all his
+important characters was the very process of creation with him.
+
+Nor was it in the treatment only of his present fiction, but also in
+its subject or design, that he had gone higher than in preceding
+efforts. Broadly what he aimed at, he would have expressed on the
+title-page if I had not dissuaded him, by printing there as its motto a
+verse altered from that prologue of his own composition to which I have
+formerly referred: "Your homes the scene. Yourselves, the actors, here!"
+Debtors' prisons, parish Bumbledoms, Yorkshire schools, were vile
+enough, but something much more pestiferous was now the aim of his
+satire; and he had not before so decisively shown vigour, daring, or
+discernment of what lay within reach of his art, as in taking such a
+person as Pecksniff for the central figure in a tale of existing life.
+Setting him up as the glass through which to view the groups around him,
+we are not the less moved to a hearty detestation of the social vices
+they exhibit, and pre-eminently of selfishness in all its forms, because
+we see more plainly than ever that there is but one vice which is quite
+irremediable. The elder Chuzzlewits are bad enough, but they bring their
+self-inflicted punishments; the Jonases and Tigg Montagues are
+execrable, but the law has its halter and its penal servitude; the
+Moulds and Gamps have plague-bearing breaths, from which sanitary wisdom
+may clear us; but from the sleek, smiling, crawling abomination of a
+Pecksniff, there is no help but self-help. Every man's hand should be
+against him, for his is against every man; and, as Mr. Taine very wisely
+warns us, the virtues have most need to be careful that they do not make
+themselves panders to his vice. It is an amiable weakness to put the
+best face on the worst things, but there is none more dangerous. There
+is nothing so common as the mistake of Tom Pinch, and nothing so rare
+as his excuses.
+
+The art with which that delightful character is placed at Mr.
+Pecksniff's elbow at the beginning of the story, and the help he gives
+to set fairly afloat the falsehood he innocently believes, contribute to
+an excellent management of this part of the design; and the same
+prodigal wealth of invention and circumstance which gives its higher
+imaginative stamp to the book, appears as vividly in its lesser as in
+its leading figures. There are wonderful touches of this suggestive kind
+in the household of Mould the undertaker; and in the vivid picture
+presented to us by one of Mrs. Gamp's recollections, we are transported
+to the youthful games of his children. "The sweet creeturs! playing at
+berryins down in the shop, and follerin' the order-book to its long home
+in the iron safe!" The American scenes themselves are not more full of
+life and fun and freshness, and do not contribute more to the general
+hilarity, than the cockney group at Todgers's; which is itself a little
+world of the qualities and humours that make up the interest of human
+life, whether it be high or low, vulgar or fine, filled in with a
+master's hand. Here, in a mere byestroke as it were, are the very finest
+things of the earlier books superadded to the new and higher achievement
+that distinguished the later productions. No part indeed of the
+execution of this remarkable novel is inferior. Young Bailey and
+Sweedlepipes are in the front rank of his humorous creations; and poor
+Mrs. Todgers, worn but not depraved by the cares of gravy and
+solicitudes of her establishment, with calculation shining out of one
+eye but affection and goodheartedness still beaming in the other, is in
+her way quite as perfect a picture as even the portentous Mrs. Gamp with
+her grim grotesqueness, her filthy habits and foul enjoyments, her thick
+and damp but most amazing utterances, her moist clammy functions, her
+pattens, her bonnet, her bundle, and her umbrella. But such prodigious
+claims must have a special mention.
+
+This world-famous personage has passed into and become one with the
+language, which her own parts of speech have certainly not exalted or
+refined. To none even of Dickens's characters has there been such a run
+of popularity; and she will remain among the everlasting triumphs of
+fiction, a superb masterpiece of English humour. What Mr. Mould says of
+her in his enthusiasm, that she's the sort of woman one would bury for
+nothing, and do it neatly too, every one feels to be an appropriate
+tribute; and this, by a most happy inspiration, is exactly what the
+genius to whom she owes her existence did, when he called her into life,
+to the foul original she was taken from. That which enduringly stamped
+upon his page its most mirth-moving figure, had stamped out of English
+life for ever one of its disgraces. The mortal Mrs. Gamp was handsomely
+put into her grave, and only the immortal Mrs. Gamp survived. Age will
+not wither this one, nor custom stale her variety. In the latter point
+she has an advantage over even Mr. Pecksniff. She has a friend, an alter
+ego, whose kind of service to her is expressed by her first utterance in
+the story; and with this, which introduces her, we may leave her most
+fitly. "'Mrs. Harris,' I says, at the very last case as ever I acted in,
+which it was but a young person, 'Mrs. Harris,' I says, 'leave the
+bottle on the chimley-piece, and don't ask me to take none, but let me
+put my lips to it when I am so dispoged.' 'Mrs. Gamp,' she says in
+answer, 'if ever there was a sober creetur to be got at eighteen pence a
+day for working people, and three and six for gentlefolks--night
+watching,' said Mrs. Gamp with emphasis, 'being a extra charge--you are
+that inwallable person.' 'Mrs. Harris,' I says to her, 'don't name the
+charge, for if I could afford to lay all my fellow-creeturs out for
+nothink, I would gladly do it, sich is the love I bears 'em.'" To this
+there is nothing to be added, except that in the person of that
+astonishing friend every phase of fun and comedy in the character is
+repeated, under fresh conditions of increased appreciation and
+enjoyment. By the exuberance of comic invention which gives his
+distinction to Mr. Pecksniff, Mrs. Gamp profits quite as much; the same
+wealth of laughable incident which surrounds that worthy man is upon her
+heaped to overflowing; but over and above this, by the additional
+invention of Mrs. Harris, it is all reproduced, acted over with renewed
+spirit, and doubled and quadrupled in her favour. This on the whole is
+the happiest stroke of humorous art in all the writings of Dickens.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+But this is a chapter of disappointments, and I have now to state, that
+as _Martin Chuzzlewit's_ success was to seem to him at first only
+distant and problematical, so even the prodigious immediate success of
+the _Christmas Carol_ itself was not to be an unmitigated pleasure.
+Never had a little book an outset so full of brilliancy of promise.
+Published but a few days before Christmas, it was hailed on every side
+with enthusiastic greeting. The first edition of six thousand copies was
+sold the first day, and on the third of January 1844 he wrote to me that
+"two thousand of the three printed for second and third editions are
+already taken by the trade." But a very few weeks were to pass before
+the darker side of the picture came. "Such a night as I have passed!" he
+wrote to me on Saturday morning the 10th of February. "I really believed
+I should never get up again, until I had passed through all the horrors
+of a fever. I found the _Carol_ accounts awaiting me, and they were the
+cause of it. The first six thousand copies show a profit of L230! And
+the last four will yield as much more. I had set my heart and soul upon
+a Thousand, clear. What a wonderful thing it is, that such a great
+success should occasion me such intolerable anxiety and disappointment!
+My year's bills, unpaid, are so terrific, that all the energy and
+determination I can possibly exert will be required to clear me before I
+go abroad; which, if next June come and find me alive, I shall do. Good
+Heaven, if I had only taken heart a year ago! Do come soon, as I am very
+anxious to talk with you. We can send round to Mac after you arrive, and
+tell him to join us at Hampstead or elsewhere. I was so utterly knocked
+down last night, that I came up to the contemplation of all these things
+quite bold this morning. If I can let the house for this season, I will
+be off to some seaside place as soon as a tenant offers. I am not
+afraid, if I reduce my expenses; but if I do not, I shall be ruined past
+all mortal hope of redemption."
+
+The ultimate result was that his publishers were changed, and the
+immediate result that his departure for Italy became a settled thing;
+but a word may be said on these Carol accounts before mention is made of
+his new publishing arrangements.[71] Want of judgment had been shown in
+not adjusting the expenses of production with a more equable regard to
+the selling price, but even as it was, before the close of the year, he
+had received L726 from a sale of fifteen thousand copies; and the
+difference between this and the amount realised by the same proportion
+of the sale of the successor to the _Carol_, undoubtedly justified him
+in the discontent now expressed. Of that second tale, as well as of the
+third and fourth, more than double the numbers of the _Carol_ were at
+once sold, and of course there was no complaint of any want of success:
+but the truth really was, as to all the Christmas stories issued in this
+form, that the price charged, while too large for the public addressed
+by them, was too little to remunerate their outlay; and when in later
+years he put forth similar fancies for Christmas, charging for them
+fewer pence than the shillings required for these, he counted his
+purchasers, with fairly corresponding gains to himself, not by tens but
+by hundreds of thousands.[72]
+
+It was necessary now that negotiations should be resumed with his
+printers, but before any step was taken Messrs. Chapman and Hall were
+informed of his intention not to open fresh publishing relations with
+them after _Chuzzlewit_ should have closed. Then followed deliberations
+and discussions, many and grave, which settled themselves at last into
+the form of an agreement with Messrs. Bradbury and Evans executed on the
+first of June 1844; by which, upon advance made to him of L2800, he
+assigned to them a fourth share in whatever he might write during the
+next ensuing eight years, to which the agreement was to be strictly
+limited. There were the usual protecting clauses, but no interest was to
+be paid, and no obligations were imposed as to what works should be
+written, if any, or the form of them; the only farther stipulation
+having reference to the event of a periodical being undertaken whereof
+Dickens might be only partially editor or author, in which case his
+proprietorship of copyright and profits was to be two thirds instead of
+three fourths. There was an understanding, at the time this agreement
+was signed, that a successor to the _Carol_ would be ready for the
+Christmas of 1844; but no other promise was asked or made in regard to
+any other book, nor had he himself decided what form to give to his
+experiences of Italy, if he should even finally determine to publish
+them at all.
+
+Between this agreement and his journey six weeks elapsed, and there were
+one or two characteristic incidents before his departure: but mention
+must first be interposed of the success quite without alloy that also
+attended the little book, and carried off in excitement and delight
+every trace of doubt or misgiving.
+
+"Blessings on your kind heart!" wrote Jeffrey to the author of the
+_Carol_. "You should be happy yourself, for you may be sure you have
+done more good by this little publication, fostered more kindly
+feelings, and prompted more positive acts of beneficence, than can be
+traced to all the pulpits and confessionals in Christendom since
+Christmas 1842." "Who can listen," exclaimed Thackeray, "to objections
+regarding such a book as this? It seems to me a national benefit, and to
+every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness." Such praise
+expressed what men of genius felt and said; but the small volume had
+other tributes, less usual and not less genuine. There poured upon its
+author daily, all through that Christmas time, letters from complete
+strangers to him which I remember reading with a wonder of pleasure; not
+literary at all, but of the simplest domestic kind; of which the general
+burden was to tell him, amid many confidences about their homes, how the
+_Carol_ had come to be read aloud there, and was to be kept upon a
+little shelf by itself, and was to do them all no end of good. Anything
+more to be said of it will not add much to this.
+
+There was indeed nobody that had not some interest in the message of the
+_Christmas Carol_. It told the selfish man to rid himself of
+selfishness; the just man to make himself generous; and the good-natured
+man to enlarge the sphere of his good nature. Its cheery voice of faith
+and hope, ringing from one end of the island to the other, carried
+pleasant warning alike to all, that if the duties of Christmas were
+wanting no good could come of its outward observances; that it must
+shine upon the cold hearth and warm it, and into the sorrowful heart and
+comfort it; that it must be kindness, benevolence, charity, mercy, and
+forbearance, or its plum pudding would turn to bile, and its roast beef
+be indigestible.[73] Nor could any man have said it with the same
+appropriateness as Dickens. What was marked in him to the last was
+manifest now. He had identified himself with Christmas fancies. Its life
+and spirits, its humour in riotous abundance, of right belonged to him.
+Its imaginations as well as kindly thoughts were his; and its privilege
+to light up with some sort of comfort the squalidest places, he had made
+his own. Christmas Day was not more social or welcome: New Year's Day
+not more new: Twelfth Night not more full of characters. The duty of
+diffusing enjoyment had never been taught by a more abundant, mirthful,
+thoughtful, ever-seasonable writer.
+
+Something also is to be said of the spirit of the book, and of the
+others that followed it, which will not anticipate special allusions to
+be made hereafter. No one was more intensely fond than Dickens of old
+nursery tales, and he had a secret delight in feeling that he was here
+only giving them a higher form. The social and manly virtues he desired
+to teach, were to him not less the charm of the ghost, the goblin, and
+the fairy fancies of his childhood; however rudely set forth in those
+earlier days. What now were to be conquered were the more formidable
+dragons and giants which had their places at our own hearths, and the
+weapons to be used were of a finer than the "ice-brook's temper." With
+brave and strong restraints, what is evil in ourselves was to be
+subdued; with warm and gentle sympathies, what is bad or unreclaimed in
+others was to be redeemed; the Beauty was to embrace the Beast, as in
+the divinest of all those fables; the star was to rise out of the ashes,
+as in our much-loved Cinderella; and we were to play the Valentine with
+our wilder brothers, and bring them back with brotherly care to
+civilization and happiness. Nor is it to be doubted, I think, that, in
+that largest sense of benefit, great public and private service was
+done; positive, earnest, practical good; by the extraordinary
+popularity, and nearly universal acceptance, which attended these little
+holiday volumes. They carried to countless firesides, with new enjoyment
+of the season, better apprehension of its claims and obligations; they
+mingled grave with glad thoughts, much to the advantage of both; what
+seemed almost too remote to meddle with they brought within reach of the
+charities, and what was near they touched with a dearer tenderness; they
+comforted the generous, rebuked the sordid, cured folly by kindly
+ridicule and comic humour, and, saying to their readers _Thus you have
+done, but it were better Thus_, may for some have realised the
+philosopher's famous experience, and by a single fortunate thought
+revised the whole manner of a life. Criticism here is a second-rate
+thing, and the reader may be spared such discoveries as it might have
+made in regard to the _Christmas Carol_.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[70] Chuffey. Sydney Smith had written to Dickens on the appearance of
+his fourth number (early in April): "Chuffey is admirable. . . . I never
+read a finer piece of writing: it is deeply pathetic and affecting."
+
+[71] It may interest the reader, and be something of a curiosity of
+literature, if I give the expenses of the first edition of 6000, and of
+the 7000 more which constituted the five following editions, with the
+profit of the remaining 2000 which completed the sale of fifteen
+thousand:
+
+ CHRISTMAS CAROL.
+ 1st Edition, 6000 No.
+
+ 1843. L _s._ _d._
+ Dec. Printing 74 2 9
+ Paper 89 2 0
+ Drawings and Engravings 49 18 0
+ Two Steel Plates 1 4 0
+ Printing Plates 15 17 6
+ Paper for do 7 12 0
+ Colouring Plates 120 0 0
+ Binding 180 0 0
+ Incidents and Advertising 168 7 8
+ Commission 99 4 6
+ --------------
+ L805 8 5
+ ==============
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ 2nd to the 7th Edition, making 7000 Copies.
+
+ 1844. L _s._ _d._
+
+ Jan. Printing 58 18 0
+ Paper 103 19 0
+ Printing Plates 17 10 0
+ Paper 8 17 4
+ Colouring Plates 140 0 0
+ Binding 199 18 2
+ Incidents and Advertising 83 5 8
+ Commission 107 18 10
+ -------------
+ L720 7 0
+ =============
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Two thousand more, represented by the last item in the subjoined
+balance, were sold before the close of the year, leaving a remainder of
+70 copies.
+
+
+ 1843. L _s._ _d._
+ Dec. Balance of a/c to Mr. Dickens's credit 186 16 7
+ 1844.
+ Jan. to April. Do. Do. 349 12 0
+ May to Dec. Do. Do. 189 11 5
+ -------------
+ Amount of Profit on the Work L726 0 0
+ =============
+
+[72] In November 1865 he wrote to me that the sale of his Christmas
+fancy for that year (_Dr. Marigold's Prescriptions_) had gone up, in the
+first week, to 250,000.
+
+[73] A characteristic letter of this date, which will explain itself,
+has been kindly sent to me by the gentleman it was written to, Mr. James
+Verry Staples, of Bristol:--"Third of April, 1844. I have been very much
+gratified by the receipt of your interesting letter, and I assure you
+that it would have given me heartfelt satisfaction to have been in your
+place when you read my little _Carol_ to the Poor in your neighbourhood.
+I have great faith in the poor; to the best of my ability I always
+endeavour to present them in a favourable light to the rich; and I shall
+never cease, I hope, until I die, to advocate their being made as happy
+and as wise as the circumstances of their condition, in its utmost
+improvement, will admit of their becoming. I mention this to assure you
+of two things. Firstly, that I try to deserve their attention; and
+secondly, that any such marks of their approval and confidence as you
+relate to me are most acceptable to my feelings, and go at once to my
+heart."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+YEAR OF DEPARTURE FOR ITALY.
+
+1844.
+
+ Gore-house--Liverpool and Birmingham
+ Institutes--A Troublesome Cheque--Wrongs from
+ Piracy--Proceedings in Chancery--Result of
+ Chancery Experience--Reliefs to Work--M. Henri
+ Taine on Dickens--Writing in the
+ _Chronicle_--Preparations for Departure--In
+ Temporary Quarters--The Farewell
+ Dinner-party--"The Evenings of a
+ Working-man"--Greenwich Dinner.
+
+
+AND now, before accompanying Dickens on his Italian travel, one or two
+parting incidents will receive illustration from his letters. A
+thoughtful little poem written during the past summer for Lady
+Blessington has been quoted on a previous page: and it may remind me to
+say here what warmth of regard he had for her, and for all the inmates
+of Gore-house; how uninterruptedly joyous and pleasurable were his
+associations with them; and what valued help they now gave in his
+preparations for Italy. The poem, as we have seen, was written during a
+visit made in Yorkshire to the house of Mr. Smithson, already named as
+the partner of his early companion, Mr. Mitton; and this visit he
+repeated in sadder circumstances during the present year, when (April
+1844) he attended Mr. Smithson's funeral. With members or connections of
+the family of this friend, his intercourse long continued.
+
+In the previous February, on the 26th and 28th respectively, he had
+taken the chair at two great meetings, in Liverpool of the Mechanics'
+Institution, and in Birmingham of the Polytechnic Institution, to which
+reference is made by him in a letter of the 21st. I quote the allusion
+because it shows thus early the sensitive regard to his position as a
+man of letters, and his scrupulous consideration for the feelings as
+well as interest of the class, which he manifested in many various and
+often greatly self-sacrificing ways all through his life. "Advise me on
+the following point. And as I must write to-night, having already lost a
+post, advise me by bearer. This Liverpool Institution, which is wealthy
+and has a high grammar-school the masters of which receive in salaries
+upwards of L2000 a year (indeed its extent horrifies me; I am struggling
+through its papers this morning), writes me yesterday by its secretary a
+business letter about the order of the proceedings on Monday; and it
+begins thus. 'I beg to send you prefixed, with the best respects of our
+committee, a bank order for twenty pounds in payment of the expenses
+contingent on your visit to Liverpool.'--And there, sure enough, it is.
+Now my impulse was, _and is_, decidedly to return it. Twenty pounds is
+not of moment to me; and any sacrifice of independence is worth it
+twenty times' twenty times told. But haggling in my mind is a doubt
+whether that would be proper, and not boastful (in an inexplicable way);
+and whether as an author, I have a right to put myself on a basis which
+the professors of literature in other forms _connected with the
+Institution_ cannot afford to occupy. Don't you see? But of course you
+do. The case stands thus. The Manchester Institution, being in debt,
+appeals to me as it were _in forma pauperis_, and makes no such
+provision as I have named. The Birmingham Institution, just struggling
+into life with great difficulty, applies to me on the same grounds. But
+the Leeds people (thriving) write to me, making the expenses a distinct
+matter of business; and the Liverpool, as a point of delicacy, say
+nothing about it to the last minute, and then send the money. Now, what
+in the name of goodness ought I to do?--I am as much puzzled with the
+cheque as Colonel Jack was with his gold. If it would have settled the
+matter to put it in the fire yesterday, I should certainly have done it.
+Your opinion is requested. I think I shall have grounds for a very good
+speech at Brummagem; but I am not sure about Liverpool: having
+misgivings of over-gentility." My opinion was clearly for sending the
+money back, which accordingly was done.
+
+Both speeches, duly delivered to enthusiastic listeners at the places
+named, were good, and both, with suitable variations, had the same
+theme: telling his popular audience in Birmingham that the principle of
+their institute, education comprehensive and unsectarian, was the only
+safe one, for that without danger no society could go on punishing men
+for preferring vice to virtue without giving them the means of knowing
+what virtue was; and reminding his genteeler audience in Liverpool, that
+if happily they had been themselves well taught, so much the more should
+they seek to extend the benefit to all, since, whatever the precedence
+due to rank, wealth, or intellect, there was yet a nobility beyond them,
+expressed unaffectedly by the poet's verse and in the power of education
+to confer.
+
+ Howe'er it be, it seems to me,
+ 'Tis only noble to be good:
+ True hearts are more than coronets,
+ And simple faith than Norman blood.
+
+He underwent some suffering, which he might have spared himself, at his
+return. "I saw the _Carol_ last night," he wrote to me of a dramatic
+performance of the little story at the Adelphi. "Better than usual, and
+Wright seems to enjoy Bob Cratchit, but _heart-breaking_ to me. Oh
+Heaven! if any forecast of _this_ was ever in my mind! Yet O. Smith was
+drearily better than I expected. It is a great comfort to have that kind
+of meat under done; and his face is quite perfect." Of what he suffered
+from these adaptations of his books, multiplied remorselessly at every
+theatre, I have forborne to speak, but it was the subject of complaint
+with him incessantly; and more or less satisfied as he was with
+individual performances, such as Mr. Yates's Quilp or Mantalini and Mrs.
+Keeley's Smike or Dot, there was only one, that of Barnaby Rudge by the
+Miss Fortescue who became afterwards Lady Gardner, on which I ever heard
+him dwell with a thorough liking. It is true that to the dramatizations
+of his next and other following Christmas stories he gave help himself;
+but, even then, all such efforts to assist special representations were
+mere attempts to render more tolerable what he had no power to prevent,
+and, with a few rare exceptions, they were never very successful.
+Another and graver wrong was the piracy of his writings, every one of
+which had been reproduced with merely such colourable changes of title,
+incidents, and names of characters, as were believed to be sufficient to
+evade the law and adapt them to "penny" purchasers. So shamelessly had
+this been going on ever since the days of _Pickwick_, in so many
+outrageous ways[74] and with all but impunity, that a course repeatedly
+urged by Talfourd and myself was at last taken in the present year with
+the _Christmas Carol_ and the _Chuzzlewit_ pirates. Upon a case of such
+peculiar flagrancy, however, that the vice-chancellor would not even
+hear Dickens's counsel; and what it cost our dear friend Talfourd to
+suppress his speech exceeded by very much the labour and pains with
+which he had prepared it. "The pirates," wrote Dickens to me, after
+leaving the court on the 18th of January, "are beaten flat. They are
+bruised, bloody, battered, smashed, squelched, and utterly undone.
+Knight Bruce would not hear Talfourd, but instantly gave judgment. He
+had interrupted Anderdon constantly by asking him to produce a passage
+which was not an expanded or contracted idea from my book. And at every
+successive passage he cried out, 'That is Mr. Dickens's case. Find
+another!' He said that there was not a shadow of doubt upon the matter.
+That there was no authority which would bear a construction in their
+favour; the piracy going beyond all previous instances. They might
+mention it again in a week, he said, if they liked, and might have an
+issue if they pleased; but they would probably consider it unnecessary
+after that strong expression of his opinion. Of course I will stand by
+what we have agreed as to the only terms of compromise with the
+printers. I am determined that I will have an apology for their
+affidavits. The other men may pay their costs and get out of it, but I
+will stick to my friend the author." Two days later he wrote: "The
+farther affidavits put in by way of extenuation by the printing rascals
+_are_ rather strong, and give one a pretty correct idea of what the men
+must be who hold on by the heels of literature. Oh! the agony of
+Talfourd at Knight Bruce's not hearing him! He had sat up till three in
+the morning, he says, preparing his speech; and would have done all
+kinds of things with the affidavits. It certainly was a splendid
+subject. We have heard nothing from the vagabonds yet. I once thought of
+printing the affidavits without a word of comment, and sewing them up
+with _Chuzzlewit_. Talfourd is strongly disinclined to compromise with
+the printers on any terms. In which case it would be referred to the
+master to ascertain what profits had been made by the piracy, and to
+order the same to be paid to me. But wear and tear of law is my
+consideration." The undertaking to which he had at last to submit was,
+that upon ample public apology, and payment of all costs, the offenders
+should be let go; but the real result was that, after infinite vexation
+and trouble, he had himself to pay all the costs incurred on his own
+behalf; and, a couple of years later, upon repetition of the wrong he
+had suffered in so gross a form that proceedings were again advised by
+Talfourd and others, he wrote to me from Switzerland the condition of
+mind to which his experience had brought him. "My feeling about the ----
+is the feeling common, I suppose, to three fourths of the reflecting
+part of the community in our happiest of all possible countries; and
+that is, that it is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse
+to the much greater wrong of the law. I shall not easily forget the
+expense, and anxiety, and horrible injustice of the _Carol_ case,
+wherein, in asserting the plainest right on earth, I was really treated
+as if I were the robber instead of the robbed. Upon the whole, I
+certainly would much rather NOT proceed. What do you think of sending in
+a grave protest against what has been done in this case, on account of
+the immense amount of piracy to which I am daily exposed, and because I
+have been already met in the court of chancery with the legal doctrine
+that silence under such wrongs barred my remedy: to which Talfourd's
+written opinion might be appended as proof that we stopped under no
+discouragement. It is useless to affect that I don't know I have a
+morbid susceptibility of exasperation, to which the meanness and badness
+of the law in such a matter would be stinging in the last degree. And I
+know of nothing that _could_ come, even of a successful action, which
+would be worth the mental trouble and disturbance it would cost."[75]
+
+A few notes of besetting temptations during his busiest days at
+_Chuzzlewit_, one taken from each of the first four months of the year
+when he was working at its masterly closing scenes, will amusingly
+exhibit, side by side, his powers of resistance and capacities of
+enjoyment. "I had written you a line" (16th of January), "pleading Jonas
+and Mrs. Gamp, but this frosty day tempts me sorely. I am distractingly
+late; but I look at the sky, think of Hampstead, and feel hideously
+tempted. Don't come with Mae, and fetch me. I couldn't resist if you
+did." In the next (18th of February), he is not the tempted, but the
+tempter. "Stanfield and Mac have come in, and we are going to Hampstead
+to dinner. I leave Betsey Prig as you know, so don't you make a scruple
+about leaving Mrs. Harris. We shall stroll leisurely up, to give you
+time to join us, and dinner will be on the table at Jack Straw's at
+four. . . . In the very improbable (surely impossible?) case of your not
+coming, we will call on you at a quarter before eight, to go to the
+ragged school." The next (5th of March) shows him in yielding mood, and
+pitying himself for his infirmity of compliance. "Sir, I
+will--he--he--he--he--he--he--I will NOT eat with you, either at your
+own house or the club. But the morning looks bright, and a walk to
+Hampstead would suit me marvellously. If you should present yourself at
+my gate (bringing the R. A.'s along with you) I shall not be sapparized.
+So no more at this writing from Poor MR. DICKENS." But again the tables
+are turned, and he is tempter in the last; written on that Shakespeare
+day (23rd of April) which we kept always as a festival, and signed in
+character expressive of his then present unfitness for any of the
+practical affairs of life, including the very pressing business which at
+the moment ought to have occupied him, namely, attention to the long
+deferred nuptials of Miss Charity Pecksniff. "November blasts! Why it's
+the warmest, most genial, most intensely bland, delicious, growing,
+springy, songster-of-the-grovy, bursting-forth-of-the-buddy, day as
+ever was. At half-past four I shall expect you. Ever, MODDLE."
+
+Moddle, the sentimental noodle hooked by Miss Pecksniff who flies on his
+proposed wedding-day from the frightful prospect before him, the reader
+of course knows; and has perhaps admired for his last supreme outbreak
+of common sense. It was a rather favourite bit of humour with Dickens;
+and I find it pleasant to think that he never saw the description given
+of it by a trained and skilful French critic, who has been able to pass
+under his review the whole of English literature without any apparent
+sense or understanding of one of its most important as well as richest
+elements. A man without the perception of humour taking English prose
+literature in hand, can of course set about it only in one way.
+Accordingly, in Mr. Taine's decisive judgments of our last great
+humourist, which proceed upon a principle of psychological analysis
+which it is only fair to say he applies impartially to everybody,
+_Pickwick_, _Oliver Twist_, and _The Old Curiosity Shop_ are not in any
+manner even named or alluded to; Mrs. Gamp is only once mentioned as
+always talking of Mrs. Harris; and Mr. Micawber also only once as using
+always the same emphatic phrases; the largest extracts are taken from
+the two books in all the Dickens series that are weakest on the humorous
+side, _Hard Times_ and the _Chimes_; _Nickleby_, with its many
+laughter-moving figures, is dismissed in a line and a half; Mr. Toots,
+Captain Cuttle, Susan Nipper, Toodles, and the rest have no place in
+what is said of _Dombey_; and, to close with what has caused and must
+excuse my digression, Mr. Augustus Moddle is introduced as a gloomy
+maniac who makes us laugh and makes us shudder, and as drawn so truly
+for a madman that though at first sight agreeable, he is in reality
+horrible![76]
+
+A month before the letter subscribed by Dickens in the character, so
+happily unknown to himself, of this gloomy maniac, he had written to me
+from amidst his famous chapter in which the tables are turned on
+Pecksniff; but here I quote the letter chiefly for noticeable words at
+its close. "I heard from Macready by the Hibernia. I have been slaving
+away regularly, but the weather is against rapid progress. I altered the
+verbal error, and substituted for the action you didn't like some words
+expressive of the hurry of the scene. Macready sums up slavery in New
+Orleans in the way of a gentle doubting on the subject, by a 'but' and a
+dash. I believe it is in New Orleans that the man is lying under
+sentence of death, who, not having the fear of God before his eyes, did
+not deliver up a captive slave to the torture? The largest gun in that
+country has not burst yet--_but it will_. Heaven help us, too, from
+explosions nearer home! I declare I never go into what is called
+'society' that I am not aweary of it, despise it, hate it, and reject
+it. The more I see of its extraordinary conceit, and its stupendous
+ignorance of what is passing out of doors, the more certain I am that it
+is approaching the period when, being incapable of reforming itself, it
+will have to submit to be reformed by others off the face of the earth."
+Thus we see that the old radical leanings were again rather strong in
+him at present, and I may add that he had found occasional recent vent
+for them by writing in the _Morning Chronicle_.
+
+Some articles thus contributed by him having set people talking, the
+proprietors of the paper rather eagerly mooted the question what payment
+he would ask for contributing regularly; and ten guineas an article was
+named. Very sensibly, however, the editor who had succeeded his old
+friend Black pointed out to him, that though even that sum would not be
+refused in the heat of the successful articles just contributed, yet (I
+quote his own account in a letter of the 7th of March 1844) so much
+would hardly be paid continuously; and thereupon an understanding, was
+come to, that he would write as a volunteer and leave his payment to be
+adjusted to the results. "Then said the editor--and this I particularly
+want you to turn over in your mind, at leisure--supposing me to go
+abroad, could I contemplate such a thing as the writing of a letter a
+week under any signature I chose, with such scraps of descriptions and
+impressions as suggested themselves to my mind? If so, would I do it
+for the _Chronicle_? And if so again, what would I do it for? He thought
+for such contributions Easthope would pay anything. I told him that the
+idea had never occurred to me; but that I was afraid he did not know
+what the value of such contributions would be. He repeated what he had
+said before; and I promised to consider whether I could reconcile it to
+myself to write such letters at all. The pros and cons need to be very
+carefully weighed. I will not tell you to which side I incline, but if
+we should disagree, or waver on the same points, we will call Bradbury
+and Evans to the council. I think it more than probable that we shall be
+of exactly the same mind, but I want you to be in possession of the
+facts and therefore send you this rigmarole." The rigmarole is not
+unimportant; because, though we did not differ on the wisdom of saying
+No to the _Chronicle_, the "council" spoken of was nevertheless held,
+and in it lay the germ of another newspaper enterprise he permitted
+himself to engage in twelve months later, to which he would have done
+more wisely to have also answered No.
+
+The preparation for departure was now actively going forward, and
+especially his enquiries for two important adjuncts thereto, a courier
+and a carriage. As to the latter it occurred to him that he might
+perhaps get for little money "some good old shabby devil of a coach--one
+of those vast phantoms that hide themselves in a corner of the
+Pantechnicon;" and exactly such a one he found there; sitting himself
+inside it, a perfect Sentimental Traveller, while the managing man told
+him its history. "As for comfort--let me see--it is about the size of
+your library; with night-lamps and day-lamps and pockets and imperials
+and leathern cellars, and the most extraordinary contrivances. Joking
+apart, it is a wonderful machine. And when you see it (if you _do_ see
+it) you will roar at it first, and will then proclaim it to be
+'perfectly brilliant, my dear fellow.'" It was marked sixty pounds; he
+got it for five-and-forty; and my own emotions respecting it he had
+described by anticipation quite correctly. In finding a courier he was
+even more fortunate; and these successes were followed by a third
+apparently very promising, but in the result less satisfactory. His
+house was let to not very careful people.
+
+The tenant having offered herself for Devonshire-terrace unexpectedly,
+during the last week or two of his stay in England he went into
+temporary quarters in Osnaburgh-terrace; and here a domestic difficulty
+befell of which the mention may be amusing, when I have disposed of an
+incident that preceded it too characteristic for omission. The Mendicity
+Society's officers had caught a notorious begging-letter writer, had
+identified him as an old offender against Dickens of which proofs were
+found on his person, and had put matters in train for his proper
+punishment; when the wretched creature's wife made such appeal before
+the case was heard at the police-court, that Dickens broke down in his
+character of prosecutor, and at the last moment, finding what was said
+of the man's distress at the time to be true, relented. "When the
+Mendicity officers themselves told me the man was in distress, I desired
+them to suppress what they knew about him, and slipped out of the bundle
+(in the police office) his first letter, which was the greatest lie of
+all. For he looked wretched, and his wife had been waiting about the
+street to see me, all the morning. It was an exceedingly bad case
+however, and the imposition, all through, very great indeed. Insomuch
+that I could not _say_ anything in his favour, even when I saw him. Yet
+I was not sorry that the creature found the loophole for escape. The
+officers had taken him illegally without any warrant; and really they
+messed it all through, quite facetiously."
+
+He will himself also best relate the small domestic difficulty into
+which he fell in his temporary dwelling, upon his unexpectedly
+discovering it to be unequal to the strain of a dinner party for which
+invitations had gone out just before the sudden "let" of
+Devonshire-terrace. The letter is characteristic in other ways, or I
+should hardly have gone so far into domesticities here; and it enables
+me to add that with the last on its list of guests, Mr. Chapman the
+chairman of Lloyd's, he held much friendly intercourse, and that few
+things more absurd or unfounded have been invented, even of Dickens,
+than that he found any part of the original of Mr. Dombey in the nature,
+the appearance, or the manners of this estimable gentleman. "Advise,
+advise," he wrote (9 Osnaburgh-terrace, 28th of May 1844), "advise with
+a distracted man. Investigation below stairs renders it, as my father
+would say, 'manifest to any person of ordinary intelligence, if the term
+may be considered allowable,' that the Saturday's dinner cannot come off
+here with safety. It would be a toss-up, and might come down heads, but
+it would put us into an agony with that kind of people. . . . Now, I feel a
+difficulty in dropping it altogether, and really fear that this might
+have an indefinably suspicious and odd appearance. Then said I at
+breakfast this morning, I'll send down to the Clarendon. Then says Kate,
+have it at Richmond. Then I say, that might be inconvenient to the
+people. Then she says, how could it be if we dine late enough? Then I am
+very much offended without exactly knowing why; and come up here, in a
+state of hopeless mystification. . . . What do you think? Ellis would be
+quite as dear as anybody else; and unless the weather changes, the place
+is objectionable. I must make up my mind to do one thing or other, for
+we shall meet Lord Denman at dinner to-day. Could it be dropped
+decently? That, I think very doubtful. Could it be done for a couple of
+guineas apiece at the Clarendon? . . . In a matter of more importance I
+could make up my mind. But in a matter of this kind I bother and
+bewilder myself, and come to no conclusion whatever. Advise! Advise! . . .
+List of the Invited. There's Lord Normanby. And there's Lord Denman.
+There's Easthope, wife, and sister. There's Sydney Smith. There's you
+and Mac. There's Babbage. There's a Lady Osborne and her daughter.
+There's Southwood Smith. And there's Quin. And there are Thomas Chapman
+and his wife. So many of these people have never dined with us, that the
+fix is particularly tight. Advise! Advise!" My advice was for throwing
+over the party altogether, but additional help was obtained and the
+dinner went off very pleasantly. It was the last time we saw Sydney
+Smith.
+
+Of one other characteristic occurrence he wrote before he left; and the
+very legible epigraph round the seal of his letter, "It is particularly
+requested that if Sir James Graham should open this, he will not
+trouble himself to seal it again," expresses both its date and its
+writer's opinion of a notorious transaction of the time. "I wish" (28th
+of June) "you would read this, and give it me again when we meet at
+Stanfield's to-day. Newby has written to me to say that he hopes to be
+able to give Overs more money than was agreed on." The enclosure was the
+proof-sheet of a preface written by him to a small collection of stories
+by a poor carpenter dying of consumption, who hoped by their
+publication, under protection of such a name, to leave behind him some
+small provision for his ailing wife and little children.[77] The book
+was dedicated to the kind physician, Doctor Elliotson, whose name was
+for nearly thirty years a synonym with us all for unwearied,
+self-sacrificing, beneficent service to every one in need.
+
+The last incident before Dickens's departure was a farewell dinner to
+him at Greenwich, which took also the form of a celebration for the
+completion of _Chuzzlewit_, or, as the Ballantynes used to call it in
+Scott's case, a christening dinner; when Lord Normanby took the chair,
+and I remember sitting next the great painter Turner, who had come with
+Stanfield, and had enveloped his throat, that sultry summer day, in a
+huge red belcher-handkerchief which nothing would induce him to remove.
+He was not otherwise demonstrative, but enjoyed himself in a quiet
+silent way, less perhaps at the speeches than at the changing lights on
+the river. Carlyle did not come; telling me in his reply to the
+invitation that he truly loved Dickens, having discerned in the inner
+man of him a real music of the genuine kind, but that he'd rather
+testify to this in some other form than that of dining out in the
+dogdays.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[74] In a letter on the subject of copyright published by Thomas Hood
+after Dickens's return from America, he described what had passed
+between himself and one of these pirates who had issued a Master
+Humphrey's Clock edited by Bos. "Sir," said the man to Hood, "if you had
+observed the name, it was _Bos_, not _Boz_; s, sir, not z; and, besides,
+it would have been no piracy, sir, even with the z, because _Master
+Humphrey's Clock_, you see, sir, was not published as by Boz, but by
+Charles Dickens!"
+
+[75] The reader may be amused if I add in a note what he said of the
+pirates in those earlier days when grave matters touched him less
+gravely. On the eve of the first number of _Nickleby_ he had issued a
+proclamation. "Whereas we are the only true and lawful Boz. And whereas
+it hath been reported to us, who are commencing a new work, that some
+dishonest dullards resident in the by-streets and cellars of this town
+impose upon the unwary and credulous, by producing cheap and wretched
+imitations of our delectable works. And whereas we derive but small
+comfort under this injury from the knowledge that the dishonest dullards
+aforesaid cannot, by reason of their mental smallness, follow near our
+heels, but are constrained to creep along by dirty and little-frequented
+ways, at a most respectful and humble distance behind. And whereas, in
+like manner, as some other vermin are not worth the killing for the sake
+of their carcases, so these kennel pirates are not worth the powder and
+shot of the law, inasmuch as whatever damages they may commit they are
+in no condition to pay any. This is to give notice, that we have at
+length devised a mode of execution for them, so summary and terrible,
+that if any gang or gangs thereof presume to hoist but one shred of the
+colours of the good ship _Nickleby_, we will hang them on gibbets so
+lofty and enduring that their remains shall be a monument of our just
+vengeance to all succeeding ages; and it shall not lie in the power of
+any lord high admiral, on earth, to cause them to be taken down again."
+The last paragraph of the proclamation informed the potentates of
+Paternoster-row, that from the then ensuing day of the thirtieth of
+March, until farther notice, "we shall hold our Levees, as heretofore,
+on the last evening but one of every month, between the hours of seven
+and nine, at our Board of Trade, number one hundred and eighty-six in
+the Strand, London; where we again request the attendance (in vast
+crowds) of their accredited agents and ambassadors. Gentlemen to wear
+knots upon their shoulders; and patent cabs to draw up with their doors
+towards the grand entrance, for the convenience of loading."
+
+[76] This might seem not very credible if I did not give the passage
+literally, and I therefore quote it from the careful translation of
+_Taine's History of English Literature_ by Mr. Van Laun, one of the
+masters of the Edinburgh Academy, where I will venture to hope that
+other authorities on English Literature are at the same time admitted.
+"Jonas" (also in _Chuzzlewit_) "is on the verge of madness. There are
+other characters quite mad. Dickens has drawn three or four portraits of
+madmen, very agreeable at first sight, but so true that they are in
+reality horrible. It needed an imagination like his, irregular,
+excessive, capable of fixed ideas, to exhibit the derangements of
+reason. Two especially there are, which make us laugh, and which make us
+shudder. Augustus, the gloomy maniac, who is on the point of marrying
+Miss Pecksniff; and poor Mr. Dick, half an idiot, half a monomaniac, who
+lives with Miss Trotwood. . . . The play of these shattered reasons is like
+the creaking of a dislocated door; it makes one sick to hear it." (Vol.
+ii. p. 346.) The original was published before Dickens's death, but he
+certainly never saw it.
+
+[77] He wrote from Marseilles (17th Dec. 1844). "When poor Overs was
+dying he suddenly asked for a pen and ink and some paper, and made up a
+little parcel for me which it was his last conscious act to direct. She
+(his wife) told me this and gave it me. I opened it last night. It was a
+copy of his little book in which he had written my name, 'With his
+devotion.' I thought it simple and affecting of the poor fellow." From a
+later letter a few lines may be added. "Mrs. Overs tells me" (Monte
+Vacchi, 30th March, 1845) "that Miss Coutts has sent her, at different
+times, sixteen pounds, has sent a doctor to her children, and has got
+one of the girls into the Orphan School. When I wrote her a word in the
+poor woman's behalf, she wrote me back to the effect that it was a
+kindness to herself to have done so, 'for what is the use of my means
+but to try and do some good with them?'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+IDLENESS AT ALBARO: VILLA BAGNERELLO.
+
+1844.
+
+ Arrival at Marseilles--A Character--Villa at
+ Genoa--Sirocco--Sunsets and Scenery--Address to
+ Maclise--French and Italian Skies--The
+ Mediterranean--The Cicala--French Consul of
+ Genoa--Learning Italian--Trades-people--Genoa
+ the Superb--Theatres--Italian Plays--Religious
+ Houses--Sunday Promenade--Winter Residence
+ chosen--Dinner at French Consul's--Reception at
+ M. di Negri's--A Tumble--English Visitors and
+ News--Visit of his Brother--Sea-bathing.
+
+
+THE travelling party arrived at Marseilles on the evening of Sunday the
+14th of July. Not being able to get vetturino horses in Paris, they had
+come on, post; paying for nine horses but bringing only four, and
+thereby saving a shilling a mile out of what the four would have cost in
+England. So great thus far, however, had been the cost of travel, that
+"what with distance, caravan, sight-seeing, and everything," two hundred
+pounds would be nearly swallowed up before they were at their
+destination. The success otherwise had been complete. The children had
+not cried in their worst troubles, the carriage had gone lightly over
+abominable roads, and the courier had proved himself a perfect gem.
+"Surrounded by strange and perfectly novel circumstances," Dickens wrote
+to me from Marseilles, "I feel as if I had a new head on side by side
+with my old one."
+
+To what shrewd and kindly observation the old one had helped him at
+every stage of his journey, his published book of travel tells, and of
+all that there will be nothing here; but a couple of experiences at his
+outset, of which he told me afterwards, have enough character in them to
+be worth mention.
+
+Shortly before there had been some public interest about the captain of
+a Boulogne steamer apprehended on a suspicion of having stolen specie,
+but reinstated by his owners after a public apology to him on their
+behalf; and Dickens had hardly set foot on the boat that was to carry
+them across, when he was attracted by the look of its captain, and
+discovered him after a few minutes' talk to be that very man. "Such an
+honest, simple, good fellow, I never saw," said Dickens, as he imitated
+for me the homely speech in which his confidences were related. The
+Boulogne people, he said, had given him a piece of plate, "but Lord
+bless us! it took a deal more than that to get him round again in his
+own mind; and for weeks and weeks he was uncommon low to be sure.
+Newgate, you see! What a place for a sea-faring man as had held up his
+head afore the best on 'em, and had more friends, I mean to say, and I
+do tell you the daylight truth, than any man on this station--ah! or any
+other, I don't care where!"
+
+His first experience in a foreign tongue he made immediately on landing,
+when he had gone to the bank for money, and after delivering with most
+laborious distinctness a rather long address in French to the clerk
+behind the counter, was disconcerted by that functionary's cool enquiry
+in the native-born Lombard-street manner, "How would you like to take
+it, sir?" He took it, as everybody must, in five-franc pieces, and a
+most inconvenient coinage he found it; for he required so much that he
+had to carry it in a couple of small sacks, and was always "turning hot
+about suddenly" taking it into his head that he had lost them.
+
+The evening of Tuesday the 16th of July saw him in a villa at Albaro,
+the suburb of Genoa in which, upon the advice of our Gore-house friends,
+he had resolved to pass the summer months before taking up his quarters
+in the city. His wish was to have had Lord Byron's house there, but it
+had fallen into neglect and become the refuge of a third-rate wine-shop.
+The matter had then been left to Angus Fletcher who just now lived near
+Genoa, and he had taken at a rent absurdly above its value[78] an
+unpicturesque and uninteresting dwelling, which at once impressed its
+new tenant with its likeness to a pink jail. "It is," he said to me,
+"the most perfectly lonely, rusty, stagnant old staggerer of a domain
+that you can possibly imagine. What would I give if you could only look
+round the courtyard! _I_ look down into it, whenever I am near that side
+of the house, for the stable is so full of 'vermin and swarmers' (pardon
+the quotation from my inimitable friend) that I always expect to see the
+carriage going out bodily, with legions of industrious fleas harnessed
+to and drawing it off, on their own account. We have a couple of Italian
+work-people in our establishment; and to hear one or other of them
+talking away to our servants with the utmost violence and volubility in
+Genoese, and our servants answering with great fluency in English (very
+loud: as if the others were only deaf, not Italian), is one of the most
+ridiculous things possible. The effect is greatly enhanced by the
+Genoese manner, which is exceedingly animated and pantomimic; so that
+two friends of the lower class conversing pleasantly in the street,
+always seem on the eve of stabbing each other forthwith. And a stranger
+is immensely astonished at their not doing it."
+
+The heat tried him less than he expected, excepting always the sirocco,
+which, near the sea as they were, and right in the course of the wind as
+it blew against the house, made everything hotter than if there had been
+no wind. "One feels it most, on first getting up. Then, it is really so
+oppressive that a strong determination is necessary to enable one to go
+on dressing; one's tendency being to tumble down anywhere and lie
+there." It seemed to hit him, he said, behind the knee, and made his
+legs so shake that he could not walk or stand. He had unfortunately a
+whole week of this without intermission, soon after his arrival; but
+then came a storm, with wind from the mountains; and he could bear the
+ordinary heat very well. What at first had been a home-discomfort, the
+bare walls, lofty ceilings, icy floors, and lattice blinds, soon became
+agreeable; there were regular afternoon breezes from the sea; in his
+courtyard was a well of very pure and very cold water; there were new
+milk and eggs by the bucketful, and, to protect from the summer insects
+these and other dainties, there were fresh vine-leaves by the thousand;
+and he satisfied himself, by the experience of a day or two in the city,
+that he had done well to come first to its suburb by the sea. What
+startled and disappointed him most were the frequent cloudy days.[79] He
+opened his third letter (3rd of August) by telling me there was a thick
+November fog, that rain was pouring incessantly, and that he did not
+remember to have seen in his life, at that time of year, such cloudy
+weather as he had seen beneath Italian skies.
+
+"The story goes that it is in autumn and winter, when other countries
+are dark and foggy, that the beauty and clearness of this are most
+observable. I hope it may prove so; for I have postponed going round
+the hills which encircle the city, or seeing any of the sights, until
+the weather is more favourable.[80] I have never yet seen it so clear,
+for any longer time of the day together, as on a bright, lark-singing,
+coast-of-France-discerning day at Broadstairs; nor have I ever seen so
+fine a sunset, _throughout_, as is very common there. But the scenery is
+exquisite, and at certain periods of the evening and the morning the
+blue of the Mediterranean surpasses all conception or description. It is
+the most intense and wonderful colour, I do believe, in all nature."
+
+In his second letter from Albaro there was more of this subject; and an
+outbreak of whimsical enthusiasm in it, meant especially for Maclise, is
+followed by some capital description. "I address you, my friend," he
+wrote, "with something of the lofty spirit of an exile, a banished
+commoner, a sort of Anglo-Pole. I don't exactly know what I have done
+for my country in coming away from it, but I feel it is something;
+something great; something virtuous and heroic. Lofty emotions rise
+within me, when I see the sun set on the blue Mediterranean. I am the
+limpet on the rock. My father's name is Turner, and my boots are
+green. . . . Apropos of blue. In a certain picture called the Serenade for
+which Browning wrote that verse[81] in Lincoln's-inn-fields, you, O Mac,
+painted a sky. If you ever have occasion to paint the Mediterranean, let
+it be exactly of that colour. It lies before me now, as deeply and
+intensely blue. But no such colour is above me. Nothing like it. In the
+south of France, at Avignon, at Aix, at Marseilles, I saw deep blue
+skies; and also in America. But the sky above me is familiar to my
+sight. Is it heresy to say that I have seen its twin brother shining
+through the window of Jack Straw's--that down in Devonshire-terrace I
+have seen a better sky? I dare say it is; but like a great many other
+heresies, it is true. . . . But such green, green, green, as flutters in
+the vineyard down below the windows, _that_ I never saw; nor yet such
+lilac and such purple as float between me and the distant hills; nor yet
+in anything, picture, book, or vestal boredom, such awful, solemn,
+impenetrable blue, as in that same sea. It has such an absorbing,
+silent, deep, profound effect, that I can't help thinking it suggested
+the idea of Styx. It looks as if a draught of it, only so much as you
+could scoop up on the beach in the hollow of your hand, would wash out
+everything else, and make a great blue blank of your intellect. . . . When
+the sun sets clearly, then, by Heaven, it is majestic. From any one of
+eleven windows here, or from a terrace overgrown with grapes, you may
+behold the broad sea, villas, houses, mountains, forts, strewn with rose
+leaves. Strewn with them? Steeped in them! Dyed, through and through and
+through. For a moment. No more. The sun is impatient and fierce (like
+everything else in these parts), and goes down headlong. Run to fetch
+your hat--and it's night. Wink at the right time of black night--and
+it's morning. Everything is in extremes. There is an insect here that
+chirps all day. There is one outside the window now. The chirp is very
+loud: something like a Brobdingnagian grasshopper. The creature is born
+to chirp; to progress in chirping; to chirp louder, louder, louder; till
+it gives one tremendous chirp and bursts itself. That is its life and
+death. Everything is 'in a concatenation accordingly.' The day gets
+brighter, brighter, brighter, till it's night. The summer gets hotter,
+hotter, hotter, till it explodes. The fruit gets riper, riper, riper,
+till it tumbles down and rots. . . . Ask me a question or two about fresco:
+will you be so good? All the houses are painted in fresco, hereabout
+(the outside walls I mean, the fronts, backs, and sides), and all the
+colour has run into damp and green seediness; and the very design has
+straggled away into the component atoms of the plaster. Beware of
+fresco! Sometimes (but not often) I can make out a Virgin with a
+mildewed glory round her head, holding nothing in an undiscernible lap
+with invisible arms; and occasionally the leg or arm of a cherub. But
+it is very melancholy and dim. There are two old fresco-painted vases
+outside my own gate, one on either hand, which are so faint that I never
+saw them till last night; and only then, because I was looking over the
+wall after a lizard who had come upon me while I was smoking a cigar
+above, and crawled over one of these embellishments in his retreat. . . ."
+
+That letter sketched for me the story of his travel through France, and
+I may at once say that I thus received, from week to week, the "first
+sprightly runnings" of every description in his _Pictures from Italy_.
+But my rule as to the American letters must be here observed yet more
+strictly; and nothing resembling his printed book, however distantly,
+can be admitted into these pages. Even so my difficulty of rejection
+will not be less; for as he had not actually decided, until the very
+last, to publish his present experiences at all, a larger number of the
+letters were left unrifled by him. He had no settled plan from the
+first, as in the other case.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+His most valued acquaintance at Albaro was the French consul-general, a
+student of our literature who had written on his books in one of the
+French reviews, and who with his English wife lived in the very next
+villa, though so oddly shut away by its vineyard that to get from the
+one adjoining house to the other was a mile's journey.[82] Describing,
+in that August letter, his first call from this new friend thus
+pleasantly self-recommended, he makes the visit his excuse for breaking
+off from a facetious description of French inns to introduce to me a
+sketch, from a pencil outline by Fletcher, of what bore the imposing
+name of the Villa di Bella vista, but which he called by the homelier
+one of its proprietor, Bagnerello. "This, my friend, is quite accurate.
+Allow me to explain it. You are standing, sir, in our vineyard, among
+the grapes and figs. The Mediterranean is at your back as you look at
+the house: of which two sides, out of four, are here depicted. The lower
+story (nearly concealed by the vines) consists of the hall, a
+wine-cellar, and some store-rooms. The three windows on the left of the
+first floor belong to the sala, lofty and whitewashed, which has two
+more windows round the corner. The fourth window _did_ belong to the
+dining-room, but I have changed one of the nurseries for better air; and
+it now appertains to that branch of the establishment. The fifth and
+sixth, or two right-hand windows, sir, admit the light to the
+inimitable's (and uxor's) chamber; to which the first window round the
+right-hand corner, which you perceive in shadow, also belongs. The next
+window in shadow, young sir, is the bower of Miss H. The next, a nursery
+window; the same having two more round the corner again. The
+bowery-looking place stretching out upon the left of the house is the
+terrace, which opens out from a French window in the drawing-room on the
+same floor, of which you see nothing: and forms one side of the
+court-yard. The upper windows belong to some of those uncounted chambers
+upstairs; the fourth one, longer than the rest, being in F.'s bedroom.
+There is a kitchen or two up there besides, and my dressing-room; which
+you can't see from this point of view. The kitchens and other offices
+in use are down below, under that part of the house where the roof is
+longest. On your left, beyond the bay of Genoa, about two miles off, the
+Alps stretch off into the far horizon; on your right, at three or four
+miles distance, are mountains crowned with forts. The intervening space
+on both sides is dotted with villas, some green, some red, some yellow,
+some blue, some (and ours among the number) pink. At your back, as I
+have said, sir, is the ocean; with the slim Italian tower of the ruined
+church of St. John the Baptist rising up before it, on the top of a pile
+of savage rocks. You go through the court-yard, and out at the gate, and
+down a narrow lane to the sea. Note. The sala goes sheer up to the top
+of the house; the ceiling being conical, and the little bedrooms built
+round the spring of its arch. You will observe that we make no
+pretension to architectural magnificence, but that we have abundance of
+room. And here I am, beholding only vines and the sea for days
+together. . . . Good Heavens! How I wish you'd come for a week or two, and
+taste the white wine at a penny farthing the pint. It is excellent.". . .
+Then, after seven days: "I have got my paper and inkstand and figures
+now (the box from Osnaburgh-terrace only came last Thursday), and can
+think--I have begun to do so every morning--with a business-like air, of
+the Christmas book. My paper is arranged, and my pens are spread out in
+the usual form. I think you know the form--Don't you? My books have not
+passed the custom-house yet, and I tremble for some volumes of
+Voltaire. . . . I write in the best bedroom. The sun is off the corner
+window at the side of the house by a very little after twelve; and I can
+then throw the blinds open, and look up from my paper, at the sea, the
+mountains, the washed-out villas, the vineyards, at the blistering white
+hot fort with a sentry on the drawbridge standing in a bit of shadow no
+broader than his own musket, and at the sky, as often as I like. It is a
+very peaceful view, and yet a very cheerful one. Quiet as quiet can be."
+
+Not yet however had the time for writing come. A sharp attack of illness
+befell his youngest little daughter, Kate, and troubled him much. Then,
+after beginning the Italian grammar himself, he had to call in the help
+of a master; and this learning of the language took up time. But he had
+an aptitude for it, and after a month's application told me (24th of
+August) that he could ask in Italian for whatever he wanted in any shop
+or coffee-house, and could read it pretty well. "I wish you could see
+me" (16th of September), "without my knowing it, walking about alone
+here. I am now as bold as a lion in the streets. The audacity with which
+one begins to speak when there is no help for it, is quite astonishing."
+The blank impossibility at the outset, however, of getting native
+meanings conveyed to his English servants, he very humorously described
+to me; and said the spell was first broken by the cook, "being really a
+clever woman, and not entrenching herself in that astonishing pride of
+ignorance which induces the rest to oppose themselves to the receipt of
+any information through any channel, and which made A. careless of
+looking out of window, in America, even to see the Falls of Niagara." So
+that he soon had to report the gain, to all of them, from the fact of
+this enterprising woman having so primed herself with "the names of all
+sorts of vegetables, meats, soups, fruits, and kitchen necessaries,"
+that she was able to order whatever was needful of the peasantry that
+were trotting in and out all day, basketed and barefooted. Her example
+became at once contagious;[83] and before the end of the second week of
+September news reached me that "the servants are beginning to pick up
+scraps of Italian; some of them go to a weekly conversazione of servants
+at the Governor's every Sunday night, having got over their
+consternation at the frequent introduction of quadrilles on these
+occasions; and I think they begin to like their foreigneering life."
+
+In the tradespeople they dealt with at Albaro he found amusing points of
+character. Sharp as they were after money, their idleness quenched even
+that propensity. Order for immediate delivery two or three pounds of
+tea, and the tea-dealer would be wretched. "Won't it do to-morrow?" "I
+want it now," you would reply; and he would say, "No, no, there can be
+no hurry!" He remonstrated against the cruelty. But everywhere there was
+deference, courtesy, more than civility. "In a cafe a little tumbler of
+ice costs something less than threepence, and if you give the waiter in
+addition what you would not offer to an English beggar, say, the third
+of a halfpenny, he is profoundly grateful." The attentions received from
+English residents were unremitting.[84] In moments of need at the
+outset, they bestirred themselves ("large merchants and grave men") as
+if they were the family's salaried purveyors; and there was in especial
+one gentleman named Curry whose untiring kindness was long remembered.
+
+The light, eager, active figure soon made itself familiar in the streets
+of Genoa, and he never went into them without bringing some oddity away.
+I soon heard of the strada Nuova and strada Balbi; of the broadest of
+the two as narrower than Albany-street, and of the other as less wide
+than Drury-lane or Wych-street; but both filled with palaces of noble
+architecture and of such vast dimensions that as many windows as there
+are days in the year might be counted in one of them, and this not
+covering by any means the largest plot of ground. I heard too of the
+other streets, none with footways, and all varying in degrees of
+narrowness, but for the most part like Field-lane in Holborn, with
+little breathing-places like St. Martin's-court; and the widest only in
+parts wide enough to enable a carriage and pair to turn. "Imagine
+yourself looking down a street of Reform Clubs cramped after this odd
+fashion, the lofty roofs almost seeming to meet in the perspective." In
+the churches nothing struck him so much as the profusion of trash and
+tinsel in them that contrasted with their real splendours of
+embellishment. One only, that of the Cappucini friars, blazed every inch
+of it with gold, precious stones, and paintings of priceless art; the
+principal contrast to its radiance being the dirt of its masters, whose
+bare legs, corded waists, and coarse brown serge never changed by night
+or day, proclaimed amid their corporate wealth their personal vows of
+poverty. He found them less pleasant to meet and look at than the
+country people of their suburb on festa-days, with the Indulgences that
+gave them the right to make merry stuck in their hats like
+turnpike-tickets. He did not think the peasant girls in general
+good-looking, though they carried themselves daintily and walked
+remarkably well: but the ugliness of the old women, begotten of hard
+work and a burning sun, with porters' knots of coarse grey hair grubbed
+up over wrinkled and cadaverous faces, he thought quite stupendous. He
+was never in a street a hundred yards long without getting up perfectly
+the witch part of _Macbeth_.
+
+With the theatres of course he soon became acquainted, and of that of
+the puppets he wrote to me again and again with humorous rapture. "There
+are other things," he added, after giving me the account which is
+published in his book, "too solemnly surprising to dwell upon. They must
+be seen. They must be seen. The enchanter carrying off the bride is not
+greater than his men brandishing fiery torches and dropping their
+lighted spirits of wine at every shake. Also the enchanter himself,
+when, hunted down and overcome, he leaps into the rolling sea, and finds
+a watery grave. Also the second comic man, aged about 55 and like
+George the Third in the face, when he gives out the play for the next
+night. They must all be seen. They can't be told about. Quite
+impossible." The living performers he did not think so good, a disbelief
+in Italian actors having been always a heresy with him, and the
+deplorable length of dialogue to the small amount of action in their
+plays making them sadly tiresome. The first that he saw at the principal
+theatre was a version of Balzac's _Pere Goriot_. "The domestic Lear I
+thought at first was going to be very clever. But he was too
+pitiful--perhaps the Italian reality would be. He was immensely
+applauded, though." He afterwards saw a version of Dumas' preposterous
+play of _Kean_, in which most of the representatives of English actors
+wore red hats with steeple crowns, and very loose blouses with broad
+belts and buckles round their waists. "There was a mysterious person
+called the Prince of Var-lees" (Wales), "the youngest and slimmest man
+in the company, whose badinage in Kean's dressing-room was irresistible;
+and the dresser wore top-boots, a Greek skull-cap, a black velvet
+jacket, and leather breeches. One or two of the actors looked very hard
+at me to see how I was touched by these English peculiarities--especially
+when Kean kissed his male friends on both cheeks." The arrangements of
+the house, which he described as larger than Drury-lane, he thought
+excellent. Instead of a ticket for the private box he had taken on the
+first tier, he received the usual key for admission which let him in as
+if he lived there; and for the whole set-out, "quite as comfortable and
+private as a box at our opera," paid only eight and fourpence English.
+The opera itself had not its regular performers until after Christmas,
+but in the summer there was a good comic company, and he saw the
+_Scaramuccia_ and the _Barber of Seville_ brightly and pleasantly done.
+There was also a day theatre, beginning at half past four in the
+afternoon; but beyond the novelty of looking on at the covered stage as
+he sat in the fresh pleasant air, he did not find much amusement in the
+Goldoni comedy put before him. There came later a Russian circus, which
+the unusual rains of that summer prematurely extinguished.
+
+The Religious Houses he made early and many enquiries about, and there
+was one that had stirred and baffled his curiosity much before he
+discovered what it really was. All that was visible from the street was
+a great high wall, apparently quite alone, no thicker than a party wall,
+with grated windows, to which iron screens gave farther protection. At
+first he supposed there had been a fire; but by degrees came to know
+that on the other side were galleries, one above another, one above
+another, and nuns always pacing them to and fro. Like the wall of a
+racket-ground outside, it was inside a very large nunnery; and let the
+poor sisters walk never so much, neither they nor the passers-by could
+see anything of each other. It was close upon the Acqua Sola, too; a
+little park with still young but very pretty trees, and fresh and
+cheerful fountains, which the Genoese made their Sunday promenade; and
+underneath which was an archway with great public tanks, where, at all
+ordinary times, washerwomen were washing away, thirty or forty together.
+At Albaro they were worse off in this matter: the clothes there being
+washed in a pond, beaten with gourds, and whitened with a preparation of
+lime: "so that," he wrote to me (24th of August), "what between the
+beating and the burning they fall into holes unexpectedly, and my white
+trowsers, after six weeks' washing, would make very good fishing-nets.
+It is such a serious damage that when we get into the Peschiere we mean
+to wash at home."
+
+Exactly a fortnight before this date, he had hired rooms in the
+Peschiere from the first of the following October; and so ended the
+house-hunting for his winter residence, that had taken him so often to
+the city. The Peschiere was the largest palace in Genoa let on hire, and
+had the advantage of standing on a height aloof from the town,
+surrounded by its own gardens. The rooms taken had been occupied by an
+English colonel, the remainder of whose term was let to Dickens for 500
+francs a month (L20); and a few days after (20th of August) he described
+to me a fellow tenant: "A Spanish duke has taken the room under me in
+the Peschiere. The duchess was his mistress many years, and bore him (I
+think) six daughters. He always promised her that if she gave birth to a
+son, he would marry her; and when at last the boy arrived, he went into
+her bedroom, saying--'Duchess, I am charmed to "salute you!"' And he
+married her in good earnest, and legitimatized (as by the Spanish law he
+could) all the other children." The beauty of the new abode will justify
+a little description when he takes up his quarters there. One or two
+incidents may be related, meanwhile, of the closing weeks of his
+residence at Albaro.
+
+In the middle of August he dined with the French consul-general, and
+there will now be no impropriety in printing his agreeable sketch of the
+dinner. "There was present, among other Genoese, the Marquis di Negri: a
+very fat and much older Jerdan, with the same thickness of speech and
+size of tongue. He was Byron's friend, keeps open house here, writes
+poetry, improvises, and is a very good old Blunderbore; just the sort of
+instrument to make an artesian well with, anywhere. Well, sir, after
+dinner, the consul proposed my health, with a little French conceit to
+the effect that I had come to Italy to have personal experience of its
+lovely climate, and that there was this similarity between the Italian
+sun and its visitor, that the sun shone into the darkest places and made
+them bright and happy with its benignant influence, and that my books
+had done the like with the breasts of men, and so forth. Upon which
+Blunderbore gives his bright-buttoned blue coat a great rap on the
+breast, turns up his fishy eye, stretches out his arm like the living
+statue defying the lightning at Astley's, and delivers four impromptu
+verses in my honour, at which everybody is enchanted, and I more than
+anybody--perhaps with the best reason, for I didn't understand a word of
+them. The consul then takes from his breast a roll of paper, and says,
+'I shall read them!' Blunderbore then says, 'Don't!' But the consul
+does, and Blunderbore beats time to the music of the verse with his
+knuckles on the table; and perpetually ducks forward to look round the
+cap of a lady sitting between himself and me, to see what I think of
+them. I exhibit lively emotion. The verses are in French--short line--on
+the taking of Tangiers by the Prince de Joinville; and are received
+with great applause; especially by a nobleman present who is reported to
+be unable to read and write. They end in my mind (rapidly translating
+them into prose) thus,--
+
+ 'The cannon of France Rendering thanks
+ Shake the foundation To Heaven.
+ Of the wondering sea, The King
+ The artillery on the shore And all the Royal Family
+ Is put to silence. Are bathed
+ Honour to Joinville In tears.
+ And the Brave! They call upon the name
+ The Great Intelligence Of Joinville!
+ Is borne France also
+ Upon the wings of Fame Weeps, and echoes it.
+ To Paris. Joinville is crowned
+ Her national citizens With Immortality;
+ Exchange caresses And Peace and Joinville,
+ In the streets! And the Glory of France,
+ The temples are crowded Diffuse themselves
+ With religious patriots Conjointly.'
+
+If you can figure to yourself the choice absurdity of receiving anything
+into one's mind in this way, you can imagine the labour I underwent in
+my attempts to keep the lower part of my face square, and to lift up one
+eye gently, as with admiring attention. But I am bound to add that this
+is really pretty literal; for I read them afterwards."
+
+This, too, was the year of other uncomfortable glories of France in the
+last three years of her Orleans dynasty; among them the Tahiti business,
+as politicians may remember; and so hot became rumours of war with
+England at the opening of September that Dickens had serious thoughts of
+at once striking his tent. One of his letters was filled with the
+conflicting doubts in which they lived for nigh a fortnight, every day's
+arrival contradicting the arrival of the day before: so that, as he told
+me, you met a man in the street to-day, who told you there would
+certainly be war in a week; and you met the same man in the street
+to-morrow, and he swore he always knew there would be nothing but peace;
+and you met him again the day after, and he said it all depended _now_
+on something perfectly new and unheard of before, which somebody else
+said had just come to the knowledge of some consul in some dispatch
+which said something about some telegraph which had been at work
+somewhere, signalizing some prodigious intelligence. However, it all
+passed harmlessly away, leaving him undisturbed opportunity to avail
+himself of a pleasure that arose out of the consul-general's dinner
+party, and to be present at a great reception given shortly after by the
+good "old Blunderbore" just mentioned, on the occasion of his daughter's
+birthday.
+
+The Marquis had a splendid house, but Dickens found the grounds so
+carved into grottoes and fanciful walks as to remind him of nothing so
+much as our old White-conduit-house, except that he would have been well
+pleased, on the present occasion, to have discovered a waiter crying,
+"Give your orders, gents!" it being not easy to him at any time to keep
+up, the whole night through, on ices and variegated lamps merely. But
+the scene for awhile was amusing enough, and not rendered less so by the
+delight of the Marquis himself, "who was constantly diving out into dark
+corners and then among the lattice-work and flower pots, rubbing his
+hands and going round and round with explosive chuckles in his huge
+satisfaction with the entertainment." With horror it occurred to
+Dickens, however, that four more hours of this kind of entertainment
+would be too much; that the Genoa gates closed at twelve; and that as
+the carriage had not been ordered till the dancing was expected to be
+over and the gates to reopen, he must make a sudden bolt if he would
+himself get back to Albaro. "I had barely time," he told me, "to reach
+the gate before midnight; and was running as hard as I could go,
+down-hill, over uneven ground, along a new street called the strada
+Sevra, when I came to a pole fastened straight across the street, nearly
+breast high, without any light or watchman--quite in the Italian style.
+I went over it, headlong, with such force that I rolled myself
+completely white in the dust; but although I tore my clothes to shreds,
+I hardly scratched myself except in one place on the knee. I had no time
+to think of it then, for I was up directly and off again to save the
+gate: but when I got outside the wall, and saw the state I was in, I
+wondered I had not broken my neck. I 'took it easy' after this, and
+walked home, by lonely ways enough, without meeting a single soul. But
+there is nothing to be feared, I believe, from midnight walks in this
+part of Italy. In other places you incur the danger of being stabbed by
+mistake; whereas the people here are quiet and good tempered, and very
+rarely commit any outrage."
+
+Such adventures, nevertheless, are seldom without consequences, and
+there followed in this case a short but sharp attack of illness. It came
+on with the old "unspeakable and agonizing pain in the side," for which
+Bob Fagin had prepared and applied the hot bottles in the old warehouse
+time; and it yielded quickly to powerful remedies. But for a few days he
+had to content himself with the minor sights of Albaro. He sat daily in
+the shade of the ruined chapel on the seashore. He looked in at the
+festa in the small country church, consisting mainly of a tenor singer,
+a seraphine, and four priests sitting gaping in a row on one side of the
+altar "in flowered satin dresses and little cloth caps, looking exactly
+like the band at a wild-beast-caravan." He was interested in the
+wine-making, and in seeing the country tenants preparing their annual
+presents for their landlords, of baskets of grapes and other fruit
+prettily dressed with flowers. The season of the grapes, too, brought
+out after dusk strong parties of rats to eat them as they ripened, and
+so many shooting parties of peasants to get rid of these despoilers,
+that as he first listened to the uproar of the firing and the echoes he
+half fancied it a siege of Albaro. The flies mustered strong, too, and
+the mosquitos;[85] so that at night he had to lie covered up with gauze,
+like cold meat in a safe.
+
+Of course all news from England, and especially visits paid him by
+English friends who might be travelling in Italy, were a great delight.
+This was the year when O'Connell was released from prison by the
+judgment of the Lords on appeal. "I have no faith in O'Connell taking
+the great position he might upon this: being beleaguered by vanity
+always. Denman delights me. I am glad to think I have always liked him
+so well. I am sure that whenever he makes a mistake, it _is_ a mistake;
+and that no man lives who has a grander and nobler scorn of every mean
+and dastard action. I would to Heaven it were decorous to pay him some
+public tribute of respect . . . O'Connell's speeches are the old thing:
+fretty, boastful, frothy, waspish at the voices in the crowd, and all
+that: but with no true greatness. . . . What a relief to turn to that noble
+letter of Carlyle's" (in which a timely testimony had been borne to the
+truthfulness and honour of Mazzini), "which I think above all praise. My
+love to him." Among his English visitors were Mr. Tagart's family, on
+their way from a scientific congress at Milan; and Peter (now become
+Lord) Robertson from Rome, of whose talk he wrote very pleasantly. The
+sons of Burns had been entertained during the summer in Edinburgh at
+what was called a Burns Festival, of which, through Jerrold who was
+present, I had sent him no very favourable account; and this was now
+confirmed by Robertson, whose letters had given him an "awful" narrative
+of Wilson's speech, and of the whole business. "There was one man who
+spoke a quarter of an hour or so, to the toast of the navy; and could
+say nothing more than 'the--British--navy--always appreciates--' which
+remarkable sentiment he repeated over and over again for that space of
+time; and then sat down. Robertson told me also that Wilson's allusion
+to, or I should rather say expatiation upon, the 'vices' of Burns,
+excited but one sentiment of indignation and disgust: and added, very
+sensibly, 'By God!--I want to know _what Burns did_! I never heard of
+his doing anything that need be strange or unaccountable to the
+Professor's mind. I think he must have mistaken the name, and fancied it
+a dinner to the sons of _Burke_'--meaning of course the murderer. In
+short he fully confirmed Jerrold in all respects." The same letter told
+me, too, something of his reading. Jerrold's _Story of a Feather_ he had
+derived much enjoyment from. "Gauntwolf's sickness and the career of
+that snuffbox, masterly.[86] I have been deep in Voyages and Travels,
+and in De Foe. Tennyson I have also been reading, again and again. What
+a great creature he is! . . . What about the _Goldsmith_? Apropos, I am all
+eagerness to write a story about the length of that most delightful of
+all stories, the _Vicar of Wakefield_."
+
+In the second week of September he went to meet his brother Frederick at
+Marseilles, and bring him back over the Cornice road to pass a
+fortnight's holiday at Genoa; and his description of the first inn upon
+the Alps they slept in is too good to be lost. "We lay last night," he
+wrote (9th of September) "at the first halting-place on this journey,
+in an inn which is not entitled, as it ought to be, The house of call
+for fleas and vermin in general, but is entitled the grand hotel of the
+Post! I hardly know what to compare it to. It seemed something like a
+house in Somers-town originally built for a wine-vaults and never
+finished, but grown very old. There was nothing to eat in it and nothing
+to drink. They had lost the teapot; and when they found it, they
+couldn't make out what had become of the lid, which, turning up at last
+and being fixed on to the teapot, couldn't be got off again for the
+pouring in of more water. Fleas of elephantine dimensions were
+gambolling boldly in the dirty beds; and the mosquitoes!--But let me
+here draw a curtain (as I would have done if there had been any). We had
+scarcely any sleep, and rose up with hands and arms hardly human."
+
+In four days they were at Albaro, and the morning after their arrival
+Dickens underwent the terrible shock of seeing his brother very nearly
+drowned in the bay. He swam out into too strong a current,[87] and was
+only narrowly saved by the accident of a fishing-boat preparing to leave
+the harbour at the time. "It was a world of horror and anguish," Dickens
+wrote to me, "crowded into four or five minutes of dreadful agitation;
+and, to complete the terror of it, Georgy, Charlotte" (the nurse), "and
+the children were on a rock in full view of it all, crying, as you may
+suppose, like mad creatures." His own bathing was from the rock, and, as
+he had already told me, of the most primitive kind. He went in whenever
+he pleased, broke his head against sharp stones if he went in with that
+end foremost, floundered about till he was all over bruises, and then
+climbed and staggered out again. "Everybody wears a dress. Mine
+extremely theatrical: Masaniello to the life: shall be preserved for
+your inspection in Devonshire-terrace." I will add another personal
+touch, also Masaniello-like, which marks the beginning of a change
+which, though confined for the present to his foreign residence and
+removed when he came to England, was resumed somewhat later, and in a
+few more years wholly altered the aspect of his face. "The moustaches
+are glorious, glorious. I have cut them shorter, and trimmed them a
+little at the ends to improve the shape. They are charming, charming.
+Without them, life would be a blank."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[78] He regretted one chance missed by his eccentric friend, which he
+described to me just before he left Italy. "I saw last night an old
+palazzo of the Doria, six miles from here, upon the sea, which De la Rue
+urged Fletcher to take for us, when he was bent on that detestable villa
+Bagnerello; which villa the Genoese have hired, time out of mind, for
+one-fourth of what I paid, as they told him again and again before he
+made the agreement. This is one of the strangest old palaces in Italy,
+surrounded by beautiful _woods_ of great trees (an immense rarity here)
+some miles in extent: and has upon the terrace a high tower, formerly a
+prison for offenders against the family, and a defence against the
+pirates. The present Doria lets it as it stands for L40 English--for the
+year. . . . And the grounds are no expense; being proudly maintained by the
+Doria, who spends this rent, when he gets it, in repairing the roof and
+windows. It is a wonderful house; full of the most unaccountable
+pictures and most incredible furniture: every room in it like the most
+quaint and fanciful of Cattermole's pictures; and how many rooms I am
+afraid to say." 2nd of June, 1845.
+
+[79] "We have had a London sky until to-day," he wrote on the 20th of
+July, "gray and cloudy as you please: but I am most disappointed, I
+think, in the evenings, which are as commonplace as need be; for there
+is no twilight, and as to the stars giving more light here than
+elsewhere, that is humbug." The summer of 1844 seems to have been,
+however, an unusually stormy and wet season. He wrote to me on the 21st
+of October that they had had, so far, only four really clear days since
+they came to Italy.
+
+[80] "My faith on that-point is decidedly shaken, which reminds me to
+ask you whether you ever read Simond's Tour in Italy. It is a most
+charming book, and eminently remarkable for its excellent sense, and
+determination not to give in to conventional lies." In a later letter he
+says: "None of the books are unaffected and true but Simond's, which
+charms me more and more by its boldness, and its frank exhibition of
+that rare and admirable quality which enables a man to form opinions for
+himself without a miserable and slavish reference to the pretended
+opinions of other people. His notices of the leading pictures enchant
+me. They are so perfectly just and faithful, and so whimsically shrewd."
+Rome, 9th of March, 1845.
+
+[81] I send my heart up to thee, all my heart
+ In this my singing!
+ For the stars help me, and the sea bears part;
+ The very night is clinging
+ Closer to Venice' streets to leave one space
+ Above me, whence thy face
+ May light my joyous heart to thee its dwelling-place.
+
+Written to express Maclise's subject in the Academy catalogue.
+
+[82] "Their house is next to ours on the right, with vineyard between;
+but the place is so oddly contrived that one has to go a full mile round
+to get to their door."
+
+[83] Not however, happily for them, in another important particular, for
+on the eve of their return to England she declared her intention of
+staying behind and marrying an Italian. "She will have to go to
+Florence, I find" (12th of May 1845), "to be married in Lord Holland's
+house: and even then is only married according to the English law:
+having no legal rights from such a marriage, either in France or Italy.
+The man hasn't a penny. If there were an opening for a nice clean
+restaurant in Genoa--which I don't believe there is, for the Genoese
+have a natural enjoyment of dirt, garlic, and oil--it would still be a
+very hazardous venture; as the priests will certainly damage the man, if
+they can, for marrying a Protestant woman. However, the utmost I can do
+is to take care, if such a crisis should arrive, that she shall not want
+the means of getting home to England. As my father would observe, she
+has sown and must reap."
+
+[84] He had carried with him, I may here mention, letters of
+introduction to residents in all parts of Italy, of which I believe he
+delivered hardly one. Writing to me a couple of months before he left
+the country he congratulated himself on this fact. "We are living very
+quietly; and I am now more than ever glad that I have kept myself aloof
+from the 'receiving' natives always, and delivered scarcely any of my
+letters of introduction. If I had, I should have seen nothing and known
+less. I have observed that the English women who have married foreigners
+are invariably the most audacious in the license they assume. Think of
+one lady married to a royal chamberlain (not here) who said at dinner to
+the master of the house at a place where I was dining--that she had
+brought back his _Satirist_, but didn't think there was quite so much
+'fun' in it as there used to be. I looked at the paper afterwards, and
+found it crammed with such vile obscenity as positively made one's hair
+stand on end."
+
+[85] What his poor little dog suffered should not be omitted from the
+troubles of the master who was so fond of him. "Timber has had every
+hair upon his body cut off because of the fleas, and he looks like the
+ghost of a drowned dog come out of a pond after a week or so. It is very
+awful to see him slide into a room. He knows the change upon him, and is
+always turning round and round to look for himself. I think he'll die of
+grief." Three weeks later: "Timber's hair is growing again, so that you
+can dimly perceive him to be a dog. The fleas only keep three of his
+legs off the ground now, and he sometimes moves of his own accord
+towards some place where they don't want to go." His improvement was
+slow, but after this continuous.
+
+[86] A characteristic message for Jerrold came in a later letter (12th
+of May, 1845): "I wish you would suggest to Jerrold for me as a Caudle
+subject (if he pursue that idea). 'Mr. Caudle has incidentally remarked
+that the house-maid is good-looking.'"
+
+[87] Of the dangers of the bay he had before written to me (10th of
+August). "A monk was drowned here on Saturday evening. He was bathing
+with two other monks, who bolted when he cried out that he was
+sinking--in consequence, I suppose, of his certainty of going to
+Heaven."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+WORK IN GENOA: PALAZZO PESCHIERE.
+
+1844.
+
+ Palace of the Fish-ponds--Mural
+ Paintings--Peschiere Garden--A Peal of
+ Chimes--Governor's Levee--_Chimes_ a Plea for
+ the Poor--Dickens's Choice of a Hero--Religious
+ Sentiment--Dialogue in a Vision--Hard at
+ Work--First Outline of the _Chimes_--What the
+ Writing of it cost Him--Wild Weather--Coming to
+ London--Secret of the Visit--The Tale
+ finished--Proposed Travel.
+
+
+IN the last week of September they moved from Albaro into Genoa, amid a
+violent storm of wind and wet, "great guns blowing," the lightning
+incessant, and the rain driving down in a dense thick cloud. But the
+worst of the storm was over when they reached the Peschiere. As they
+passed into it along the stately old terraces, flanked on either side
+with antique sculptured figures, all the seven fountains were playing in
+its gardens, and the sun was shining brightly on its groves of camellias
+and orange-trees.
+
+It was a wonderful place, and I soon became familiar with the several
+rooms that were to form their home for the rest of their stay in Italy.
+In the centre was the grand sala, fifty feet high, of an area larger
+than "the dining-room of the Academy," and painted, walls and ceiling,
+with frescoes three hundred years old, "as fresh as if the colours had
+been laid on yesterday." On the same floor as this great hall were a
+drawing-room, and a dining-room,[88] both covered also with frescoes
+still bright enough to make them thoroughly cheerful, and both so nicely
+proportioned as to give to their bigness all the effect of snugness.[89]
+Out of these opened three other chambers that were turned into
+sleeping-rooms and nurseries. Adjoining the sala, right and left, were
+the two best bedrooms; "in size and shape like those at Windsor-castle
+but greatly higher;" both having altars, a range of three windows with
+stone balconies, floors tesselated in patterns of black and white stone,
+and walls painted every inch: on the left, nymphs pursued by satyrs "as
+large as life and as wicked;" on the right, "Phaeton larger than life,
+with horses bigger than Meux and Co.'s, tumbling headlong down into the
+best bed." The right-hand one he occupied with his wife, and of the left
+took possession as a study; writing behind a big screen he had lugged
+into it, and placed by one of the windows, from which he could see over
+the city, as he wrote, as far as the lighthouse in its harbour. Distant
+little over a mile as the crow flew, flashing five times in four
+minutes, and on dark nights, as if by magic, illuminating brightly the
+whole palace-front every time it shone, this lighthouse was one of the
+wonders of Genoa.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+When it had all become more familiar to him, he was fond of dilating on
+its beauties; and even the dreary sound of the chaunting from
+neighbouring mass-performances, as it floated in at all the open
+windows, which at first was a sad trouble, came to have its charm for
+him. I remember a vivid account he gave me of a great festa on the hill
+behind the house, when the people alternately danced under tents in the
+open air and rushed to say a prayer or two in an adjoining church bright
+with red and gold and blue and silver; so many minutes of dancing, and
+of praying, in regular turns of each. But the view over into Genoa, on
+clear bright days, was a never failing enjoyment. The whole city then,
+without an atom of smoke, and with every possible variety of tower and
+steeple pointing up into the sky, lay stretched out below his windows.
+To the right and left were lofty hills, with every indentation in their
+rugged sides sharply discernible; and on one side of the harbour
+stretched away into the dim bright distance the whole of the Cornice,
+its first highest range of mountains hoary with snow. Sitting down one
+Spring day to write to me, he thus spoke of the sea and of the garden.
+"Beyond the town is the wide expanse of the Mediterranean, as blue, at
+this moment, as the most pure and vivid prussian blue on Mac's palette
+when it is newly set; and on the horizon there is a red flush, seen
+nowhere as it is here. Immediately below the windows are the gardens of
+the house, with gold fish swimming and diving in the fountains; and
+below them, at the foot of a steep slope, the public garden and drive,
+where the walks are marked out by hedges of pink roses, which blush and
+shine through the green trees and vines, close up to the balconies of
+these windows. No custom can impair, and no description enhance, the
+beauty of the scene."
+
+All these and other glories and beauties, however, did not come to him
+at once. They counted for little indeed when he first set himself
+seriously to write. "Never did I stagger so upon a threshold before. I
+seem as if I had plucked myself out of my proper soil when I left
+Devonshire-terrace; and could take root no more until I return to it. . . .
+Did I tell you how many fountains we have here? No matter. If they
+played nectar, they wouldn't please me half so well as the West
+Middlesex water-works at Devonshire-terrace." The subject for his new
+Christmas story he had chosen, but he had not found a title for it, or
+the machinery to work it with; when, at the moment of what seemed to be
+his greatest trouble, both reliefs came. Sitting down one morning
+resolute for work, though against the grain, his hand being out and
+everything inviting to idleness, such a peal of chimes arose from the
+city as he found to be "maddening." All Genoa lay beneath him, and up
+from it, with some sudden set of the wind, came in one fell sound the
+clang and clash of all its steeples, pouring into his ears, again and
+again, in a tuneless, grating, discordant, jerking, hideous vibration
+that made his ideas "spin round and round till they lost themselves in a
+whirl of vexation and giddiness, and dropped down dead." He had never
+before so suffered, nor did he again; but this was his description to me
+next day, and his excuse for having failed in a promise to send me his
+title. Only two days later, however, came a letter in which not a
+syllable was written but "We have heard THE CHIMES at midnight, Master
+Shallow!" and I knew he had discovered what he wanted.
+
+Other difficulties were still to be got over. He craved for the London
+streets. He so missed his long night-walks before beginning anything
+that he seemed, as he said, dumbfounded without them. "I can't help
+thinking of the boy in the school-class whose button was cut off by
+Walter Scott and his friends. Put me down on Waterloo-bridge at eight
+o'clock in the evening, with leave to roam about as long as I like, and
+I would come home, as you know, panting to go on. I am sadly strange as
+it is, and can't settle. You will have lots of hasty notes from me while
+I am at work; but you know your man; and whatever strikes me, I shall
+let off upon you as if I were in Devonshire-terrace. It's a great thing
+to have my title, and see my way how to work the bells. Let them clash
+upon me now from all the churches and convents in Genoa, I see nothing
+but the old London belfry I have set them in. In my mind's eye, Horatio.
+I like more and more my notion of making, in this little book, a great
+blow for the poor. Something powerful, I think I can do, but I want to
+be tender too, and cheerful; as like the _Carol_ in that respect as may
+be, and as unlike it as such a thing can be. The duration of the action
+will resemble it a little, but I trust to the novelty of the machinery
+to carry that off; and if my design be anything at all, it has a grip
+upon the very throat of the time." (8th of October.)
+
+Thus bent upon his work, for which he never had been in more earnest
+mood, he was disturbed by hearing that he must attend the levee of the
+Governor who had unexpectedly arrived in the city, and who would take it
+as an affront, his eccentric friend Fletcher told him, if that courtesy
+were not immediately paid. "It was the morning on which I was going to
+begin, so I wrote round to our consul,"--praying, of course, that excuse
+should be made for him. Don't bother yourself, replied that sensible
+functionary, for all the consuls and governors alive; but shut yourself
+up by all means. "So," continues Dickens, telling me the tale, "he went
+next morning in great state and full costume, to present two English
+gentlemen. 'Where's the great poet?' said the Governor. 'I want to see
+the great poet.' 'The great poet, your excellency,' said the consul, 'is
+at work, writing a book, and begged me to make his excuses.' 'Excuses!'
+said the Governor, 'I wouldn't interfere with such an occupation for all
+the world. Pray tell him that my house is open to the honour of his
+presence when it is perfectly convenient for him; but not otherwise.
+And let no gentleman,' said the Governor, a surweyin' of his suite
+with a majestic eye, 'call upon Signor Dickens till he is understood
+to be disengaged.' And he sent somebody with his own cards next day.
+Now I _do_ seriously call this, real politeness and pleasant
+consideration--not positively American, but still gentlemanly and
+polished. The same spirit pervades the inferior departments; and I have
+not been required to observe the usual police regulations, or to put
+myself to the slightest trouble about anything." (18th of October.)
+
+The picture I am now to give of him at work should be prefaced by a word
+or two that may throw light on the design he was working at. It was a
+large theme for so small an instrument; and the disproportion was not
+more characteristic of the man, than the throes of suffering and passion
+to be presently undergone by him for results that many men would smile
+at. He was bent, as he says, on striking a blow for the poor. They had
+always been his clients, they had never been forgotten in any of his
+books, but here nothing else was to be remembered. He had become, in
+short, terribly earnest in the matter. Several months before he left
+England, I had noticed in him the habit of more gravely regarding many
+things before passed lightly enough; the hopelessness of any true
+solution of either political or social problems by the ordinary
+Downing-street methods had been startlingly impressed on him in
+Carlyle's writings; and in the parliamentary talk of that day he had
+come to have as little faith for the putting down of any serious evil,
+as in a then notorious city Alderman's gabble for the putting down of
+suicide. The latter had stirred his indignation to its depths just
+before he came to Italy, and his increased opportunities of solitary
+reflection since had strengthened and extended it. When he came
+therefore to think of his new story for Christmas time, he resolved to
+make it a plea for the poor. He did not want it to resemble his _Carol_,
+but the same kind of moral was in his mind. He was to try and convert
+Society, as he had converted Scrooge, by showing that its happiness
+rested on the same foundations as those of the individual, which are
+mercy and charity not less than justice. Whether right or wrong in these
+assumptions, need not be questioned here, where facts are merely stated
+to render intelligible what will follow; he had not made politics at any
+time a study, and they were always an instinct with him rather than a
+science; but the instinct was wholesome and sound, and to set class
+against class never ceased to be as odious to him as he thought it
+righteous at all times to help each to a kindlier knowledge of the
+other. And so, here in Italy, amid the grand surroundings of this
+Palazzo Peschiere, the hero of his imagination was to be a sorry old
+drudge of a London ticket-porter, who in his anxiety not to distrust or
+think hardly of the rich, has fallen into the opposite extreme of
+distrusting the poor. From such distrust it is the object of the story
+to reclaim him; and, to the writer of it, the tale became itself of less
+moment than what he thus intended it to enforce. Far beyond mere vanity
+in authorship went the passionate zeal with which he began, and the
+exultation with which he finished, this task. When we met at its close,
+he was fresh from Venice, which had impressed him as "the wonder" and
+"the new sensation" of the world: but well do I remember how high above
+it all arose the hope that filled his mind. "Ah!" he said to me, "when I
+saw those places, how I thought that to leave one's hand upon the time,
+lastingly upon the time, with one tender touch for the mass of toiling
+people that nothing could obliterate, would be to lift oneself above the
+dust of all the Doges in their graves, and stand upon a giant's
+staircase that Sampson couldn't overthrow!" In varying forms this
+ambition was in all his life.
+
+Another incident of these days will exhibit aspirations of a more solemn
+import that were not less part of his nature. It was depth of sentiment
+rather than clearness of faith which kept safe the belief on which they
+rested against all doubt or question of its sacredness, but every year
+seemed to strengthen it in him. This was told me in his second letter
+after reaching the Peschiere; the first having sent me some such
+commissions in regard to his wife's family as his kindly care for all
+connected with him frequently led to. "Let me tell you," he wrote (30th
+of September), "of a curious dream I had, last Monday night; and of the
+fragments of reality I can collect; which helped to make it up. I have
+had a return of rheumatism in my back, and knotted round my waist like a
+girdle of pain; and had laid awake nearly all that night under the
+infliction, when I fell asleep and dreamed this dream. Observe that
+throughout I was as real, animated, and full of passion as Macready (God
+bless him!) in the last scene of _Macbeth_. In an indistinct place,
+which was quite sublime in its indistinctness, I was visited by a
+Spirit. I could not make out the face, nor do I recollect that I desired
+to do so. It wore a blue drapery, as the Madonna might in a picture by
+Raphael; and bore no resemblance to any one I have known except in
+stature. I think (but I am not sure) that I recognized the voice.
+Anyway, I knew it was poor Mary's spirit. I was not at all afraid, but
+in a great delight, so that I wept very much, and stretching out my arms
+to it called it 'Dear.' At this, I thought it recoiled; and I felt
+immediately, that not being of my gross nature, I ought not to have
+addressed it so familiarly. 'Forgive me!' I said. 'We poor living
+creatures are only able to express ourselves by looks and words. I have
+used the word most natural to _our_ affections; and you know my heart.'
+It was so full of compassion and sorrow for me--which I knew
+spiritually, for, as I have said, I didn't perceive its emotions by its
+face--that it cut me to the heart; and I said, sobbing, 'Oh! give me
+some token that you have really visited me!' 'Form a wish,' it said. I
+thought, reasoning with myself: 'If I form a selfish wish, it will
+vanish.' So I hastily discarded such hopes and anxieties of my own as
+came into my mind, and said, 'Mrs. Hogarth is surrounded with great
+distresses'--observe, I never thought of saying 'your mother' as to a
+mortal creature--'will you extricate her?' 'Yes.' 'And her extrication
+is to be a certainty to me, that this has really happened?' 'Yes.' 'But
+answer me one other question!' I said, in an agony of entreaty lest it
+should leave me. 'What is the True religion?' As it paused a moment
+without replying, I said--Good God in such an agony of haste, lest it
+should go away!--'You think, as I do, that the Form of religion does not
+so greatly matter, if we try to do good? or,' I said, observing that it
+still hesitated, and was moved with the greatest compassion for me,
+'perhaps the Roman Catholic is the best? perhaps it makes one think of
+God oftener, and believe in him more steadily?' 'For _you_,' said the
+Spirit, full of such heavenly tenderness for me, that I felt as if my
+heart would break; 'for _you_, it is the best!' Then I awoke, with the
+tears running down my face, and myself in exactly the condition of the
+dream. It was just dawn. I called up Kate, and repeated it three or four
+times over, that I might not unconsciously make it plainer or stronger
+afterwards. It was exactly this. Free from all hurry, nonsense, or
+confusion, whatever. Now, the strings I can gather up, leading to this,
+were three. The first you know, from the main subject of my last letter.
+The second was, that there is a great altar in our bed-room, at which
+some family who once inhabited this palace had mass performed in old
+time: and I had observed within myself, before going to bed, that there
+was a mark in the wall, above the sanctuary, where a religious picture
+used to be; and I had wondered within myself what the subject might have
+been, _and what the face was like_. Thirdly, I had been listening to the
+convent bells (which ring at intervals in the night), and so had
+thought, no doubt, of Roman Catholic services. And yet, for all this,
+put the case of that wish being fulfilled by any agency in which I had
+no hand; and I wonder whether I should regard it as a dream, or an
+actual Vision!" It was perhaps natural that he should omit, from his own
+considerations awakened by the dream, the very first that would have
+risen in any mind to which his was intimately known--that it strengthens
+other evidences, of which there are many in his life, of his not having
+escaped those trying regions of reflection which most men of thought and
+all men of genius have at some time to pass through. In such disturbing
+fancies during the next year or two, I may add that the book which
+helped him most was the _Life of Arnold_. "I respect and reverence his
+memory," he wrote to me in the middle of October, in reply to my mention
+of what had most attracted myself in it, "beyond all expression. I must
+have that book. Every sentence that you quote from it is the text-book
+of my faith."
+
+He kept his promise that I should hear from him while writing, and I had
+frequent letters when he was fairly in his work. "With my steam very
+much up, I find it a great trial to be so far off from you, and
+consequently to have no one (always excepting Kate and Georgy) to whom
+to expatiate on my day's work. And I want a crowded street to plunge
+into at night. And I want to be 'on the spot' as it were. But apart from
+such things, the life I lead is favourable to work." In his next letter:
+"I am in regular, ferocious excitement with the _Chimes_; get up at
+seven; have a cold bath before breakfast; and blaze away, wrathful and
+red-hot, until three o'clock or so; when I usually knock off (unless it
+rains) for the day . . . I am fierce to finish in a spirit bearing some
+affinity to those of truth and mercy, and to shame the cruel and the
+canting. I have not forgotten my catechism. 'Yes verily, and with God's
+help, so I will!'"
+
+Within a week he had completed his first part, or quarter. "I send you
+to-day" (18th of October), "by mail, the first and longest of the four
+divisions. This is great for the first week, which is usually up-hill. I
+have kept a copy in shorthand in case of accidents. I hope to send you a
+parcel every Monday until the whole is done. I do not wish to influence
+you, but it has a great hold upon me, and has affected me, in the doing,
+in divers strong ways, deeply, forcibly. To give you better means of
+judgment I will sketch for you the general idea, but pray don't read it
+until you have read this first part of the MS." I print it here. It is a
+good illustration of his method in all his writing. His idea is in it so
+thoroughly, that, by comparison with the tale as printed, we see the
+strength of its mastery over his first design. Thus always, whether his
+tale was to be written in one or in twenty numbers, his fancies
+controlled him. He never, in any of his books, accomplished what he had
+wholly preconceived, often as he attempted it. Few men of genius ever
+did. Once at the sacred heat that opens regions beyond ordinary vision,
+imagination has its own laws; and where characters are so real as to be
+treated as existences, their creator himself cannot help them having
+their own wills and ways. Fern the farm-labourer is not here, nor yet
+his niece the little Lilian (at first called Jessie) who is to give to
+the tale its most tragical scene; and there are intimations of poetic
+fancy at the close of my sketch which the published story fell short of.
+Altogether the comparison is worth observing.
+
+"The general notion is this. That what happens to poor Trotty in the
+first part, and what will happen to him in the second (when he takes the
+letter to a punctual and a great man of business, who is balancing his
+books and making up his accounts, and complacently expatiating on the
+necessity of clearing off every liability and obligation, and turning
+over a new leaf and starting fresh with the new year), so dispirits him,
+who can't do this, that he comes to the conclusion that his class and
+order have no business with a new year, and really are 'intruding.' And
+though he will pluck up for an hour or so, at the christening (I think)
+of a neighbour's child, that evening: still, when he goes home, Mr.
+Filer's precepts will come into his mind, and he will say to himself,
+'we are a long way past the proper average of children, and it has no
+business to be born:' and will be wretched again. And going home, and
+sitting there alone, he will take that newspaper out of his pocket, and
+reading of the crimes and offences of the poor, especially of those whom
+Alderman Cute is going to put down, will be quite confirmed in his
+misgiving that they are bad; irredeemably bad. In this state of mind, he
+will fancy that the Chimes are calling, to him; and saying to himself
+'God help me. Let me go up to 'em. I feel as if I were going to die in
+despair--of a broken heart; let me die among the bells that have been a
+comfort to me!'--will grope his way up into the tower; and fall down in
+a kind of swoon among them. Then the third quarter, or in other words
+the beginning of the second half of the book, will open with the Goblin
+part of the thing: the bells ringing, and innumerable spirits (the sound
+or vibration of them) flitting and tearing in and out of the
+church-steeple, and bearing all sorts of missions and commissions and
+reminders and reproaches, and comfortable recollections and what not, to
+all sorts of people and places. Some bearing scourges; and others
+flowers, and birds, and music; and others pleasant faces in mirrors, and
+others ugly ones: the bells haunting people in the night (especially the
+last of the old year) according to their deeds. And the bells
+themselves, who have a goblin likeness to humanity in the midst of their
+proper shapes, and who shine in a light of their own, will say (the
+Great Bell being the chief spokesman) Who is he that being of the poor
+doubts the right of poor men to the inheritance which Time reserves for
+them, and echoes an unmeaning cry against his fellows? Toby, all aghast,
+will tell him it is he, and why it is. Then the spirits of the bells
+will bear him through the air to various scenes, charged with this
+trust: That they show him how the poor and wretched, at the worst--yes,
+even in the crimes that aldermen put down, and he has thought so
+horrible--have some deformed and hunchbacked goodness clinging to them;
+and how they have their right and share in Time. Following out the
+history of Meg the Bells will show her, that marriage broken off and all
+friends dead, with an infant child; reduced so low, and made so
+miserable, as to be brought at last to wander out at night. And in
+Toby's sight, her father's, she will resolve to drown herself and the
+child together. But before she goes down to the water, Toby will see how
+she covers it with a part of her own wretched dress, and adjusts its
+rags so as to make it pretty in its sleep, and hangs over it, and
+smooths its little limbs, and loves it with the dearest love that God
+ever gave to mortal creatures; and when she runs down to the water, Toby
+will cry 'Oh spare her! Chimes, have mercy on her! Stop her!'--and the
+bells will say, 'Why stop her? She is bad at heart--let the bad die.'
+And Toby on his knees will beg and pray for mercy: and in the end the
+bells will stop her, by their voices, just in time. Toby will see, too,
+what great things the punctual man has left undone on the close of the
+old year, and what accounts he has left unsettled: punctual as he is.
+And he will see a great many things about Richard, once so near being
+his son-in-law, and about a great many people. And the moral of it all
+will be, that he has his portion in the new year no less than any other
+man, and that the poor require a deal of beating out of shape before
+their human shape is gone; that even in their frantic wickedness there
+may be good in their hearts triumphantly asserting itself, though all
+the aldermen alive say 'No,' as he has learnt from the agony of his own
+child; and that the truth is Trustfulness in them, not doubt, nor
+putting down, nor filing them away. And when at last a great sea rises,
+and this sea of Time comes sweeping down, bearing the alderman and such
+mudworms of the earth away to nothing, dashing them to fragments in its
+fury--Toby will climb a rock and hear the bells (now faded from his
+sight) pealing out upon the waters. And as he hears them, and looks
+round for help, he will wake up and find himself with the newspaper
+lying at his foot; and Meg sitting opposite to him at the table, making
+up the ribbons for her wedding to-morrow; and the window open, that the
+sound of the bells ringing the old year out and the new year in may
+enter. They will just have broken out, joyfully; and Richard will dash
+in to kiss Meg before Toby, and have the first kiss of the new year
+(he'll get it too); and the neighbours will crowd round with good
+wishes; and a band will strike up gaily (Toby knows a Drum in private);
+and the altered circumstances, and the ringing of the bells, and the
+jolly musick, will so transport the old fellow that he will lead off a
+country dance forthwith in an entirely new step, consisting of his old
+familiar trot. Then quoth the inimitable--Was it a dream of Toby's after
+all? Or is Toby but a dream? and Meg a dream? and all a dream! In
+reference to which, and the realities of which dreams are born, the
+inimitable will be wiser than he can be now, writing for dear life, with
+the post just going, and the brave C booted. . . . Ah how I hate myself, my
+dear fellow, for this lame and halting outline of the Vision I have in
+my mind. But it must go to you. . . . You will say what is best for the
+frontispiece". . . .
+
+With the second part or quarter, after a week's interval, came
+announcement of the enlargement of his plan, by which he hoped better to
+carry out the scheme of the story, and to get, for its following part,
+an effect for his heroine that would increase the tragic interest. "I am
+still in stout heart with the tale. I think it well-timed and a good
+thought; and as you know I wouldn't say so to anybody else, I don't mind
+saying freely thus much. It has great possession of me every moment in
+the day; and drags me where it will. . . . If you only could have read it
+all at once!--But you never would have done that, anyway, for I never
+should have been able to keep it to myself; so that's nonsense. I hope
+you'll like it. I would give a hundred pounds (and think it cheap) to
+see you read it. . . . Never mind."
+
+That was the first hint of an intention of which I was soon to hear
+more; but meanwhile, after eight more days, the third part came, with
+the scene from which he expected so much, and with a mention of what the
+writing of it had cost him. "This book (whether in the Hajji Baba sense
+or not I can't say, but certainly in the literal one) has made my face
+white in a foreign land. My cheeks, which were beginning to fill out,
+have sunk again; my eyes have grown immensely large; my hair is very
+lank; and the head inside the hair is hot and giddy. Read the scene at
+the end of the third part, twice. I wouldn't write it twice, for
+something. . . . You will see that I have substituted the name of Lilian
+for Jessie. It is prettier in sound, and suits my music better. I
+mention this, lest you should wonder who and what I mean by that name.
+To-morrow I shall begin afresh (starting the next part with a broad
+grin, and ending it with the very soul of jollity and happiness); and I
+hope to finish by next Monday at latest. Perhaps on Saturday. I hope you
+will like the little book. Since I conceived, at the beginning of the
+second part, what must happen in the third, I have undergone as much
+sorrow and agitation as if the thing were real; and have wakened up with
+it at night. I was obliged to lock myself in when I finished it
+yesterday, for my face was swollen for the time to twice its proper
+size, and was hugely ridiculous.". . . His letter ended abruptly. "I am
+going for a long walk, to clear my head. I feel that I am very shakey
+from work, and throw down my pen for the day. There! (That's where it
+fell.)" A huge blot represented it, and, as Hamlet says, the rest was
+silence.
+
+Two days later, answering a letter from me that had reached in the
+interval, he gave sprightlier account of himself, and described a happy
+change in the weather. Up to this time, he protested, they had not had
+more than four or five clear days. All the time he had been writing they
+had been wild and stormy. "Wind, hail, rain, thunder and lightning.
+To-day," just before he sent me his last manuscript, "has been November
+slack-baked, the sirocco having come back; and to-night it blows great
+guns with a raging storm." "Weather worse," he wrote after three
+Mondays, "than any November English weather I have ever beheld, or any
+weather I have had experience of anywhere. So horrible to-day that all
+power has been rained and gloomed out of me. Yesterday, in pure
+determination to get the better of it, I walked twelve miles in
+mountain rain. You never saw it rain. Scotland and America are nothing
+to it." But now all this was over. "The weather changed on Saturday
+night, and has been glorious ever since. I am afraid to say more in its
+favour, lest it should change again." It did not. I think there were no
+more complainings. I heard now of autumn days with the mountain wind
+lovely, enjoyable, exquisite past expression. I heard of mountain walks
+behind the Peschiere, most beautiful and fresh, among which, and along
+the beds of dry rivers and torrents, he could "pelt away," in any dress,
+without encountering a soul but the contadini. I heard of his starting
+off one day after finishing work, "fifteen miles to dinner--oh my stars!
+at such an inn!!!" On another day, of a party to dinner at their
+pleasant little banker's at Quinto six miles off, to which, while the
+ladies drove, he was able "to walk in the sun of the middle of the day
+and to walk home again at night." On another, of an expedition up the
+mountain on mules. And on another of a memorable tavern-dinner with
+their merchant friend Mr. Curry, in which there were such successions of
+surprising dishes of genuine native cookery that they took two hours in
+the serving, but of the component parts of not one of which was he able
+to form the remotest conception: the site of the tavern being on the
+city wall, its name in Italian sounding very romantic and meaning "the
+Whistle," and its bill of fare kept for an experiment to which, before
+another month should be over, he dared and challenged my cookery in
+Lincoln's-inn.
+
+A visit from him to London was to be expected almost immediately! That
+all remonstrance would be idle, under the restless excitement his work
+had awakened, I well knew. It was not merely the wish he had, natural
+enough, to see the last proofs and the woodcuts before the day of
+publication, which he could not otherwise do; but it was the stronger
+and more eager wish, before that final launch, to have a vivider sense
+than letters could give him of the effect of what he had been doing. "If
+I come, I shall put up at Cuttris's" (then the Piazza-hotel in
+Covent-garden) "that I may be close to you. Don't say to anybody, except
+our immediate friends, that I am coming. Then I shall not be bothered.
+If I should preserve my present fierce writing humour, in any pass I may
+run to Venice, Bologna, and Florence, before I turn my face towards
+Lincoln's-inn-fields; and come to England by Milan and Turin. But this
+of course depends in a great measure on your reply." My reply, dwelling
+on the fatigue and cost, had the reception I foresaw. "Notwithstanding
+what you say, I am still in the same mind about coming to London. Not
+because the proofs concern me at all (I should be an ass as well as a
+thankless vagabond if they did), but because of that unspeakable
+restless something which would render it almost as impossible for me to
+remain here and not see the thing complete, as it would be for a full
+balloon, left to itself, not to go up. I do not intend coming from
+_here_, but by way of Milan and Turin (previously going to Venice), and
+so, across the wildest pass of the Alps that may be open, to
+Strasburg. . . . As you dislike the Young England gentleman I shall knock
+him out, and replace him by a man (I can dash him in at your rooms in an
+hour) who recognizes no virtue in anything but the good old times, and
+talks of them, parrot-like, whatever the matter is. A real good old city
+tory, in a blue coat and bright buttons and a white cravat, and with a
+tendency of blood to the head. File away at Filer, as you please; but
+bear in mind that the _Westminster Review_ considered Scrooge's
+presentation of the turkey to Bob Cratchit as grossly incompatible with
+political economy. I don't care at all for the skittle-playing." These
+were among things I had objected to.
+
+But the close of his letter revealed more than its opening of the
+reason, not at once so frankly confessed, for the long winter-journey he
+was about to make; and if it be thought that, in printing the passage, I
+take a liberty with my friend, it will be found that equal liberty is
+taken with myself, whom it goodnaturedly caricatures; so that the reader
+can enjoy his laugh at either or both. "Shall I confess to you, I
+particularly want Carlyle above all to see it before the rest of the
+world, when it is done; and I should like to inflict the little story on
+him and on dear old gallant Macready with my own lips, and to have
+Stanny and the other Mac sitting by. Now, if you was a real gent, you'd
+get up a little circle for me, one wet evening, when I come to town: and
+would say, 'My boy (SIR, will you have the goodness to leave those books
+alone and to go downstairs--WHAT the Devil are you doing! And mind, sir,
+I can see nobody--do you hear? Nobody. I am particularly engaged with a
+gentleman from Asia)--My boy, would you give us that little Christmas
+book (a little Christmas book of Dickens's, Macready, which I'm anxious
+you should hear); and don't slur it, now, or be too fast, Dickens,
+please!'--I say, if you was a real gent, something to this effect might
+happen. I shall be under sailing orders the moment I have finished. And
+I shall produce myself (please God) in London on the very day you name.
+For one week: to the hour."
+
+The wish was complied with, of course; and that night in
+Lincoln's-inn-fields led to rather memorable issues. His next letter
+told me the little tale was done. "Third of November, 1844. Half-past
+two, afternoon. Thank God! I have finished the _Chimes_. This moment. I
+take up my pen again to-day; to say only that much; and to add that I
+have had what women call 'a real good cry!'" Very genuine all this, it
+is hardly necessary to say. The little book thus completed was not one
+of his greater successes, and it raised him up some objectors; but there
+was that in it which more than repaid the suffering its writing cost
+him, and the enmity its opinions provoked; and in his own heart it had a
+cherished corner to the last. The intensity of it seemed always best to
+represent to himself what he hoped to be longest remembered for; and
+exactly what he felt as to this, his friend Jeffrey warmly expressed.
+"All the tribe of selfishness, and cowardice and cant, will hate you in
+their hearts, and cavil when they can; will accuse you of wicked
+exaggeration, and excitement to discontent, and what they pleasantly
+call disaffection! But never mind. The good and the brave are with you,
+and the truth also."
+
+He resumed his letter on the fourth of November. "Here is the brave
+courier measuring bits of maps with a carving-fork, and going up
+mountains on a teaspoon. He and I start on Wednesday for Parma, Modena,
+Bologna, Venice, Verona, Brescia, and Milan. Milan being within a
+reasonable journey from here, Kate and Georgy will come to meet me when
+I arrive there on my way towards England; and will bring me all letters
+from you. I shall be there on the 18th. . . . Now, you know my
+punctiwality. Frost, ice, flooded rivers, steamers, horses, passports,
+and custom-houses may damage it. But my design is, to walk into
+Cuttris's coffee-room on Sunday the 1st of December, in good time for
+dinner. I shall look for you at the farther table by the fire--where we
+generally go. . . . But the party for the night following? I know you have
+consented to the party. Let me see. Don't have any one, this particular
+night, to dinner, but let it be a summons for the special purpose at
+half-past 6. Carlyle, indispensable, and I should like his wife of all
+things: _her_ judgment would be invaluable. You will ask Mac, and why
+not his sister? Stanny and Jerrold I should particularly wish; Edwin
+Landseer; Blanchard; perhaps Harness; and what say you to Fonblanque and
+Fox? I leave it to you. You know the effect I want to try . . . Think the
+_Chimes_ a letter, my dear fellow, and forgive this. I will not fail to
+write to you on my travels. Most probably from Venice. And when I meet
+you (in sound health I hope) oh Heaven! what a week we will have."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[88] "Into which we might put your large room--I wish we could!--away in
+one corner, and dine without knowing it."
+
+[89] "Very vast you will say, and very dreary; but it is not so really.
+The paintings are so fresh, and the proportions so agreeable to the eye,
+that the effect is not only cheerful but snug. . . . We are a little
+incommoded by applications from strangers to go over the interior. The
+paintings were designed by Michael Angelo, and have a great
+reputation. . . . Certain of these frescoes were reported officially to the
+Fine Art Commissioners by Wilson as the best in Italy . . . I allowed a
+party of priests to be shown the great hall yesterday . . . It is in
+perfect repair, and the doors almost shut--which is quite a miraculous
+circumstance. I wish you could see it, my dear F. Gracious Heavens! if
+you could only _come back_ with me, wouldn't I soon flash on your
+astonished sight." (6th of October.)
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+ITALIAN TRAVEL.
+
+1844.
+
+ Cities and People--Venice--Proposed Travel--At
+ Lodi--Paintings--The Inns--Dinner at the
+ Peschiere--Custom-house Officers--At Milan--At
+ Strasburg--Return to London--A Macready
+ Rehearsal--Friendly Americans.
+
+
+SO it all fell out accordingly. He parted from his disconsolate wife, as
+he told me in his first letter from Ferrara, on Wednesday the 6th of
+November: left her shut up in her palace like a baron's lady in the time
+of the crusades; and had his first real experience of the wonders of
+Italy. He saw Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice, Verona, and
+Mantua. As to all which the impressions conveyed to me in his letters
+have been more or less given in his published _Pictures_. They are
+charmingly expressed. There is a sketch of a cicerone at Bologna which
+will remain in his books among their many delightful examples of his
+unerring and loving perception for every gentle, heavenly, and tender
+soul, under whatever conventional disguise it wanders here on earth,
+whether as poorhouse orphan or lawyer's clerk, architect's pupil at
+Salisbury or cheerful little guide to graves at Bologna; and there is
+another memorable description in his Rembrandt sketch, in form of a
+dream, of the silent, unearthly, watery wonders of Venice. This last,
+though not written until after his London visit, had been prefigured so
+vividly in what he wrote at once from the spot, that those passages from
+his letter[90] may be read still with a quite undiminished interest. "I
+must not," he said, "anticipate myself. But, my dear fellow, nothing in
+the world that ever you have heard of Venice, is equal to the
+magnificent and stupendous reality. The wildest visions of the Arabian
+Nights are nothing to the piazza of Saint Mark, and the first impression
+of the inside of the church. The gorgeous and wonderful reality of
+Venice is beyond the fancy of the wildest dreamer. Opium couldn't build
+such a place, and enchantment couldn't shadow it forth in a vision. All
+that I have heard of it, read of it in truth or fiction, fancied of it,
+is left thousands of miles behind. You know that I am liable to
+disappointment in such things from over-expectation, but Venice is
+above, beyond, out of all reach of coming near, the imagination of a
+man. It has never been rated high enough. It is a thing you would shed
+tears to see. When I came _on board_ here last night (after a five
+miles' row in a gondola; which somehow or other, I wasn't at all
+prepared for); when, from seeing the city lying, one light, upon the
+distant water, like a ship, I came plashing through the silent and
+deserted streets; I felt as if the houses were reality--the water,
+fever-madness. But when, in the bright, cold, bracing day, I stood upon
+the piazza, this morning, by Heaven the glory of the place was
+insupportable! And diving down from that into its wickedness and
+gloom--its awful prisons, deep below the water; its judgment chambers,
+secret doors, deadly nooks, where the torches you carry with you blink
+as if they couldn't bear the air in which the frightful scenes were
+acted; and coming out again into the radiant, unsubstantial Magic of the
+town; and diving in again, into vast churches, and old tombs--a new
+sensation, a new memory, a new mind came upon me. Venice is a bit of my
+brain from this time. My dear Forster, if you could share my transports
+(as you would if you were here) what would I not give! I feel cruel not
+to have brought Kate and Georgy; positively cruel and base. Canaletti
+and Stanny, miraculous in their truth. Turner, very noble. But the
+reality itself, beyond all pen or pencil. I never saw the thing before
+that I should be afraid to describe. But to tell what Venice is, I feel
+to be an impossibility. And here I sit alone, writing it: with nothing
+to urge me on, or goad me to that estimate, which, speaking of it to
+anyone I loved, and being spoken to in return, would lead me to form. In
+the sober solitude of a famous inn; with the great bell of Saint Mark
+ringing twelve at my elbow; with three arched windows in my room (two
+stories high) looking down upon the grand canal and away, beyond, to
+where the sun went down to-night in a blaze; and thinking over again
+those silent speaking faces of Titian and Tintoretto; I swear (uncooled
+by any humbug I have seen) that Venice is _the_ wonder and the new
+sensation of the world! If you could be set down in it, never having
+heard of it, it would still be so. With your foot upon its stones, its
+pictures before you, and its history in your mind, it is something past
+all writing of or speaking of--almost past all thinking of. You couldn't
+talk to me in this room, nor I to you, without shaking hands and saying
+'Good God my dear fellow, have we lived to see this!'"
+
+Five days later, Sunday the 17th, he was at Lodi, from which he wrote to
+me that he had been, like Leigh Hunt's pig, up "all manner of streets"
+since he left his palazzo; that with one exception he had not on any
+night given up more than five hours to rest; that all the days except
+two had been bad ("the last two foggy as Blackfriars-bridge on Lord
+Mayor's day"); and that the cold had been dismal. But what cheerful,
+keen, observant eyes he carried everywhere; and, in the midst of new and
+unaccustomed scenes, and of objects and remains of art for which no
+previous study had prepared him, with what a delicate play of
+imagination and fancy the minuteness and accuracy of his ordinary
+vision was exalted and refined; I think strikingly shown by the few
+unstudied passages I am preserving from these friendly letters. He saw
+everything for himself; and from mistakes in judging for himself which
+not all the learning and study in the world will save ordinary men, the
+intuition of genius almost always saved him. Hence there is hardly
+anything uttered by him, of this much-trodden and wearisomely-visited,
+but eternally beautiful and interesting country, that will not be found
+worth listening to.
+
+"I am already brim-full of cant about pictures, and shall be happy to
+enlighten you on the subject of the different schools, at any length you
+please. It seems to me that the preposterous exaggeration in which our
+countrymen delight in reference to this Italy, hardly extends to the
+really good things.[91] Perhaps it is in its nature, that there it
+should fall short. I have never seen any praise of Titian's great
+picture of the Transfiguration of the Virgin at Venice, which soared
+half as high as the beautiful and amazing reality. It is perfection.
+Tintoretto's picture too, of the Assembly of the Blest, at Venice also,
+with all the lines in it (it is of immense size and the figures are
+countless) tending majestically and dutifully to Almighty God in the
+centre, is grand and noble in the extreme. There are some wonderful
+portraits there, besides; and some confused, and hurried, and
+slaughterous battle pieces, in which the surprising art that presents
+the generals to your eye, so that it is almost impossible you can miss
+them in a crowd though they are in the thick of it, is very pleasant to
+dwell upon. I have seen some delightful pictures; and some (at Verona
+and Mantua) really too absurd and ridiculous even to laugh at.
+Hampton-court is a fool to 'em--and oh there are some rum 'uns there, my
+friend. Some werry rum 'uns. . . . Two things are clear to me already. One
+is, that the rules of art are much too slavishly followed; making it a
+pain to you, when you go into galleries day after day, to be so very
+precisely sure where this figure will be turning round, and that figure
+will be lying down, and that other will have a great lot of drapery
+twined about him, and so forth. This becomes a perfect nightmare. The
+second is, that these great men, who were of necessity very much in the
+hands of the monks and priests, painted monks and priests a vast deal
+too often. I constantly see, in pictures of tremendous power, heads
+quite below the story and the painter; and I invariably observe that
+those heads are of the convent stamp, and have their counterparts,
+exactly, in the convent inmates of this hour. I see the portraits of
+monks I know at Genoa, in all the lame parts of strong paintings: so I
+have settled with myself that in such cases the lameness was not with
+the painter, but with the vanity and ignorance of his employers, who
+_would_ be apostles on canvas at all events."[92]
+
+In the same letter he described the Inns. "It is a great thing--quite a
+matter of course--with English travellers, to decry the Italian inns. Of
+course you have no comforts that you are used to in England; and
+travelling alone, you dine in your bedroom always. Which is opposed to
+our habits. But they are immeasurably better than you would suppose. The
+attendants are very quick; very punctual; and so obliging, if you speak
+to them politely, that you would be a beast not to look cheerful, and
+take everything pleasantly. I am writing this in a room like a room on
+the two-pair front of an unfinished house in Eaton-square: the very
+walls make me feel as if I were a bricklayer distinguished by Mr. Cubitt
+with the favour of having it to take care of. The windows won't open,
+and the doors won't shut; and these latter (a cat could get in, between
+them and the floor) have a windy command of a colonnade which is open to
+the night, so that my slippers positively blow off my feet, and make
+little circuits in the room--like leaves. There is a very ashy
+wood-fire, burning on an immense hearth which has no fender (there is no
+such thing in Italy); and it only knows two extremes--an agony of heat
+when wood is put on, and an agony of cold when it has been on two
+minutes. There is also an uncomfortable stain in the wall, where the
+fifth door (not being strictly indispensable) was walled up a year or
+two ago, and never painted over. But the bed is clean; and I have had an
+excellent dinner; and without being obsequious or servile, which is not
+at all the characteristic of the people in the North of Italy, the
+waiters are so amiably disposed to invent little attentions which they
+suppose to be English, and are so lighthearted and goodnatured, that it
+is a pleasure to have to do with them. But so it is with all the people.
+Vetturino-travelling involves a stoppage of two hours in the middle of
+the day, to bait the horses. At that time I always walk on. If there are
+many turns in the road, I necessarily have to ask my way, very often:
+and the men are such gentlemen, and the women such ladies, that it is
+quite an interchange of courtesies."
+
+Of the help his courier continued to be to him I had whimsical instances
+in almost every letter, but he appears too often in the published book
+to require such celebration here. He is however an essential figure to
+two little scenes sketched for me at Lodi, and I may preface them by
+saying that Louis Roche, a native of Avignon, justified to the close his
+master's high opinion. He was again engaged for nearly a year in
+Switzerland, and soon after, poor fellow, though with a jovial
+robustness of look and breadth of chest that promised unusual length of
+days, was killed by heart-disease. "The brave C continues to be a
+prodigy. He puts out my clothes at every inn as if I were going to stay
+there twelve months; calls me to the instant every morning; lights the
+fire before I get up; gets hold of roast fowls and produces them in
+coaches at a distance from all other help, in hungry moments; and is
+invaluable to me. He is such a good fellow, too, that little rewards
+don't spoil him. I always give him, after I have dined, a tumbler of
+Sauterne or Hermitage or whatever I may have; sometimes (as yesterday)
+when we have come to a public-house at about eleven o'clock, very cold,
+having started before day-break and had nothing, I make him take his
+breakfast with me; and this renders him only more anxious than ever, by
+redoubling attentions, to show me that he thinks he has got a good
+master . . . I didn't tell you that the day before I left Genoa, we had a
+dinner-party--our English consul and his wife; the banker; Sir George
+Crawford and his wife; the De la Rues; Mr. Curry; and some others,
+fourteen in all. At about nine in the morning, two men in immense paper
+caps enquired at the door for the brave C, who presently introduced them
+in triumph as the Governor's cooks, his private friends, who had come to
+dress the dinner! Jane wouldn't stand this, however; so we were obliged
+to decline. Then there came, at half-hourly intervals, six gentlemen
+having the appearance of English clergymen; other private friends who
+had come to wait. . . . We accepted _their_ services; and you never saw
+anything so nicely and quietly done. He had asked, as a special
+distinction, to be allowed the supreme control of the dessert; and he
+had ices made like fruit, had pieces of crockery turned upside down so
+as to look like other pieces of crockery non-existent in this part of
+Europe, and carried a case of tooth-picks in his pocket. Then his
+delight was, to get behind Kate at one end of the table, to look at me
+at the other, and to say to Georgy in a low voice whenever he handed her
+anything, 'What does master think of datter 'rangement? Is he
+content?'. . . If you could see what these fellows of couriers are when
+their families are not upon the move, you would feel what a prize he is.
+I can't make out whether he was ever a smuggler, but nothing will induce
+him to give the custom-house-officers anything: in consequence of which
+that portmanteau of mine has been unnecessarily opened twenty times.
+Two of them will come to the coach-door, at the gate of a town. 'Is
+there anything contraband in this carriage, signore?'--'No, no. There's
+nothing here. I am an Englishman, and this is my servant.' 'A buono mano
+signore?' 'Roche,'(in English) 'give him something, and get rid of him.'
+He sits unmoved. 'A buono mano signore?' 'Go along with you!' says the
+brave C. 'Signore, I am a custom-house-officer!' 'Well, then, more shame
+for you!'--he always makes the same answer. And then he turns to me and
+says in English: while the custom-house-officer's face is a portrait of
+anguish framed in the coach-window, from his intense desire to know what
+is being told to his disparagement: 'Datter chip,' shaking his fist at
+him, 'is greatest tief--and you know it you rascal--as never did en-razh
+me so, that I cannot bear myself!' I suppose chip to mean chap, but it
+may include the custom-house-officer's father and have some reference to
+the old block, for anything I distinctly know."
+
+He closed his Lodi letter next day at Milan, whither his wife and her
+sister had made an eighty miles journey from Genoa, to pass a couple of
+days with him in Prospero's old Dukedom before he left for London. "We
+shall go our several ways on Thursday morning, and I am still bent on
+appearing at Cuttris's on Sunday the first, as if I had walked thither
+from Devonshire-terrace. In the meantime I shall not write to you again
+. . . to enhance the pleasure (if anything _can_ enhance the pleasure) of
+our meeting . . . I am opening my arms so wide!" One more letter I had
+nevertheless; written at Strasburg on Monday night the 25th; to tell me
+I might look for him one day earlier, so rapid had been his progress. He
+had been in bed only once, at Friburg for two or three hours, since he
+left Milan; and he had sledged through the snow on the top of the
+Simplon in the midst of prodigious cold. "I am sitting here _in_ a
+wood-fire, and drinking brandy and water scalding hot, with a faint idea
+of coming warm in time. My face is at present tingling with the frost
+and wind, as I suppose the cymbals may, when that turbaned turk attached
+to the life guards' band has been newly clashing at them in St.
+James's-park. I am in hopes it may be the preliminary agony of returning
+animation."
+
+[Illustration: AT 58 LINCOLN'S-INN-FIELDS, MONDAY THE 2^{ND} OF DECEMBER
+1844.]
+
+There was certainly no want of animation when we met. I have but to
+write the words to bring back the eager face and figure, as they flashed
+upon me so suddenly this wintry Saturday night that almost before I
+could be conscious of his presence I felt the grasp of his hand. It is
+almost all I find it possible to remember of the brief, bright, meeting.
+Hardly did he seem to have come when he was gone. But all that the visit
+proposed he accomplished. He saw his little book in its final form for
+publication; and, to a select few brought together on Monday the 2nd of
+December at my house, had the opportunity of reading it aloud. An
+occasion rather memorable, in which was the germ of those readings to
+larger audiences by which, as much as by his books, the world knew him
+in his later life; but of which no detail beyond the fact remains in my
+memory, and all are now dead who were present at it excepting only Mr.
+Carlyle and myself. Among those however who have thus passed away was
+one, our excellent Maclise, who, anticipating the advice of Captain
+Cuttle, had "made a note of" it in pencil, which I am able here to
+reproduce. It will tell the reader all he can wish to know. He will see
+of whom the party consisted; and may be assured (with allowance for a
+touch of caricature to which I may claim to be considered myself as the
+chief victim), that in the grave attention of Carlyle, the eager
+interest of Stanfield and Maclise, the keen look of poor Laman
+Blanchard, Fox's rapt solemnity, Jerrold's skyward gaze, and the tears
+of Harness and Dyce, the characteristic points of the scene are
+sufficiently rendered. All other recollection of it is passed and gone;
+but that at least its principal actor was made glad and grateful,
+sufficient farther testimony survives. Such was the report made of it,
+that once more, on the pressing intercession of our friend Thomas
+Ingoldsby (Mr. Barham), there was a second reading to which the presence
+and enjoyment of Fonblanque gave new zest;[93] and when I expressed to
+Dickens, after he left us, my grief that he had had so tempestuous a
+journey for such brief enjoyment, he replied that the visit had been one
+happiness and delight to him. "I would not recall an inch of the way to
+or from you, if it had been twenty times as long and twenty thousand
+times as wintry. It was worth any travel--anything! With the soil of the
+road in the very grain of my cheeks, I swear I wouldn't have missed
+that week, that first night of our meeting, that one evening of the
+reading at your rooms, aye, and the second reading too, for any easily
+stated or conceived consideration."
+
+He wrote from Paris, at which he had stopped on his way back to see
+Macready, whom an engagement to act there with Mr. Mitchell's English
+company had prevented from joining us in Lincoln's-inn-fields. There had
+been no such frost and snow since 1829, and he gave dismal report of the
+city. With Macready he had gone two nights before to the Odeon to see
+Alexandre Dumas' _Christine_ played by Madame St. George, "once
+Napoleon's mistress; now of an immense size, from dropsy I suppose; and
+with little weak legs which she can't stand upon. Her age, withal,
+somewhere about 80 or 90. I never in my life beheld such a sight. Every
+stage-conventionality she ever picked up (and she has them all) has got
+the dropsy too, and is swollen and bloated hideously. The other actors
+never looked at one another, but delivered all their dialogues to the
+pit, in a manner so egregiously unnatural and preposterous that I
+couldn't make up my mind whether to take it as a joke or an outrage."
+And then came allusion to a project we had started on the night of the
+reading, that a private play should be got up by us on his return from
+Italy. "You and I, sir, will reform this altogether." He had but to wait
+another night, however, when he saw it all reformed at the Italian opera
+where Grisi was singing in _Il Pirato_, and "the passion and fire of a
+scene between her, Mario, and Fornasari, was as good and great as it is
+possible for anything operatic to be. They drew on one another, the two
+men--not like stage-players, but like Macready himself: and she, rushing
+in between them; now clinging to this one, now to that, now making a
+sheath for their naked swords with her arms, now tearing her hair in
+distraction as they broke away from her and plunged again at each other;
+was prodigious." This was the theatre at which Macready was immediately
+to act, and where Dickens saw him next day rehearse the scene before the
+doge and council in _Othello_, "not as usual facing the float but
+arranged on one side," with an effect that seemed to him to heighten the
+reality of the scene.
+
+He left Paris on the night of the 13th with the malle poste, which did
+not reach Marseilles till fifteen hours behind its time, after three
+days and three nights travelling over horrible roads. Then, in a
+confusion between the two rival packets for Genoa, he unwillingly
+detained one of them more than an hour from sailing; and only managed at
+last to get to her just as she was moving out of harbour. As he went up
+the side, he saw a strange sensation among the angry travellers whom he
+had detained so long; heard a voice exclaim "I am blarmed if it ain't
+DICKENS!" and stood in the centre of a group of _Five Americans_! But
+the pleasantest part of the story is that they were, one and all, glad
+to see him; that their chief man, or leader, who had met him in New
+York, at once introduced them all round with the remark, "Personally our
+countrymen, and you, can fix it friendly sir, I do expectuate;" and
+that, through the stormy passage to Genoa which followed, they were
+excellent friends. For the greater part of the time, it is true, Dickens
+had to keep to his cabin; but he contrived to get enjoyment out of them
+nevertheless. The member of the party who had the travelling dictionary
+wouldn't part with it, though he was dead sick in the cabin next to my
+friend's; and every now and then Dickens was conscious of his
+fellow-travellers coming down to him, crying out in varied tones of
+anxious bewilderment, "I say, what's French for a pillow?" "Is there any
+Italian phrase for a lump of sugar? Just look, will you?" "What the
+devil does echo mean? The garsong says echo to everything!" They were
+excessively curious to know, too, the population of every little town on
+the Cornice, and all its statistics; "perhaps the very last subjects
+within the capacity of the human intellect," remarks Dickens, "that
+would ever present themselves to an Italian steward's mind. He was a
+very willing fellow, our steward; and, having some vague idea that they
+would like a large number, said at hazard fifty thousand, ninety
+thousand, four hundred thousand, when they asked about the population of
+a place not larger than Lincoln's-inn-fields. And when they said _Non
+Possible!_ (which was the leader's invariable reply), he doubled or
+trebled the amount; to meet what he supposed to be their views, and make
+it quite satisfactory."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[90] "I began this letter, my dear friend" (he wrote it from Venice on
+Tuesday night the 12th of November), "with the intention of describing
+my travels as I went on. But I have seen so much, and travelled so hard
+(seldom dining, and being almost always up by candle light), that I must
+reserve my crayons for the greater leisure of the Peschiere after we
+have met, and I have again returned to it. As soon as I have fixed a
+place in my mind, I bolt--at such strange seasons and at such unexpected
+angles, that the brave C stares again. But in this way, and by insisting
+on having everything shewn to me whether or no, and against all
+precedents and orders of proceeding, I get on wonderfully." Two days
+before he had written to me from Ferrara, after the very pretty
+description of the vineyards between Piacenza and Parma which will be
+found in the _Pictures from Italy_ (pp. 203-4): "If you want an antidote
+to this, I may observe that I got up, this moment, to fasten the window;
+and the street looked as like some byeway in Whitechapel--or--I look
+again--like Wych Street, down by the little barber's shop on the same
+side of the way as Holywell Street--or--I look again--as like Holywell
+Street itself--as ever street was like to street, or ever will be, in
+this world."
+
+[91] Four months later, after he had seen the galleries at Rome and the
+other great cities, he sent me a remark which has since had eloquent
+reinforcement from critics of undeniable authority. "The most famous of
+the oil paintings in the Vatican you know through the medium of the
+finest line-engravings in the world; and as to some of them I much
+doubt, if you had seen them with me, whether you might not think you had
+lost little in having only known them hitherto in that translation.
+Where the drawing is poor and meagre, or alloyed by time,--it is so, and
+it must be, often; though no doubt it is a heresy to hint at such a
+thing--the engraving presents the forms and the idea to you, in a simple
+majesty which such defects impair. Where this is not the case, and all
+is stately and harmonious, still it is somehow in the very grain and
+nature of a delicate engraving to suggest to you (I think) the utmost
+delicacy, finish, and refinement, as belonging to the original.
+Therefore, though the Picture in this latter case will greatly charm and
+interest you, it does not take you by surprise. You are quite prepared
+beforehand for the fullest excellence of which it is capable." In the
+same letter he wrote of what remained always a delight in his memory,
+the charm of the more private collections. He found magnificent
+portraits and paintings in the private palaces, where he thought them
+seen to greater advantage than in galleries; because in numbers not so
+large as to distract attention or confuse the eye. "There are portraits
+innumerable by Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt and Vandyke; heads by Guido,
+and Domenichino, and Carlo Dolci; subjects by Raphael, and Correggio,
+and Murillo, and Paul Veronese, and Salvator; which it would be
+difficult indeed to praise too highly, or to praise enough. It is a
+happiness to me to think that they cannot be felt, as they should be
+felt, by the profound connoisseurs who fall into fits upon the longest
+notice and the most unreasonable terms. Such tenderness and grace, such
+noble elevation, purity, and beauty, so shine upon me from some
+well-remembered spots in the walls of these galleries, as to relieve my
+tortured memory from legions of whining friars and waxy holy families. I
+forgive, from the bottom of my soul, whole orchestras of earthy angels,
+and whole groves of St. Sebastians stuck as full of arrows according to
+pattern as a lying-in pincushion is stuck with pins. And I am in no
+humour to quarrel even with that priestly infatuation, or priestly
+doggedness of purpose, which persists in reducing every mystery of our
+religion to some literal development in paint and canvas, equally
+repugnant to the reason and the sentiment of any thinking man."
+
+[92] The last two lines he has printed in the _Pictures_, p. 249,
+"certain of" being inserted before "his employers."
+
+[93] I find the evening mentioned in the diary which Mr. Barham's son
+quotes in his Memoir. "December 5, 1844. Dined at Forster's with Charles
+Dickens, Stanfield, Maclise, and Albany Fonblanque. Dickens read with
+remarkable effect his Christmas story, the _Chimes_, from the
+proofs. . . ." (ii. 191.)
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+LAST MONTHS IN ITALY.
+
+1845.
+
+ Jesuit Interferences--Travel Southward--Carrara
+ and Pisa--A Wild Journey--At Radicofani--A
+ Beggar and his Staff--At Rome--Terracina--Bay
+ of Naples--Lazzaroni--Sad English News--At
+ Florence--Visit to Landor's Villa--At Lord
+ Holland's--Return to Genoa--Italy's Best
+ Season--A Funeral--Nautical Incident--Fireflies
+ at Night--Returning by Switzerland--At
+ Lucerne--Passage of the St. Gothard--Splendour
+ of Swiss Scenery--Swiss Villages.
+
+
+ON the 22nd of December he had resumed his ordinary Genoa life; and of a
+letter from Jeffrey, to whom he had dedicated his little book, he wrote
+as "most energetic and enthusiastic. Filer sticks in his throat rather,
+but all the rest is quivering in his heart. He is very much struck by
+the management of Lilian's story, and cannot help speaking of that;
+writing of it all indeed with the freshness and ardour of youth, and not
+like a man whose blue and yellow has turned grey." Some of its words
+have been already given. "Miss Coutts has sent Charley, with the best of
+letters to me, a Twelfth Cake weighing ninety pounds, magnificently
+decorated; and only think of the characters, Fairburn's Twelfth Night
+characters, being detained at the custom-house for Jesuitical
+surveillance! But these fellows are---- Well! never mind. Perhaps you
+have seen the history of the Dutch minister at Turin, and of the
+spiriting away of his daughter by the Jesuits? It is all true; though,
+like the history of our friend's servant,[94] almost incredible. But
+their devilry is such that I am assured by our consul that if, while we
+are in the south, we were to let our children go out with servants on
+whom we could not implicitly rely, these holy men would trot even their
+small feet into churches with a view to their ultimate conversion! It is
+tremendous even to see them in the streets, or slinking about this
+garden." Of his purpose to start for the south of Italy in the middle of
+January, taking his wife with him, his letter the following week told
+me; dwelling on all he had missed, in that first Italian Christmas, of
+our old enjoyments of the season in England; and closing its pleasant
+talk with a postscript at midnight. "First of January, 1845. Many many
+many happy returns of the day! A life of happy years! The Baby is
+dressed in thunder, lightning, rain, and wind. His birth is most
+portentous here."
+
+It was of ill-omen to me, one of its earliest incidents being my only
+brother's death; but Dickens had a friend's true helpfulness in sorrow,
+and a portion of what he then wrote to me I permit myself to preserve
+in a note[95] for what it relates of his own sad experiences and solemn
+beliefs and hopes. The journey southward began on the 20th January, and
+five days later I had a letter written from La Scala, at a little inn,
+"supported on low brick arches like a British haystack," the bed in
+their room "like a mangle," the ceiling without lath or plaster, nothing
+to speak of available for comfort or decency, and nothing particular to
+eat or drink. "But for all this I have become attached to the country
+and I don't care who knows it." They had left Pisa that morning and
+Carrara the day before: at the latter place an ovation awaiting him, the
+result of the zeal of our eccentric friend Fletcher, who happened to be
+staying there with an English marble-merchant.[96] "There is a beautiful
+little theatre there, built of marble; and they had it illuminated that
+night, in my honour. There was really a very fair opera: but it is
+curious that the chorus has been always, time out of mind, made up of
+labourers in the quarries, who don't know a note of music, and sing
+entirely by ear. It was crammed to excess, and I had a great reception;
+a deputation waiting upon us in the box, and the orchestra turning out
+in a body afterwards and serenading us at Mr. Walton's." Between this
+and Rome they had a somewhat wild journey;[97] and before Radicofani was
+reached, there were disturbing rumours of bandits and even uncomfortable
+whispers as to their night's lodging-place. "I really began to think we
+might have an adventure; and as I had brought (like an ass) a bag of
+Napoleons with me from Genoa, I called up all the theatrical ways of
+letting off pistols that I could call to mind, and was the more disposed
+to fire them from not having any." It ended in no worse adventure,
+however, than a somewhat exciting dialogue with an old professional
+beggar at Radicofani itself, in which he was obliged to confess that he
+came off second-best. It transpired at a little town hanging on a hill
+side, of which the inhabitants, being all of them beggars, had the habit
+of swooping down, like so many birds of prey, upon any carriage that
+approached it.
+
+"Can you imagine" (he named a first-rate bore, for whose name I shall
+substitute) "M. F. G. in a very frowsy brown cloak concealing his whole
+figure, and with very white hair and a very white beard, darting out of
+this place with a long staff in his hand, and begging? There he was,
+whether you can or not; out of breath with the rapidity of his dive, and
+staying with his staff all the Radicofani boys, that he might fight it
+out with me alone. It was very wet, and so was I: for I had kept,
+according to custom, my box-seat. It was blowing so hard that I could
+scarcely stand; and there was a custom-house on the spot, besides. Over
+and above all this, I had no small money; and the brave C never has,
+when I want it for a beggar. When I had excused myself several times, he
+suddenly drew himself up and said, with a wizard look (fancy the
+aggravation of M. F. G. as a wizard!) 'Do you know what you are doing,
+my lord? Do you mean to go on, to-day?' 'Yes,' I said, 'I do.' 'My
+lord,' he said, 'do you know that your vetturino is unacquainted with
+this part of the country; that there is a wind raging on the mountain,
+which will sweep you away; that the courier, the coach, and all the
+passengers, were blown from the road last year; and that the danger is
+great and almost certain?' 'No,' I said, 'I don't.' 'My lord, you don't
+understand me, I think?' 'Yes I do, d---- you!' nettled by this (you
+feel it? I confess it). 'Speak to my servant. It's his business. Not
+mine'--for he really was too like M. F. G. to be borne. If you could
+have seen him!--'Santa Maria, these English lords! It's not their
+business, if they're killed! They leave it to their servants!' He drew
+off the boys; whispered them to keep away from the heretic; and ran up
+the hill again, almost as fast as he had come down. He stopped at a
+little distance as we moved on; and pointing to Roche with his long
+staff cried loudly after me, 'It's _his_ business if you're killed, is
+it, my lord? Ha! ha! ha! whose business is it, when the English lords
+are born! Ha! ha! ha!' The boys taking it up in a shrill yell, I left
+the joke and them at this point. But I must confess that I thought he
+had the best of it. And he had so far reason for what he urged, that
+when we got on the mountain pass the wind became terrific, so that we
+were obliged to take Kate out of the carriage lest she should be blown
+over, carriage and all, and had ourselves to hang on to it, on the windy
+side, to prevent its going Heaven knows where!"
+
+The first impression of Rome was disappointing. It was the evening of
+the 30th of January, and the cloudy sky, dull cold rain, and muddy
+footways, he was prepared for; but he was not prepared for the long
+streets of commonplace shops and houses like Paris or any other capital,
+the busy people, the equipages, the ordinary walkers up and down. "It
+was no more my Rome, degraded and fallen and lying asleep in the sun
+among a heap of ruins, than Lincoln's-inn-fields is. So I really went to
+bed in a very indifferent humour." That all this yielded to later and
+worthier impressions I need hardly say; and he had never in his life, he
+told me afterwards, been so moved or overcome by any sight as by that of
+the Coliseum, "except perhaps by the first contemplation of the Falls of
+Niagara." He went to Naples for the interval before the holy week; and
+his first letter from it was to say that he had found the wonderful
+aspects of Rome before he left, and that for loneliness and grandeur of
+ruin nothing could transcend the southern side of the Campagna. But
+farther and farther south the weather had become worse; and for a week
+before his letter (the 11th of February), the only bright sky he had
+seen was just as the sun was coming up across the sea at Terracina. "Of
+which place, a beautiful one, you can get a very good idea by imagining
+something as totally unlike the scenery in _Fra Diavolo_ as possible."
+He thought the bay less striking at Naples than at Genoa, the shape of
+the latter being more perfect in its beauty, and the smaller size
+enabling you to see it all at once, and feel it more like an exquisite
+picture. The city he conceived the greatest dislike to.[98] "The
+condition of the common people here is abject and shocking. I am afraid
+the conventional idea of the picturesque is associated with such misery
+and degradation that a new picturesque will have to be established as
+the world goes onward. Except Fondi, there is nothing on earth that I
+have seen so dirty as Naples. I don't know what to liken the streets to
+where the mass of the lazzaroni live. You recollect that favourite
+pigstye of mine near Broadstairs? They are more like streets of such
+apartments heaped up story on story, and tumbled house on house, than
+anything else I can think of, at this moment." In a later letter he was
+even less tolerant. "What would I give that you should see the lazzaroni
+as they really are--mere squalid, abject, miserable animals for vermin
+to batten on; slouching, slinking, ugly, shabby, scavenging scarecrows!
+And oh the raffish counts and more than doubtful countesses, the noodles
+and the blacklegs, the good society! And oh the miles of miserable
+streets and wretched occupants,[99] to which Saffron-hill or the
+Borough-mint is a kind of small gentility, which are found to be so
+picturesque by English lords and ladies; to whom the wretchedness left
+behind at home is lowest of the low, and vilest of the vile, and
+commonest of all common things. Well! well! I have often thought that
+one of the best chances of immortality for a writer is in the Death of
+his language, when he immediately becomes good company; and I often
+think here,--What _would_ you say to these people, milady and milord, if
+they spoke out of the homely dictionary of your own 'lower orders.'" He
+was again at Rome on Sunday the second of March.
+
+Sad news from me as to a common and very dear friend awaited him there;
+but it is a subject on which I may not dwell farther than to say that
+there arose from it much to redeem even such a sorrow, and that this I
+could not indicate better than by these wise and tender words from
+Dickens. "No philosophy will bear these dreadful things, or make a
+moment's head against them, but the practical one of doing all the good
+we can, in thought and deed. While we can, God help us! ourselves stray
+from ourselves so easily; and there are all around us such frightful
+calamities besetting the world in which we live; nothing else will carry
+us through it. . . . What a comfort to reflect on what you tell me. Bulwer
+Lytton's conduct is that of a generous and noble-minded man, as I have
+ever thought him. Our dear good Procter too! And Thackeray--how earnest
+they have all been! I am very glad to find you making special mention of
+Charles Lever. I am glad over every name you write. It says something
+for our pursuit, in the midst of all its miserable disputes and
+jealousies, that the common impulse of its followers, in such an
+instance as this, is surely and certainly of the noblest."
+
+After the ceremonies of the holy week, of which the descriptions sent to
+me were reproduced in his book, he went to Florence,[100] which lived
+always afterwards in his memory with Venice, and with Genoa. He thought
+these the three great Italian cities. "There are some places
+here,[101]--oh Heaven how fine! I wish you could see the tower of the
+palazzo Vecchio as it lies before me at this moment, on the opposite
+bank of the Arno! But I will tell you more about it, and about all
+Florence, from my shady arm-chair up among the Peschiere oranges. I
+shall not be sorry to sit down in it again. . . . Poor Hood, poor Hood! I
+still look for his death, and he still lingers on. And Sydney Smith's
+brother gone after poor dear Sydney himself! Maltby will wither when he
+reads it; and poor old Rogers will contradict some young man at dinner,
+every day for three weeks."
+
+Before he left Florence (on the 4th of April) I heard of a "very
+pleasant and very merry day" at Lord Holland's; and I ought to have
+mentioned how much he was gratified, at Naples, by the attentions of the
+English Minister there, Mr. Temple, Lord Palmerston's brother, whom he
+described as a man supremely agreeable, with everything about him in
+perfect taste, and with that truest gentleman-manner which has its root
+in kindness and generosity of nature. He was back at home in the
+Peschiere on Wednesday the ninth of April. Here he continued to write to
+me every week, for as long as he remained, of whatever he had seen: with
+no definite purpose as yet, but the pleasure of interchanging with
+myself the impressions and emotions undergone by him. "Seriously," he
+wrote to me on the 13th of April, "it is a great pleasure to me to find
+that you are really pleased with these shadows in the water, and think
+them worth the looking at. Writing at such odd places, and in such odd
+seasons, I have been half savage with myself, very often, for not doing
+better. But d'Orsay, from whom I had a charming letter three days since,
+seems to think as you do of what he has read in those shown to him, and
+says they remind him vividly of the real aspect of these scenes. . . .
+Well, if we should determine, after we have sat in council, that the
+experiences they relate are to be used, we will call B. and E. to their
+share and voice in the matter." Shortly before he left, the subject was
+again referred to (7th of June). "I am in as great doubt as you about
+the letters I have written you with these Italian experiences. I cannot
+for the life of me devise any plan of using them to my own satisfaction,
+and yet think entirely with you that in some form I ought to use them."
+Circumstances not in his contemplation at this time settled the form
+they ultimately took.
+
+Two more months were to finish his Italian holiday, and I do not think
+he enjoyed any part of it so much as its close. He had formed a real
+friendship for Genoa, was greatly attached to the social circle he had
+drawn round him there, and liked rest after his travel all the more for
+the little excitement of living its activities over again, week by week,
+in these letters to me. And so, from his "shady arm-chair up among the
+Peschiere oranges," I had at regular intervals what he called his
+rambling talk; went over with him again all the roads he had taken; and
+of the more important scenes and cities, such as Venice, Rome, and
+Naples, received such rich filling-in to the first outlines sent, as
+fairly justified the title of _Pictures_ finally chosen for them. The
+weather all the time too had been without a flaw. "Since our return," he
+wrote on the 27th April, "we have had charming spring days. The garden
+is one grove of roses; we have left off fires; and we breakfast and dine
+again in the great hall, with the windows open. To-day we have rain,
+but rain was rather wanted I believe, so it gives offence to nobody. As
+far as I have had an opportunity of judging yet, the spring is the most
+delightful time in this country. But for all that I am looking with
+eagerness to the tenth of June, impatient to renew our happy old walks
+and old talks in dear old home."
+
+Of incidents during these remaining weeks there were few, but such as he
+mentioned had in them points of humour or character still worth
+remembering.[102] Two men were hanged in the city; and two ladies of
+quality, he told me, agreed to keep up for a time a prayer for the souls
+of these two miserable creatures so incessant that Heaven should never
+for a moment be left alone; to which end "they relieved each other"
+after such wise, that, for the whole of the stated time, one of them was
+always on her knees in the cathedral church of San Lorenzo. From which
+he inferred that "a morbid sympathy for criminals is not wholly peculiar
+to England, though it affects more people in that country perhaps than
+in any other."
+
+Of Italian usages to the dead some notices from his letters have been
+given, and he had an example before he left of the way in which they
+affected English residents. A gentleman of his friend Fletcher's
+acquaintance living four miles from Genoa had the misfortune to lose his
+wife; and no attendance on the dead beyond the city gate, nor even any
+decent conveyance, being practicable, the mourner, to whom Fletcher had
+promised nevertheless the sad satisfaction of an English funeral, which
+he had meanwhile taken enormous secret pains to arrange with a small
+Genoese upholsterer, was waited upon, on the appointed morning, by a
+very bright yellow hackney-coach-and-pair driven by a coachman in yet
+brighter scarlet knee-breeches and waistcoat, who wanted to put the
+husband and the body inside together. "They were obliged to leave one of
+the coach-doors open for the accommodation even of the coffin; the
+widower walked beside the carriage to the Protestant cemetery; and
+Fletcher followed on a big grey horse."[103]
+
+Scarlet breeches reappear, not less characteristically, in what his next
+letter told of a couple of English travellers who took possession at
+this time (24th of May) of a portion of the ground floor of the
+Peschiere. They had with them a meek English footman who immediately
+confided to Dickens's servants, among other personal grievances, the
+fact that he was made to do everything, even cooking, in crimson
+breeches; which in a hot climate, he protested, was "a grinding of him
+down." "He is a poor soft country fellow; and his master locks him up at
+night, in a basement room with iron bars to the window. Between which
+our servants poke wine in, at midnight. His master and mistress buy old
+boxes at the curiosity shops, and pass their lives in lining 'em with
+bits of parti-coloured velvet. A droll existence, is it not? We are
+lucky to have had the palace to ourselves until now, but it is so large
+that we never see or hear these people; and I should not have known
+even, if they had not called upon us, that another portion of the ground
+floor had been taken by some friends of old Lady Holland--whom I seem to
+see again, crying about dear Sydney Smith, behind that green screen as
+we last saw her together."[104]
+
+Then came a little incident also characteristic. An English ship of war,
+the Phantom, appeared in the harbour; and from her commander, Sir Henry
+Nicholson, Dickens received, among attentions very pleasant to him, an
+invitation to lunch on board and bring his wife, for whom, at a time
+appointed, a boat was to be sent to the Ponte Reale (the royal bridge).
+But no boat being there at the time, Dickens sent off his servant in
+another boat to the ship to say he feared some mistake. "While we were
+walking up and down a neighbouring piazza in his absence, a brilliant
+fellow in a dark blue shirt with a white hem to it all round the collar,
+regular corkscrew curls, and a face as brown as a berry, comes up to me
+and says 'Beg your pardon sir--Mr. Dickens?' 'Yes.' 'Beg your pardon
+sir, but I'm one of the ship's company of the Phantom sir, cox'en of the
+cap'en's gig sir, she's a lying off the pint sir--been there half an
+hour.' 'Well but my good fellow,' I said, 'you're at the wrong place!'
+'Beg your pardon sir, I was afeerd it was the wrong place sir, but I've
+asked them Genoese here sir, twenty times, if it was Port Real; and they
+knows no more than a dead jackass!'--Isn't it a good thing to have made
+a regular Portsmouth name of it?"
+
+That was in his letter of the 1st June, which began by telling me it had
+been twice begun and twice flung into the basket, so great was his
+indisposition to write as the time for departure came; and which ended
+thus. "The fire-flies at night now, are miraculously splendid; making
+another firmament among the rocks on the seashore, and the vines inland.
+They get into the bedrooms, and fly about, all night, like beautiful
+little lamps.[105]. . . I have surrendered much I had fixed my heart
+upon, as you know, admitting you have had reason for not coming to us
+here: but I stand by the hope that you and Mac will come and meet us at
+Brussels; it being so very easy. A day or two there, and at Antwerp,
+would be very happy for us; and we could still dine in Lincoln's-inn-fields
+on the day of arrival." I had been unable to join him in Genoa, urgently
+as he had wished it: but what is said here was done, and Jerrold was
+added to the party.
+
+His last letter from Genoa was written on the 7th of June, not from the
+Peschiere, but from a neighbouring palace, "Brignole Rosso," into which
+he had fled from the miseries of moving. "They are all at sixes and
+sevens up at the Peschiere, as you may suppose; and Roche is in a
+condition of tremendous excitement, engaged in settling the inventory
+with the house-agent, who has just told me he is the devil himself. I
+had been appealed to, and had contented myself with this expression of
+opinion. 'Signor Noli, you are an old impostor!' 'Illustrissimo,' said
+Signor Noli in reply, 'your servant is the devil himself: sent on earth
+to torture me.' I look occasionally towards the Peschiere (it is visible
+from this room), expecting to see one of them flying out of a window.
+Another great cause of commotion is, that they have been paving the lane
+by which the house is approached, ever since we returned from Rome. We
+have not been able to get the carriage up since that time, in
+consequence; and unless they finish to-night, it can't be packed in the
+garden, but the things will have to be brought down in baskets,
+piecemeal, and packed in the street. To avoid this inconvenient
+necessity, the Brave made proposals of bribery to the paviours last
+night, and induced them to pledge themselves that the carriage should
+come up at seven this evening. The manner of doing that sort of paving
+work here, is to take a pick or two with an axe, and then lie down to
+sleep for an hour. When I came out, the Brave had issued forth to
+examine the ground; and was standing alone in the sun among a heap of
+prostrate figures: with a Great Despair depicted in his face, which it
+would be hard to surpass. It was like a picture--'After the
+Battle'--Napoleon by the Brave: Bodies by the Paviours."
+
+He came home by the Great St. Gothard, and was quite carried away by
+what he saw of Switzerland. The country was so divine that he should
+have wondered indeed if its sons and daughters had ever been other than
+a patriotic people. Yet, infinitely above the country he had left as he
+ranked it in its natural splendours, there was something more enchanting
+than these that he lost in leaving Italy; and he expressed this
+delightfully in the letter from Lucerne (14th of June) which closes the
+narrative of his Italian life.
+
+"We came over the St. Gothard, which has been open only eight days. The
+road is cut through the snow, and the carriage winds along a narrow path
+between two massive snow walls, twenty feet high or more. Vast plains of
+snow range up the mountain-sides above the road, itself seven thousand
+feet above the sea; and tremendous waterfalls, hewing out arches for
+themselves in the vast drifts, go thundering down from precipices into
+deep chasms, here and there and everywhere: the blue water tearing
+through the white snow with an awful beauty that is most sublime. The
+pass itself, the mere pass over the top, is not so fine, I think, as the
+Simplon; and there is no plain upon the summit, for the moment it is
+reached the descent begins. So that the loneliness and wildness of the
+Simplon are not equalled _there_. But being much higher, the ascent and
+the descent range over a much greater space of country; and on both
+sides there are places of terrible grandeur, unsurpassable, I should
+imagine, in the world. The Devil's Bridge, terrific! The whole descent
+between Andermatt (where we slept on Friday night) and Altdorf, William
+Tell's town, which we passed through yesterday afternoon, is the highest
+sublimation of all you can imagine in the way of Swiss scenery. Oh God!
+what a beautiful country it is! How poor and shrunken, beside it, is
+Italy in its brightest aspect!
+
+"I look upon the coming down from the Great St. Gothard with a carriage
+and four horses and only one postilion, as the most dangerous thing that
+a carriage and horses can do. We had two great wooden logs for drags,
+and snapped them both like matches. The road is like a geometrical
+staircase, with horrible depths beneath it; and at every turn it is a
+toss-up, or seems to be, whether the leaders shall go round or over. The
+lives of the whole party may depend upon a strap in the harness; and if
+we broke our rotten harness once yesterday, we broke it at least a dozen
+times. The difficulty of keeping the horses together in the continual
+and steep circle, is immense. They slip and slide, and get their legs
+over the traces, and are dragged up against the rocks; carriage, horses,
+harness, all a confused heap. The Brave, and I, and the postilion, were
+constantly at work, in extricating the whole concern from a tangle, like
+a skein of thread. We broke two thick iron chains, and crushed the box
+of a wheel, as it was; and the carriage is now undergoing repair, under
+the window, on the margin of the lake: where a woman in short
+petticoats, a stomacher, and two immensely long tails of black hair
+hanging down her back very nearly to her heels, is looking
+on--apparently dressed for a melodrama, but in reality a waitress at
+this establishment.
+
+"If the Swiss villages look beautiful to me in winter, their summer
+aspect is most charming: most fascinating: most delicious. Shut in by
+high mountains capped with perpetual snow; and dotting a rich carpet of
+the softest turf, overshadowed by great trees; they seem so many little
+havens of refuge from the troubles and miseries of great towns. The
+cleanliness of the little baby-houses of inns is wonderful to those who
+come from Italy. But the beautiful Italian manners, the sweet language,
+the quick recognition of a pleasant look or cheerful word; the
+captivating expression of a desire to oblige in everything; are left
+behind the Alps. Remembering them, I sigh for the dirt again: the brick
+floors, bare walls, unplaistered ceilings, and broken windows."
+
+We met at Brussels; Maclise, Jerrold, myself, and the travellers; passed
+a delightful week in Flanders together; and were in England at the close
+of June.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[94] In a previous letter he had told me that history. "Apropos of
+servants, I must tell you of a child-bearing handmaiden of some friends
+of ours, a thorough out and outer, who, by way of expiating her sins,
+caused herself, the other day, to be received into the bosom of the
+infallible church. She had two marchionesses for her sponsors; and she
+is heralded in the Genoa newspapers as Miss B--, an English lady, who
+has repented of her errors and saved her soul alive."
+
+[95] "I feel the distance between us now, indeed. I would to Heaven, my
+dearest friend, that I could remind you in a manner more lively and
+affectionate than this dull sheet of paper can put on, that you have a
+Brother left. One bound to you by ties as strong as ever Nature forged.
+By ties never to be broken, weakened, changed in any way--but to be
+knotted tighter up, if that be possible, until the same end comes to
+them as has come to these. That end but the bright beginning of a
+happier union, I believe; and have never more strongly and religiously
+believed (and oh! Forster, with what a sore heart I have thanked God for
+it) than when that shadow has fallen on my own hearth, and made it cold
+and dark as suddenly as in the home of that poor girl you tell me of. . . .
+When you write to me again, the pain of this will have passed. No
+consolation can be so certain and so lasting to you as that softened and
+manly sorrow which springs up from the memory of the Dead. I read your
+heart as easily as if I held it in my hand, this moment. And I know--I
+_know_, my dear friend--that before the ground is green above him, you
+will be content that what was capable of death in him, should lie
+there. . . . I am glad to think it was so easy, and full of peace. What can
+we hope for more, when our own time comes!--The day when he visited us
+in our old house is as fresh to me as if it had been yesterday. I
+remember him as well as I remember you. . . . I have many things to say,
+but cannot say them now. Your attached and loving friend for life, and
+far, I hope, beyond it. C. D." (8th of January, 1845.)
+
+[96] "A Yorkshireman, who talks Yorkshire Italian with the drollest and
+pleasantest effect; a jolly, hospitable excellent fellow; as odd yet
+kindly a mixture of shrewdness and simplicity as I have ever seen. He is
+the only Englishman in these parts who has been able to erect an English
+household out of Italian servants, but he has done it to admiration. It
+would be a capital country-house at home; and for staying in
+'first-rate.' (I find myself inadvertently quoting _Tom Thumb_.) Mr.
+Walton is a man of an extraordinarily kind heart, and has a
+compassionate regard for Fletcher to whom his house is open as a home,
+which is half affecting and half ludicrous. He paid the other day a
+hundred pounds for him, which he knows he will never see a penny of
+again." C. D. to J. F. (25th of January, 1845.)
+
+[97] "Do you think," he wrote from Ronciglione on the 29th January, "in
+your state room, when the fog makes your white blinds yellow, and the
+wind howls in the brick and mortar gulf behind that square perspective,
+with a middle distance of two ladder-tops and a background of Drury-lane
+sky--when the wind howls, I say, as if its eldest brother, born in
+Lincoln's-inn-fields, had gone to sea and was making a fortune on the
+Atlantic--at such times do you ever think of houseless Dick?"
+
+[98] He makes no mention in his book of the pauper burial-place at
+Naples, to which the reference made in his letters is striking enough
+for preservation. "In Naples, the burying place of the poor people is a
+great paved yard with three hundred and sixty-five pits in it: every one
+covered by a square stone which is fastened down. One of these pits is
+opened every night in the year; the bodies of the pauper dead are
+collected in the city; brought out in a cart (like that I told you of at
+Rome); and flung in, uncoffined. Some lime is then cast down into the
+pit; and it is sealed up until a year is past, and its turn again comes
+round. Every night there is a pit opened; and every night that same pit
+is sealed up again, for a twelvemonth. The cart has a red lamp attached,
+and at about ten o'clock at night you see it glaring through the streets
+of Naples: stopping at the doors of hospitals and prisons, and such
+places, to increase its freight: and then rattling off again. Attached
+to the new cemetery (a very pretty one, and well kept: immeasurably
+better in all respects than Pere-la-Chaise) there is another similar
+yard, but not so large.". . . In connection with the same subject he adds:
+"About Naples, the dead are borne along the street, uncovered, on an
+open bier; which is sometimes hoisted on a sort of palanquin, covered
+with a cloth of scarlet and gold. This exposure of the deceased is not
+peculiar to that part of Italy; for about midway between Rome and Genoa
+we encountered a funeral procession attendant on the body of a woman,
+which was presented in its usual dress, to my eyes (looking from my
+elevated seat on the box of a travelling carriage) as if she were alive,
+and resting on her bed. An attendant priest was chanting lustily--and as
+badly as the priests invariably do. Their noise is horrible. . . ."
+
+[99] "Thackeray praises the people of Italy for being kind to brutes.
+There is probably no country in the world where they are treated with
+such frightful cruelty. It is universal." (Naples, 2nd. Feb. 1845.)
+Emphatic confirmation of this remark has been lately given by the Naples
+correspondent of the _Times_, writing under date of February 1872.
+
+[100] The reader will perhaps think with me that what he noticed, on the
+roads in Tuscany more than in any others, of wayside crosses and
+religious memorials, may be worth preserving. . . . "You know that in the
+streets and corners of roads, there are all sorts of crosses and similar
+memorials to be seen in Italy. The most curious are, I think, in
+Tuscany. There is very seldom a figure on the cross, though there is
+sometimes a face; but they are remarkable for being garnished with
+little models in wood of every possible object that can be connected
+with the Saviour's death. The cock that crowed when Peter had denied his
+master thrice, is generally perched on the tip-top; and an
+ornithological phenomenon he always is. Under him is the inscription.
+Then, hung on to the cross-beam, are the spear, the reed with the sponge
+of vinegar and water at the end, the coat without seam for which the
+soldiers cast lots, the dice-box with which they threw for it, the
+hammer that drove in the nails, the pincers that pulled them out, the
+ladder which was set against the cross, the crown of thorns, the
+instrument of flagellation, the lantern with which Mary went to the
+tomb--I suppose; I can think of no other--and the sword with which Peter
+smote the high priest's servant. A perfect toyshop of little objects;
+repeated at every four or five miles all along the highway."
+
+[101] Of his visit to Fiesole I have spoken in my LIFE OF LANDOR. "Ten
+years after Landor had lost this home, an Englishman travelling in
+Italy, his friend and mine, visited the neighbourhood for his sake,
+drove out from Florence to Fiesole, and asked his coachman which was the
+villa in which the Landor family lived. 'He was a dull dog, and pointed
+to Boccaccio's. I didn't believe him. He was so deuced ready that I knew
+he lied. I went up to the convent, which is on a height, and was leaning
+over a dwarf wall basking in the noble view over a vast range of hill
+and valley, when a little peasant girl came up and began to point out
+the localities. _Ecco la villa Landora!_ was one of the first half-dozen
+sentences she spoke. My heart swelled as Landor's would have done when I
+looked down upon it, nestling among its olive-trees and vines, and with
+its upper windows (there are five above the door) open to the setting
+sun. Over the centre of these there is another story, set upon the
+housetop like a tower; and all Italy, except its sea, is melted down
+into the glowing landscape it commands. I plucked a leaf of ivy from the
+convent-garden as I looked; and here it is. 'For Landor. With my love.'
+So wrote Mr. Dickens to me from Florence on the and of April 1845; and
+when I turned over Landor's papers in the same month after an interval
+of exactly twenty years, the ivy-leaf was found carefully enclosed, with
+the letter in which I had sent it." Dickens had asked him before leaving
+what he would most wish to have in remembrance of Italy. "An ivy-leaf
+from Fiesole," said Landor.
+
+[102] One message sent me, though all to whom it refers have now passed
+away, I please myself by thinking may still, where he might most have
+desired it, be the occasion of pleasure. ". . . Give my love to Colden,
+and tell him if he leaves London before I return I will ever more
+address him and speak of him as _Colonel_ Colden. Kate sends _her_ love
+to him also, and we both entreat him to say all the affectionate things
+he can spare for third parties--using so many himself--when he writes to
+Mrs. Colden: whom you ought to know, for she, as I have often told you,
+is BRILLIANT. I would go five hundred miles to see her for five minutes.
+I am deeply grieved by poor Felton's loss. His letter is manly, and of a
+most rare kind in the dignified composure and silence of his sorrow."
+(See Vol. I. p. 315).
+
+[103] "It matters little now," says Dickens, after describing this
+incident in one of his minor writings, "for coaches of all colours are
+alike to poor Kindheart, and he rests far north of the little cemetery
+with the cypress trees, by the city walls where the Mediterranean is so
+beautiful." What was said on a former page (_ante_, 182) may here be
+completed by a couple of stories told to Dickens by Mr. Walton,
+suggestive strongly of the comment that it required indeed a kind heart
+and many attractive qualities (which undoubtedly Fletcher possessed) to
+render tolerable such eccentricities. Dickens made one of these stories
+wonderfully amusing. It related the introduction by Fletcher of an
+unknown Englishman to the marble-merchant's house; the stay there of the
+Englishman, unasked, for ten days; and finally the walking off of the
+Englishman in a shirt, pair of stockings, neckcloth, pocket-handkerchief,
+and other etceteras belonging to Mr. Walton, which never reappeared
+after that hour. On another occasion, Fletcher confessed to Mr. Walton
+his having given a bill to a man in Carrara for L30; and the
+marble-merchant having asked, "And pray, Fletcher, have you arranged to
+meet it when it falls due?" Fletcher at once replied, "Yes," and to the
+marble-merchant's farther enquiry "how?" added, in his politest manner,
+"I have arranged to blow my brains out the day before!" The poor fellow
+did afterwards almost as much self-violence without intending it, dying
+of fever caught in night-wanderings through Liverpool half-clothed amid
+storms of rain.
+
+[104] Sydney died on the 22nd of February ('45), in his 77th year.
+
+[105] A remark on this, made in my reply, elicited what follows in a
+letter during his travel home: "Odd enough that remark of yours. I had
+been wondering at Rome that Juvenal (which I have been always lugging
+out of a bag, on all occasions) never used the fire-flies for an
+illustration. But even now, they are only partially seen; and no where I
+believe in such enormous numbers as on the Mediterranean coast-road,
+between Genoa and Spezzia. I will ascertain for curiosity's sake,
+whether there are any at this time in Rome, or between it and the
+country-house of Maecenas--on the ground of Horace's journey. I know
+there is a place on the French side of Genoa, where they begin at a
+particular boundary-line, and are never seen beyond it. . . . All wild to
+see you at Brussels! What a meeting we will have, please God!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+AGAIN IN ENGLAND. 1845-1846.
+
+ Proposed Weekly Paper--Christmas Book of
+ 1845--Stage Studies--Private
+ Theatricals--Dickens as Performer and as
+ Manager--Second Raven's Death--Busy with the
+ _Cricket_--Disturbing Engagements--Prospectus
+ written by him--New Book to be written in
+ Switzerland--Leaves England.
+
+
+HIS first letter after again taking possession of Devonshire-terrace
+revived a subject on which opinions had been from time to time
+interchanged during his absence, and to which there was allusion in the
+agreement executed before his departure. The desire was still as strong
+with him as when he started _Master Humphrey's Clock_ to establish a
+periodical, that, while relieving his own pen by enabling him to receive
+frequent help from other writers, might yet retain always the popularity
+of his name. "I really think I have an idea, and not a bad one, for the
+periodical. I have turned it over, the last two days, very much in my
+mind: and think it positively good. I incline still to weekly; price
+three halfpence, if possible; partly original, partly select; notices of
+books, notices of theatres, notices of all good things, notices of all
+bad ones; _Carol_ philosophy, cheerful views, sharp anatomization of
+humbug, jolly good temper; papers always in season, pat to the time of
+year; and a vein of glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming
+reference in everything to Home, and Fireside. And I would call it,
+sir,--
+
+ --------------------------------------------------------
+ | |
+ | THE CRICKET. |
+ | |
+ | A cheerful creature that chirrups on the Hearth. |
+ | |
+ | _Natural History._ |
+ | |
+ --------------------------------------------------------
+
+"Now, don't decide hastily till you've heard what I would do. I would
+come out, sir, with a prospectus on the subject of the Cricket that
+should put everybody in a good temper, and make such a dash at people's
+fenders and arm-chairs as hasn't been made for many a long day. I could
+approach them in a different mode under this name, and in a more winning
+and immediate way, than under any other. I would at once sit down upon
+their very hobs; and take a personal and confidential position with them
+which should separate me, instantly, from all other periodicals
+periodically published, and supply a distinct and sufficient reason for
+my coming into existence. And I would chirp, chirp, chirp away in every
+number until I chirped it up to----well, you shall say how many hundred
+thousand! . . . Seriously, I feel a capacity in this name and notion which
+appears to give us a tangible starting-point, and a real, defined,
+strong, genial drift and purpose. I seem to feel that it is an aim and
+name which people would readily and pleasantly connect with _me_; and
+that, for a good course and a clear one, instead of making circles
+pigeon-like at starting, here we should be safe. I think the general
+recognition would be likely to leap at it; and of the helpful
+associations that could be clustered round the idea at starting, and the
+pleasant tone of which the working of it is susceptible, I have not the
+smallest doubt. . . . But you shall determine. What do you think? And what
+do you say? The chances are, that it will either strike you instantly,
+or not strike you at all. Which is it, my dear fellow? You know I am not
+bigoted to the first suggestions of my own fancy; but you know also
+exactly how I should use such a lever, and how much power I should find
+in it. Which is it? What do you say?--I have not myself said half
+enough. Indeed I have said next to nothing; but like the parrot in the
+negro-story, I 'think a dam deal.'"
+
+My objection, incident more or less to every such scheme, was the risk
+of losing its general advantage by making it too specially dependent on
+individual characteristics; but there was much in favour of the present
+notion, and its plan had been modified so far, in the discussions that
+followed, as to involve less absolute personal identification with
+Dickens,--when discussion, project, everything was swept away by a
+larger scheme, in its extent and its danger more suitable to the wild
+and hazardous enterprises of that prodigious year (1845) of excitement
+and disaster. In this more tremendous adventure, already hinted at on a
+previous page, we all became involved; and the chirp of the Cricket,
+delayed in consequence until Christmas, was heard then in circumstances
+quite other than those that were first intended. The change he thus
+announced to me about half way through the summer, in the same letter
+which told me the success of d'Orsay's kind exertion to procure a fresh
+engagement for his courier Roche.[106] "What do you think of a notion
+that has occurred to me in connection with our abandoned little weekly?
+It would be a delicate and beautiful fancy for a Christmas book, making
+the Cricket a little household god--silent in the wrong and sorrow of
+the tale, and loud again when all went well and happy." The reader will
+not need to be told that thus originated the story of the _Cricket on
+the Hearth_, a Fairy Tale of Home, which had a great popularity in the
+Christmas days of 1845. Its sale at the outset doubled that of both its
+predecessors.
+
+But as yet the larger adventure has not made itself known, and the
+interval was occupied with the private play of which the notion had been
+started between us at his visit in December, and which cannot now be
+better introduced than by a passage of autobiography. This belongs to
+his early life, but I overlooked it when engaged on that portion of the
+memoir; and the accident gives it now a more appropriate place. For,
+though the facts related belong to the interval described in the chapter
+on his school-days and start in life, when he had to pass nearly two
+years as a reporter for one of the offices in Doctors' Commons, the
+influences and character it illustrates had their strongest expression
+at this later time. I had asked him, after his return to Genoa, whether
+he continued to think that we should have the play; and this was his
+reply. It will startle and interest the reader, and I must confess that
+it took myself by surprise; for I did not thus early know the story of
+his boyish years, and I thought it strange that he could have concealed
+from me so much.
+
+"ARE we to have that play??? Have I spoken of it, ever since I came home
+from London, as a settled thing! I do not know if I have ever told you
+seriously, but I have often thought, that I should certainly have been
+as successful on the boards as I have been between them. I assure you,
+when I was on the stage at Montreal (not having played for years) I was
+as much astonished at the reality and ease, to myself, of what I did as
+if I had been another man. See how oddly things come about! When I was
+about twenty, and knew three or four successive years of Mathews's At
+Homes from sitting in the pit to hear them, I wrote to Bartley who was
+stage manager at Covent-garden, and told him how young I was, and
+exactly what I thought I could do; and that I believed I had a strong
+perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing
+in my own person what I observed in others. There must have been
+something in the letter that struck the authorities, for Bartley wrote
+to me, almost immediately, to say that they were busy getting up the
+_Hunchback_ (so they were!) but that they would communicate with me
+again, in a fortnight. Punctual to the time, another letter came: with
+an appointment to do anything of Mathews's I pleased, before him and
+Charles Kemble, on a certain day at the theatre. My sister Fanny was in
+the secret, and was to go with me to play the songs. I was laid up, when
+the day came, with a terrible bad cold and an inflammation of the face;
+the beginning, by the bye, of that annoyance in one ear to which I am
+subject at this day. I wrote to say so, and added that I would resume my
+application next season. I made a great splash in the gallery soon
+afterwards; the _Chronicle_ opened to me; I had a distinction in the
+little world of the newspaper, which made me like it; began to write;
+didn't want money; had never thought of the stage, but as a means of
+getting it; gradually left off turning my thoughts that way; and never
+resumed the idea. I never told you this, did I? See how near I may have
+been, to another sort of life.
+
+"This was at the time when I was at Doctors' Commons as a shorthand
+writer for the proctors. And I recollect I wrote the letter from a
+little office I had there, where the answer came also. It wasn't a very
+good living (though not a _very_ bad one), and was wearily uncertain;
+which made me think of the Theatre in quite a business-like way. I went
+to some theatre every night, with a very few exceptions, for at least
+three years: really studying the bills first, and going to where there
+was the best acting: and always to see Mathews whenever he played. I
+practised immensely (even such things as walking in and out, and sitting
+down in a chair): often four, five, six hours a day: shut up in my own
+room, or walking about in the fields. I prescribed to myself, too, a
+sort of Hamiltonian system for learning parts; and learnt a great
+number. I haven't even lost the habit now, for I knew my Canadian parts
+immediately, though they were new to me. I must have done a good deal:
+for, just as Macready found me out, they used to challenge me at
+Braham's: and Yates, who was knowing enough in those things, wasn't to
+be parried at all. It was just the same, that day at Keeley's, when they
+were getting up the _Chuzzlewit_ last June.
+
+"If you think Macready would be interested in this Strange news from the
+South, tell it him. Fancy Bartley or Charles Kemble _now_! And how
+little they suspect me!" In the later letter from Lucerne written as he
+was travelling home, he adds: "_Did_ I ever tell you the details of my
+theatrical idea, before? Strange, that I should have quite forgotten it.
+I had an odd fancy, when I was reading the unfortunate little farce at
+Covent-garden, that Bartley looked as if some struggling recollection
+and connection were stirring up within him--but it may only have been
+his doubts of that humorous composition." The last allusion is to the
+farce of the _Lamplighter_ which he read in the Covent-garden
+green-room, and to which former allusion was made in speaking of his
+wish to give help to Macready's managerial enterprise.
+
+_What Might have Been_ is a history of too little profit to be worth
+anybody's writing, and here there is no call even to regret how great
+an actor was in Dickens lost. He took to a higher calling, but it
+included the lower. There was no character created by him into which
+life and reality were not thrown with such vividness, that the thing
+written did not seem to his readers the thing actually done, whether the
+form of disguise put on by the enchanter was Mrs. Gamp, Tom Pinch, Mr.
+Squeers, or Fagin the Jew. He had the power of projecting himself into
+shapes and suggestions of his fancy which is one of the marvels of
+creative imagination, and what he desired to express he became. The
+assumptions of the theatre have the same method at a lower pitch,
+depending greatly on personal accident; but the accident as much as the
+genius favoured Dickens, and another man's conception underwent in his
+acting the process which in writing he applied to his own. Into both he
+flung himself with the passionate fullness of his nature; and though the
+theatre had limits for him that may be named hereafter, and he was
+always greater in quickness of assumption than in steadiness of
+delineation, there was no limit to his delight and enjoyment in the
+adventures of our theatrical holiday.
+
+In less than three weeks after his return we had selected our play, cast
+our parts, and all but engaged our theatre; as I find by a note from my
+friend of the 22nd of July, in which the good natured laugh can give now
+no offence, since all who might have objected to it have long gone from
+us. Fanny Kelly, the friend of Charles Lamb, and a genuine successor to
+the old school of actresses in which the Mrs. Orgers and Miss Popes were
+bred, was not more delightful on the stage than impracticable when off,
+and the little theatre in Dean-street which the Duke of Devonshire's
+munificence had enabled her to build, and which with any ordinary good
+sense might handsomely have realized both its uses, as a private school
+for young actresses and a place of public amusement, was made useless
+for both by her mere whims and fancies. "Heavens! Such a scene as I have
+had with Miss Kelly here, this morning! She wanted us put off until the
+theatre should be cleaned and brushed up a bit, and she would and she
+would not, for she is eager to have us and alarmed when she thinks of
+us. By the foot of Pharaoh, it was a great scene! Especially when she
+choked, and had the glass of water brought. She exaggerates the
+importance of our occupation, dreads the least prejudice against the
+establishment in the minds of any of our company, says the place already
+has quite ruined her, and with tears in her eyes protests that any jokes
+at her additional expense in print would drive her mad. By the body of
+Caesar, the scene was incredible! It's like a preposterous dream."
+Something of our play is disclosed by the oaths a la Bobadil, and of our
+actors by "the jokes" poor Miss Kelly was afraid of. We had chosen EVERY
+MAN IN HIS HUMOUR, with special regard to the singleness and
+individuality of the "humours" portrayed in it; and our company included
+the leaders of a journal then in its earliest years, but already not
+more renowned as the most successful joker of jokes yet known in
+England, than famous for that exclusive use of its laughter and satire
+for objects the highest or most harmless which makes it still so
+enjoyable a companion to mirth-loving right-minded men. Maclise took
+earnest part with us, and was to have acted, but fell away on the eve of
+the rehearsals; and Stanfield, who went so far as to rehearse Downright
+twice, then took fright and also ran away:[107] but Jerrold, who played
+Master Stephen, brought with him Lemon, who took Brainworm; Leech, to
+whom Master Matthew was given; A'Beckett, who had condescended to the
+small part of William; and Mr. Leigh, who had Oliver Cob. I played
+Kitely, and Bobadil fell to Dickens, who took upon him the redoubtable
+Captain long before he stood in his dress at the footlights; humouring
+the completeness of his assumption by talking and writing Bobadil, till
+the dullest of our party were touched and stirred to something of his
+own heartiness of enjoyment. One or two hints of these have been given,
+and I will only add to them his refusal of my wish that he should go and
+see some special performance of the Gamester. "Man of the House.
+_Gamester!_ By the foot of Pharaoh, I will _not_ see the _Gamester_. Man
+shall not force, nor horses drag, this poor gentleman-like carcass into
+the presence of the _Gamester_. I have said it. . . . The player Mac hath
+bidden me to eat and likewise drink with him, thyself, and short-necked
+Fox to-night--An' I go not, I am a hog, and not a soldier. But an' thou
+goest not--Beware citizen! Look to it. . . . Thine as thou meritest.
+BOBADIL (Captain). Unto Master Kitely. These."
+
+The play was played on the 21st of September with a success that out-ran
+the wildest expectation; and turned our little enterprise into one of
+the small sensations of the day. The applause of the theatre found so
+loud an echo in the press, that for the time nothing else was talked
+about in private circles; and after a week or two we had to yield (we
+did not find it difficult) to a pressure of demand for more public
+performance in a larger theatre, by which a useful charity received
+important help, and its committee showed their gratitude by an
+entertainment to us at the Clarendon, a month or two later, when Lord
+Lansdowne took the chair. There was also another performance by us at
+the same theatre, before the close of the year, of a play by Beaumont
+and Fletcher. I may not farther indicate the enjoyments that attended
+the success, and gave always to the first of our series of performances
+a pre-eminently pleasant place in memory.
+
+Of the thing itself, however, it is necessary to be said that a modicum
+of merit goes a long way in all such matters, and it would not be safe
+now to assume that ours was much above the average of amateur attempts
+in general. Lemon certainly had most of the stuff, conventional as well
+as otherwise, of a regular actor in him, but this was not of a high
+kind; and though Dickens had the title to be called a born comedian, the
+turn for it being in his very nature, his strength was rather in the
+vividness and variety of his assumptions, than in the completeness,
+finish, or ideality he could give to any part of them. It is expressed
+exactly by what he says of his youthful preference for the
+representations of the elder Mathews. At the same time this was in
+itself so thoroughly genuine and enjoyable, and had in it such quickness
+and keenness of insight, that of its kind it was unrivalled; and it
+enabled him to present in Bobadil, after a richly coloured picture of
+bombastical extravagance and comic exaltation in the earlier scenes, a
+contrast in the later of tragical humility and abasement, that had a
+wonderful effect. But greatly as his acting contributed to the success
+of the night, this was nothing to the service he had rendered as
+manager. It would be difficult to describe it. He was the life and soul
+of the entire affair. I never seemed till then to have known his
+business capabilities. He took everything on himself, and did the whole
+of it without an effort. He was stage-director, very often
+stage-carpenter, scene-arranger, property-man, prompter, and
+band-master. Without offending any one he kept every one in order. For
+all he had useful suggestions, and the dullest of clays under his
+potter's hand were transformed into little bits of porcelain. He
+adjusted scenes, assisted carpenters, invented costumes, devised
+playbills, wrote out calls, and enforced as well as exhibited in his
+proper person everything of which he urged the necessity on others. Such
+a chaos of dirt, confusion, and noise, as the little theatre was the day
+we entered it, and such a cosmos as he made it of cleanliness, order,
+and silence, before the rehearsals were over! There were only two
+things left as we found them, bits of humanity both, understood from
+the first as among the fixtures of the place: a Man in a Straw Hat,
+tall, and very fitful in his exits and entrances, of whom we never could
+pierce the mystery, whether he was on guard or in possession, or what he
+was; and a solitary little girl, who flitted about so silently among our
+actors and actresses that she might have been deaf and dumb but for
+sudden small shrieks and starts elicited by the wonders going on, which
+obtained for her the name of Fireworks. There is such humorous allusion
+to both in a letter of Dickens's of a year's later date, on the occasion
+of the straw-hatted mystery revealing itself as a gentleman in training
+for the tragic stage, that it may pleasantly close for the present our
+private theatricals.
+
+"OUR STRAW-HATTED FRIEND from Miss Kelly's! Oh my stars! To think of
+him, all that time--Macbeth in disguise; Richard the Third grown
+straight; Hamlet as he appeared on his seavoyage to England. What an
+artful villain he must be, never to have made any sign of the melodrama
+that was in him! What a wicked-minded and remorseless Iago to have seen
+you doing Kitely night after night! raging to murder you and seize the
+part! Oh fancy Miss Kelly 'getting him up' in Macbeth. Good Heaven! what
+a mass of absurdity must be shut up sometimes within the walls of that
+small theatre in Dean-street! FIREWORKS will come out shortly, depend
+upon it, in the dumb line; and will relate her history in profoundly
+unintelligible motions that will be translated into long and complicated
+descriptions by a grey-headed father, and a red-wigged countryman, his
+son. You remember the dumb dodge of relating an escape from captivity?
+Clasping the left wrist with the right hand, and the right wrist with
+the left hand--alternately (to express chains)--and then going round and
+round the stage very fast, and coming hand over hand down an imaginary
+cord; at the end of which there is one stroke on the drum, and a
+kneeling to the chandelier? If Fireworks can't do that--and won't
+somewhere--I'm a Dutchman."
+
+Graver things now claim a notice which need not be proportioned to their
+gravity, because, though they had an immediate effect on Dickens's
+fortunes, they do not otherwise form part of his story. But first let me
+say, he was at Broadstairs for three weeks in the autumn;[108] we had
+the private play on his return; and a month later, on the 28th of
+October, a sixth child and fourth son, named Alfred Tennyson after his
+godfathers d'Orsay and Tennyson, was born in Devonshire-terrace. A death
+in the family followed, the older and more gifted of his ravens having
+indulged the same illicit taste for putty and paint which had been fatal
+to his predecessor. Voracity killed him, as it killed Scott's. He died
+unexpectedly before the kitchen-fire. "He kept his eye to the last upon
+the meat as it roasted, and suddenly turned over on his back with a
+sepulchral cry of _Cuckoo_!" The letter which told me this (31st of
+October) announced to me also that he was at a dead lock in his
+Christmas story: "Sick, bothered and depressed. Visions of Brighton come
+upon me; and I have a great mind to go there to finish my second part,
+or to Hampstead. I have a desperate thought of Jack Straw's. I never was
+in such bad writing cue as I am this week, in all my life." The reason
+was not far to seek. In the preparation for the proposed new Daily Paper
+to which reference has been made, he was now actively assisting, and had
+all but consented to the publication of his name.
+
+I entertained at this time, for more than one powerful reason, the
+greatest misgiving of his intended share in the adventure. It was not
+fully revealed until later on what difficult terms, physical as well as
+mental, Dickens held the tenure of his imaginative life; but already I
+knew enough to doubt the wisdom of what he was at present undertaking.
+In all intellectual labour, his will prevailed so strongly when he fixed
+it on any object of desire, that what else its attainment might exact
+was never duly measured; and this led to frequent strain and unconscious
+waste of what no man could less afford to spare. To the world gladdened
+by his work, its production might always have seemed quite as easy as
+its enjoyment; but it may be doubted if ever any man's mental effort
+cost him more. His habits were robust, but not his health; that secret
+had been disclosed to me before he went to America; and to the last he
+refused steadily to admit the enormous price he had paid for his
+triumphs and successes. The morning after his last note I heard again.
+"I have been so very unwell this morning, with giddiness, and headache,
+and botheration of one sort or other, that I didn't get up till noon:
+and, shunning Fleet-street" (the office of the proposed new paper), "am
+now going for a country walk, in the course of which you will find me,
+if you feel disposed to come away in the carriage that goes to you with
+this. It is to call for a pull of the first part of the _Cricket_, and
+will bring you, if you like, by way of Hampstead to me, and subsequently
+to dinner. There is much I should like to discuss, if you can manage it.
+It's the loss of my walks, I suppose; but I am as giddy as if I were
+drunk, and can hardly see." I gave far from sufficient importance at the
+time to the frequency of complaints of this kind, or to the recurrence,
+at almost regular periods after the year following the present, of
+those spasms in the side of which he has recorded an instance in the
+recollections of his childhood, and of which he had an attack in Genoa;
+but though not conscious of it to its full extent, this consideration
+was among those that influenced me in a determination to endeavour to
+turn him from what could not but be regarded as full of peril. His
+health, however, had no real prominence in my letter; and it is strange
+now to observe that it appears as an argument in his reply. I had simply
+put before him, in the strongest form, all the considerations drawn from
+his genius and fame that should deter him from the labour and
+responsibility of a daily paper, not less than from the party and
+political involvements incident to it; and here was the material part of
+the answer made. "Many thanks for your affectionate letter, which is
+full of generous truth. These considerations weigh with me, _heavily_:
+but I think I descry in these times, greater stimulants to such an
+effort; greater chance of some fair recognition of it; greater means of
+persevering in it, or retiring from it unscratched by any weapon one
+should care for; than at any other period. And most of all I have,
+sometimes, that possibility of failing health or fading popularity
+before me, which beckons me to such a venture when it comes within my
+reach. At the worst, I have written to little purpose, if I cannot
+_write myself right_ in people's minds, in such a case as this."
+
+And so it went on: but it does not fall within my plan to describe more
+than the issue, which was to be accounted so far at least fortunate that
+it established a journal which has advocated steadily improvements in
+the condition of all classes, rich as well as poor, and has been able,
+during late momentous occurrences, to give wider scope to its influence
+by its enterprise and liberality. To that result, the great writer whose
+name gave its earliest attraction to the _Daily News_ was not enabled to
+contribute much; but from him it certainly received the first impress of
+the opinions it has since consistently maintained. Its prospectus is
+before me in his handwriting, but it bears upon itself sufficiently the
+character of his hand and mind. The paper would be kept free, it said,
+from personal influence or party bias; and would be devoted to the
+advocacy of all rational and honest means by which wrong might be
+redressed, just rights maintained, and the happiness and welfare of
+society promoted.
+
+The day for the appearance of its first number was that which was to
+follow Peel's speech for the repeal of the corn laws; but, brief as my
+allusions to the subject are, the remark should be made that even before
+this day came there were interruptions to the work of preparation, at
+one time very grave, which threw such "changes of vexation" on Dickens's
+personal relations to the venture as went far to destroy both his faith
+and his pleasure in it. No opinion need be offered as to where most of
+the blame lay, and it would be useless now to apportion the share that
+might possibly have belonged to himself; but, owing to this cause, his
+editorial work began with such diminished ardour that its brief
+continuance could not but be looked for. A little note written "before
+going home" at six o'clock in the morning of Wednesday the 21st of
+January 1846, to tell me they had "been at press three quarters of an
+hour, and were out before the _Times_," marks the beginning; and a note
+written in the night of Monday the 9th of February, "tired to death and
+quite worn out," to say that he had just resigned his editorial
+functions, describes the end. I had not been unprepared. A week before
+(Friday 30th of January) he had written: "I want a long talk with you. I
+was obliged to come down here in a hurry to give out a travelling letter
+I meant to have given out last night, and could not call upon you. Will
+you dine with us to-morrow at six sharp? I have been revolving plans in
+my mind this morning for quitting the paper and going abroad again to
+write a new book in shilling numbers. Shall we go to Rochester to-morrow
+week (my birthday) if the weather be, as it surely must be, better?" To
+Rochester accordingly we had gone, he and Mrs. Dickens and her sister,
+with Maclise and Jerrold and myself; going over the old Castle, Watts's
+Charity, and Chatham fortifications on the Saturday, passing Sunday in
+Cobham church and Cobham park; having our quarters both days at the Bull
+inn made famous in _Pickwick_; and thus, by indulgence of the desire
+which was always strangely urgent in him, associating his new resolve in
+life with those earliest scenes of his youthful time. On one point our
+feeling had been in thorough agreement. If long continuance with the
+paper was not likely, the earliest possible departure from it was
+desirable. But as the letters descriptive of his Italian travel (turned
+afterwards into _Pictures from Italy_) had begun with its first number,
+his name could not at once be withdrawn; and for the time during which
+they were still to appear, he consented to contribute other occasional
+letters on important social questions. Public executions and Ragged
+schools were among the subjects chosen by him, and all were handled with
+conspicuous ability. But the interval they covered was a short one.
+
+To the supreme control which he had quitted, I succeeded, retaining it
+very reluctantly for the greater part of that weary, anxious, laborious
+year; but in little more than four months from the day the paper
+started, the whole of Dickens's connection with the _Daily News_, even
+that of contributing letters with his signature, had ceased. As he said
+in the preface to the republished _Pictures_, it was a mistake to have
+disturbed the old relations between himself and his readers, in so
+departing from his old pursuits. It had however been "a brief mistake;"
+the departure had been only "for a moment;" and now those pursuits were
+"joyfully" to be resumed in Switzerland. Upon the latter point we had
+much discussion; but he was bent on again removing himself from London,
+and his glimpse of the Swiss mountains on his coming from Italy had
+given him a passion to visit them again. "I don't think," he wrote to
+me, "I _could_ shut out the paper sufficiently, here, to write well. No
+. . . I will write my book in Lausanne and in Genoa, and forget everything
+else if I can; and by living in Switzerland for the summer, and in Italy
+or France for the winter, I shall be saving money while I write." So
+therefore it was finally determined.
+
+There is not much that calls for mention before he left. The first
+conceiving of a new book was always a restless time, and other subjects
+beside the characters that were growing in his mind would persistently
+intrude themselves into his night-wanderings. With some surprise I heard
+from him afterwards, for example, of a communication opened with a
+leading member of the Government to ascertain what chances there might
+be for his appointment, upon due qualification, to the paid magistracy
+of London: the reply not giving him encouragement to entertain the
+notion farther. It was of course but an outbreak of momentary
+discontent; and if the answer had been as hopeful as for others' sake
+rather than his own one could have wished it to be, the result would
+have been the same. Just upon the eve of his departure, I may add, he
+took much interest in the establishment of the General Theatrical Fund,
+of which he remained a trustee until his death. It had originated in the
+fact that the Funds of the two large theatres, themselves then disused
+for theatrical performances, were no longer available for the ordinary
+members of the profession; and on the occasion of his presiding at its
+first dinner in April he said, very happily, that now the statue of
+Shakespeare outside the door of Drury-lane, as emphatically as his bust
+inside the church of Stratford-on-Avon, _pointed out his grave_. I am
+tempted also to mention as felicitous a word which I heard fall from him
+at one of the many private dinners that were got up in those days of
+parting to give him friendliest farewell. "Nothing is ever so good as it
+is thought," said Lord Melbourne. "And nothing so bad," interposed
+Dickens.
+
+The last incidents were that he again obtained Roche for his travelling
+servant, and that he let his Devonshire-terrace house to Sir James Duke
+for twelve months, the entire proposed term of his absence. On the 30th
+of May they all dined with me, and on the following day left England.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[106] Count d'Orsay's note about Roche, replying to Dickens's
+recommendation of him at his return, has touches of the pleasantry, wit,
+and kindliness that gave such a wonderful fascination to its writer.
+"Gore House, 6 July, 1845. MON CHER DICKENS, Nous sommes enchantes de
+votre retour. Voici, thank God, Devonshire Place ressuscite. Venez
+luncheoner demain a 1 heure, et amenez notre brave ami Forster.
+J'attends la perle fine des couriers. Vous l'immortalisez par ce
+certificat--la difficulte sera de trouver un maitre digne de lui.
+J'essayerai de tout mon coeur. La Reine devroit le prendre pour aller
+en Saxe Gotha, car je suis convaincu qu'il est assez intelligent pour
+pouvoir decouvrir ce Royaume. Gore House vous envoye un cargo d'amities
+des plus sinceres. Donnez de ma part 100,000 kind regards a Madame
+Dickens. Toujours votre affectionne, Ce D'ORSAY. J'ai vu le courier,
+c'est le tableau de l'honnetete, et de la bonne humeur. Don't forget to
+be here at one to-morrow, with Forster."
+
+[107] "Look here! Enclosed are two packets--a large one and a small one.
+The small one, read first. It contains Stanny's renunciation as an
+actor!!! After receiving it, at dinner time to-day" (22nd of August), "I
+gave my brains a shake, and thought of George Cruikshank. After much
+shaking, I made up the big packet, wherein I have put the case in the
+artfullest manner. R-r-r-r-ead it! as a certain Captain whom you know
+observes." The great artist was not for that time procurable, having
+engagements away from London, and Mr. Dudley Costello was substituted;
+Stanfield taking off the edge of his desertion as an actor by doing
+valuable work in management and scenery.
+
+[108] Characteristic glimpse of this Broadstairs holiday is afforded by
+a letter of the 19th of August 1845. "Perhaps it is a fair specimen of
+the odd adventures which befall the inimitable, that the cab in which
+the children and the luggage were (I and my womankind being in the
+other) got its shafts broken in the city, last Friday morning, through
+the horse stumbling on the greasy pavement; _and was drawn to the wharf
+(about a mile) by a stout man_, amid such frightful howlings and
+derisive yellings on the part of an infuriated populace, as I never
+heard before. Conceive the man in the broken shafts with his back
+towards the cab; all the children looking out of the windows; and the
+muddy portmanteaus and so forth (which were all tumbled down when the
+horse fell) tottering and nodding on the box! The best of it was, that
+_our_ cabman, being an intimate friend of the damaged cabman, insisted
+on keeping him company; and proceeded at a solemn walk, in front of the
+procession; thereby securing to me a liberal share of the popular
+curiosity and congratulation. . . . Everything here at Broadstairs is the
+same as of old. I have walked 20 miles a day since I came down, and I
+went to a circus at Ramsgate on Saturday night, where _Mazeppa_ was
+played in three long acts without an H in it: as if for a wager. Evven,
+and edds, and errors, and ands, were as plentiful as blackberries; but
+the letter H was neither whispered in Evven, nor muttered in Ell, nor
+permitted to dwell in any form on the confines of the sawdust." With
+this I will couple another theatrical experience of this holiday, when
+he saw a Giant played by a village comedian with a quite Gargantuesque
+felicity, and singled out for my admiration his fine manner of sitting
+down to a hot supper (of children), with the self-lauding exalting
+remark, by way of grace, "How pleasant is a quiet conscience and an
+approving mind!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+A HOME IN SWITZERLAND.
+
+1846.
+
+ On the Rhine--Travelling Englishmen--At
+ Lausanne--House-hunting--A Cottage
+ chosen--First Impressions of
+ Switzerland--Lausanne described--His Villa
+ described--Design as to Work--English
+ Neighbours--Swiss Prison System--Blind
+ Institution--Interesting Case--Idiot
+ Girl--Habits in Idiot Life and Savage--Begins
+ Dombey--The Christmas Tale.
+
+
+HALTING only at Ostend, Verviers, Coblentz, and Mannheim, they reached
+Strasburg on the seventh of June: the beauty of the weather[109] showing
+them the Rhine at its best. At Mayence there had come aboard their boat
+a German, who soon after accosted Mrs. Dickens on deck in excellent
+English: "Your countryman Mr. Dickens is travelling this way just now,
+our papers say. Do you know him, or have you passed him anywhere?"
+Explanations ensuing, it turned out, by one of the odd chances my friend
+thought himself always singled out for, that he had with him a letter of
+introduction to the brother of this gentleman; who then spoke to him of
+the popularity of his books in Germany, and of the many persons he had
+seen reading them in the steamboats as he came along. Dickens remarking
+at this how great his own vexation was not to be able himself to speak a
+word of German, "Oh dear! that needn't trouble you," rejoined the other;
+"for even in so small a town as ours, where we are mostly primitive
+people and have few travellers, I could make a party of at least forty
+people who understand and speak English as well as I do, and of at least
+as many more who could manage to read you in the original." His town was
+Worms, which Dickens afterwards saw, ". . . a fine old place, though
+greatly shrunken and decayed in respect of its population; with a
+picturesque old cathedral standing on the brink of the Rhine, and some
+brave old churches shut up, and so hemmed in and overgrown with
+vineyards that they look as if they were turning into leaves and
+grapes."
+
+He had no other adventure on the Rhine. But, on the same steamer, a not
+unfamiliar bit of character greeted him in the well-known lineaments,
+moral and physical, of two travelling Englishmen who had got an immense
+barouche on board with them, and had no plan whatever of going anywhere
+in it. One of them wanted to have this barouche wheeled ashore at every
+little town and village they came to. The other was bent upon "seeing it
+out," as he said--meaning, Dickens supposed, the river; though neither
+of them seemed to have the slightest interest in it. "The locomotive one
+would have gone ashore without the carriage, and would have been
+delighted to get rid of it; but they had a joint courier, and neither of
+them would part with _him_ for a moment; so they went growling and
+grumbling on together, and seemed to have no satisfaction but in asking
+for impossible viands on board the boat, and having a grim delight in
+the steward's excuses."
+
+From Strasburg they went by rail on the 8th to Bale, from which they
+started for Lausanne next day, in three coaches, two horses to each,
+taking three days for the journey: its only enlivening incident being an
+uproar between the landlord of an inn on the road, and one of the
+voituriers who had libelled Boniface's establishment by complaining of
+the food. "After various defiances on both sides, the landlord said
+'Scelerat! Mecreant! Je vous boaxerai!' to which the voiturier replied,
+'Aha! Comment dites-vous? Voulez-vous boaxer? Eh? Voulez-vous? Ah!
+Boaxez-moi donc! Boaxez-moi!'--at the same time accompanying these
+retorts with gestures of violent significance, which explained that this
+new verb-active was founded on the well-known English verb to boax, or
+box. If they used it once, they used it at least a hundred times, and
+goaded each other to madness with it always." The travellers reached the
+hotel Gibbon at Lausanne on the evening of Thursday the 11th of June;
+having been tempted as they came along to rest somewhat short of it, by
+a delightful glimpse of Neuchatel. "On consideration however I thought
+it best to come on here, in case I should find, when I begin to write,
+that I want streets sometimes. In which case, Geneva (which I hope would
+answer the purpose) is only four and twenty miles away."
+
+He at once began house-hunting, and had two days' hard work of it. He
+found the greater part of those let to the English like small villas in
+the Regent's-park, with verandahs, glass-doors opening on lawns, and
+alcoves overlooking the lake and mountains. One he was tempted by,
+higher up the hill, "poised above the town like a ship on a high wave;"
+but the possible fury of its winter winds deterred him. Greater still
+was the temptation to him of "L'Elysee," more a mansion than a villa;
+with splendid grounds overlooking the lake, and in its corridors and
+staircases as well as furniture like an old fashioned country house in
+England; which he could have got for twelve months for L160. "But when I
+came to consider its vastness, I was rather dismayed at the prospect of
+windy nights in the autumn, with nobody staying in the house to make it
+gay." And so he again fell back upon the very first place he had seen,
+Rosemont, quite a doll's house; with two pretty little salons, a
+dining-room, hall, and kitchen, on the ground floor; and with just
+enough bedrooms upstairs to leave the family one to spare. "It is
+beautifully situated on the hill that rises from the lake, within ten
+minutes' walk of this hotel, and furnished, though scantily as all here
+are, better than others except Elysee, on account of its having being
+built and fitted up (the little salons in the Parisian way) by the
+landlady and her husband for themselves. They lived now in a smaller
+house like a porter's lodge, just within the gate. A portion of the
+grounds is farmed by a farmer, and _he_ lives close by; so that, while
+it is secluded, it is not at all lonely." The rent was to be ten pounds
+a month for half a year, with reduction to eight for the second half, if
+he should stay so long; and the rooms and furniture were to be described
+to me, so that according to custom I should be quite at home there, as
+soon as, also according to a custom well-known, his own ingenious
+re-arrangements and improvements in the chairs and tables should be
+completed. "I shall merely observe at present therefore, that my little
+study is upstairs, and looks out, from two French windows opening into a
+balcony, on the lake and mountains; and that there are roses enough to
+smother the whole establishment of the _Daily News_ in. Likewise, there
+is a pavilion in the garden, which has but two rooms in it; in one of
+which, I think you shall do your work when you come. As to bowers for
+reading and smoking, there are as many scattered about the grounds, as
+there are in Chalk-farm tea-gardens. But the Rosemont bowers are really
+beautiful. Will you come to the bowers. . . ?"
+
+Very pleasant were the earliest impressions of Switzerland with which
+this first letter closed. "The country is delightful in the extreme--as
+leafy, green, and shady, as England; full of deep glens, and branchy
+places (rather a Leigh Huntish expression), and bright with all sorts of
+flowers in profusion.[110] It abounds in singing birds besides--very
+pleasant after Italy; and the moonlight on the lake is noble. Prodigious
+mountains rise up from its opposite shore (it is eight or nine miles
+across, at this point), and the Simplon, the St. Gothard, Mont Blanc,
+and all the Alpine wonders are piled there, in tremendous grandeur. The
+cultivation is uncommonly rich and profuse. There are all manner of
+walks, vineyards, green lanes, cornfields, and pastures full of hay. The
+general neatness is as remarkable as in England. There are no priests or
+monks in the streets, and the people appear to be industrious and
+thriving. French (and very intelligible and pleasant French) seems to be
+the universal language. I never saw so many booksellers' shops crammed
+within the same space, as in the steep up-and-down streets of Lausanne."
+
+Of the little town he spoke in his next letter as having its natural
+dulness increased by that fact of its streets going up and down hill
+abruptly and steeply, like the streets in a dream; and the consequent
+difficulty of getting about it. "There are some suppressed churches in
+it, now used as packers' warehouses: with cranes and pulleys growing out
+of steeple-towers; little doors for lowering goods through, fitted into
+blocked-up oriel windows; and cart-horses stabled in crypts. These also
+help to give it a deserted and disused appearance. On the other hand, as
+it is a perfectly free place subject to no prohibitions or restrictions
+of any kind, there are all sorts of new French books and publications in
+it, and all sorts of fresh intelligence from the world beyond the Jura
+mountains. It contains only one Roman Catholic church, which is mainly
+for the use of the Savoyards and Piedmontese who come trading over the
+Alps. As for the country, it cannot be praised too highly, or reported
+too beautiful. There are no great waterfalls, or walks through
+mountain-gorges, _close_ at hand, as in some other parts of Switzerland;
+but there is a charming variety of enchanting scenery. There is the
+shore of the lake, where you may dip your feet, as you walk, in the
+deep blue water, if you choose. There are the hills to climb up, leading
+to the great heights above the town; or to stagger down, leading to the
+lake. There is every possible variety of deep green lanes, vineyard,
+cornfield, pasture-land, and wood. There are excellent country roads
+that might be in Kent or Devonshire: and, closing up every view and
+vista, is an eternally changing range of prodigious mountains--sometimes
+red, sometimes grey, sometimes purple, sometimes black; sometimes white
+with snow; sometimes close at hand; and sometimes very ghosts in the
+clouds and mist."
+
+In the heart of these things he was now to live and work for at least
+six months; and, as the love of nature was as much a passion with him in
+his intervals of leisure, as the craving for crowds and streets when he
+was busy with the creatures of his fancy, no man was better qualified to
+enjoy what was thus open to him from his little farm.
+
+The view from each side of it was different in character, and from one
+there was visible the liveliest aspect of Lausanne itself, close at
+hand, and seeming, as he said, to be always coming down the hill with
+its steeples and towers, not able to stop itself. "From a fine long
+broad balcony on which the windows of my little study on the first floor
+(where I am now writing) open, the lake is seen to wonderful
+advantage,--losing itself by degrees in the solemn gorge of mountains
+leading to the Simplon pass. Under the balcony is a stone colonnade, on
+which the six French windows of the drawing-room open; and quantities of
+plants are clustered about the pillars and seats, very prettily. One of
+these drawing-rooms is furnished (like a French hotel) with red velvet,
+and the other with green; in both, plenty of mirrors and nice white
+muslin curtains; and for the larger one in cold weather there is a
+carpet, the floors being bare now, but inlaid in squares with
+different-coloured woods." His description did not close until, in every
+nook and corner inhabited by the several members of the family, I was
+made to feel myself at home; but only the final sentence need be added.
+"Walking out into the balcony as I write, I am suddenly reminded, by the
+sight of the Castle of Chillon glittering in the sunlight on the lake,
+that I omitted to mention that object in my catalogue of the Rosemont
+beauties. Please to put it in, like George Robins, in a line by itself."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Regular evening walks of nine or ten miles were named in the same letter
+(22nd of June) as having been begun;[111] and thoughts of his books were
+already stirring in him. "An odd shadowy undefined idea is at work
+within me, that I could connect a great battle-field somehow with my
+little Christmas story. Shapeless visions of the repose and peace
+pervading it in after-time; with the corn and grass growing over the
+slain, and people singing at the plough; are so perpetually floating
+before me, that I cannot but think there may turn out to be something
+good in them when I see them more plainly. . . . I want to get Four Numbers
+of the monthly book done here, and the Christmas book. If all goes well,
+and nothing changes, and I can accomplish this by the end of November, I
+shall run over to you in England for a few days with a light heart, and
+leave Roche to move the caravan to Paris in the meanwhile. It will be
+just the very point in the story when the life and crowd of that
+extraordinary place will come vividly to my assistance in writing." Such
+was his design; and, though difficulties not now seen started up which
+he had a hard fight to get through, he managed to accomplish it. His
+letter ended with a promise to tell me, when next he wrote, of the small
+colony of English who seemed ready to give him even more than the usual
+welcome. Two visits had thus early been paid him by Mr. Haldimand,
+formerly a member of the English parliament, an accomplished man, who,
+with his sister Mrs. Marcet (the well-known authoress), had long made
+Lausanne his home. He had a very fine seat just below Rosemont, and his
+character and station had made him quite the little sovereign of the
+place. "He has founded and endowed all sorts of hospitals and
+institutions here, and he gives a dinner to-morrow to introduce our
+neighbours, whoever they are."
+
+He found them to be happily the kind of people who rendered entirely
+pleasant those frank and cordial hospitalities which the charm of his
+personal intercourse made every one so eager to offer him. The dinner at
+Mr. Haldimand's was followed by dinners from the guests he met there;
+from an English lady[112] married to a Swiss, Mr. and Mrs. Cerjat,
+clever and agreeable both, far beyond the common; from her sister wedded
+to an Englishman, Mr. and Mrs. Goff; and from Mr. and Mrs. Watson of
+Rockingham-castle in Northamptonshire, who had taken the Elysee on
+Dickens giving it up, and with whom, as with Mr. Haldimand, his
+relations continued to be very intimate long after he left Lausanne. In
+his drive to Mr. Cerjat's dinner a whimsical difficulty presented
+itself. He had set up, for use of his wife and children, an odd little
+one-horse-carriage; made to hold three persons sideways, so that they
+should avoid the wind always blowing up or down the valley; and he found
+it attended with one of the drollest consequences conceivable. "It can't
+be easily turned; and as you face to the side, all sorts of evolutions
+are necessary to bring you 'broad-side to' before the door of the house
+where you are going. The country houses here are very like those upon
+the Thames between Richmond and Kingston (this, particularly), with
+grounds all round. At Mr. Cerjat's we were obliged to be carried, like
+the child's riddle, round the house and round the house, without
+touching the house; and we were presented in the most alarming manner,
+three of a row, first to all the people in the kitchen, then to the
+governess who was dressing in her bedroom, then to the drawing-room
+where the company were waiting for us, then to the dining-room where
+they were spreading the table, and finally to the hall where we were got
+out--scraping the windows of each apartment as we glared slowly into
+it."
+
+A dinner party of his own followed of course; and a sad occurrence, of
+which he and his guests were unconscious, signalised the evening (15th
+of July). "While we were sitting at dinner, one of the prettiest girls
+in Lausanne was drowned in the lake--in the most peaceful water,
+reflecting the steep mountains, and crimson with the setting sun. She
+was bathing in one of the nooks set apart for women, and seems somehow
+to have entangled her feet in the skirts of her dress. She was an
+accomplished swimmer, as many of the girls are here, and drifted,
+suddenly, out of only five feet water. Three or four friends who were
+with her, _ran away_, screaming. Our children's governess was on the
+lake in a boat with M. Verdeil (my prison-doctor) and his family. They
+ran inshore immediately; the body was quickly got out; and M. Verdeil,
+with three or four other doctors, laboured for some hours to restore
+animation; but she only sighed once. After all that time, she was
+obliged to be borne, stiff and stark, to her father's house. She was his
+only child, and but 17 years old. He has been nearly dead since, and all
+Lausanne has been full of the story. I was down by the lake, near the
+place, last night; and a boatman _acted_ to me the whole scene:
+depositing himself finally on a heap of stones, to represent the body."
+
+With M. Verdeil, physician to the prison and vice-president of the
+council of health, introduced by Mr. Haldimand, there had already been
+much communication; and I could give nothing more characteristic of
+Dickens than his reference to this, and other similar matters in which
+his interest was strongly moved during his first weeks at Lausanne.[113]
+
+
+"Some years ago, when they set about reforming the prison at Lausanne,
+they turned their attention, in a correspondence of republican feeling,
+to America; and taking the Philadelphian system for granted, adopted it.
+Terrible fits, new phases of mental affection, and horrible madness,
+among the prisoners, were very soon the result; and attained to such an
+alarming height, that M. Verdeil, in his public capacity, began to
+report against the system, and went on reporting and working against it
+until he formed a party who were determined not to have it, and caused
+it to be abolished--except in cases where the imprisonment does not
+exceed ten months in the whole. It is remarkable that in his notes of
+the different cases, there is _every effect_ I mentioned as having
+observed myself at Philadelphia; even down to those contained in the
+description of the man who had been there thirteen years, and who
+_picked his hands_ so much as he talked. He has only recently, he says,
+read the _American Notes_; but he is so much struck by the perfect
+coincidence that he intends to republish some extracts from his own
+notes, side by side with these passages of mine translated into French.
+I went with him over the prison the other day. It is wonderfully well
+arranged for a continental jail, and in perfect order. The sentences
+however, or some of them, are very terrible. I saw one man sent there
+for murder under circumstances of mitigation--for 30 years. Upon the
+silent social system all the time! They weave, and plait straw, and make
+shoes, small articles of turnery and carpentry, and little common wooden
+clocks. But the sentences are too long for that monotonous and hopeless
+life; and, though they are well-fed and cared for, they generally break
+down utterly after two or three years. One delusion seems to become
+common to three-fourths of them after a certain time of imprisonment.
+Under the impression that there is something destructive put into their
+food 'pour les guerir de crime' (says M. Verdeil), they refuse to eat!"
+
+It was at the Blind Institution, however, of which Mr. Haldimand was the
+president and great benefactor, that Dickens's attention was most deeply
+arrested; and there were two cases in especial of which the detail may
+be read with as much interest now as when my friend's letters were
+written, and as to which his own suggestions open up still rather
+startling trains of thought. The first, which in its attraction for him
+he found equal even to Laura Bridgman's, was that of a young man of 18:
+"born deaf and dumb, and stricken blind by an accident when he was about
+five years old. The Director of the institution is a young German, of
+great ability, and most uncommonly prepossessing appearance. He
+propounded to the scientific bodies of Geneva, a year ago (when this
+young man was under education in the asylum), the possibility of
+teaching him to speak--in other words, to play with his tongue upon his
+teeth and palate as if on an instrument, and connect particular
+performances with particular words conveyed to him in the
+finger-language. They unanimously agreed that it was quite impossible.
+The German set to work, and the young man now speaks very plainly and
+distinctly: without the least modulation, of course, but with
+comparatively little hesitation; expressing the words aloud as they are
+struck, so to speak, upon his hands; and showing the most intense and
+wonderful delight in doing it. This is commonly acquired, as you know,
+by the deaf and dumb who learn by sight; but it has never before been
+achieved in the case of a deaf, dumb, and blind subject. He is an
+extremely lively, intelligent, good-humoured fellow; an excellent
+carpenter; a first-rate turner; and runs about the building with a
+certainty and confidence which none of the merely blind pupils acquire.
+He has a great many ideas, and an instinctive dread of death. He knows
+of God, as of Thought enthroned somewhere; and once told, on nature's
+prompting (the devil's of course), a lie. He was sitting at dinner, and
+the Director asked him whether he had had anything to drink; to which he
+instantly replied 'No,' in order that he might get some more, though he
+had been served in his turn. It was explained to him that this was a
+wrong thing, and wouldn't do, and that he was to be locked up in a room
+for it: which was done. Soon after this, he had a dream of being bitten
+in the shoulder by some strange animal. As it left a great impression on
+his mind, he told M. the Director that he had told another lie in the
+night. In proof of it he related his dream, and added, 'It must be a lie
+you know, because there is no strange animal here, and I never was
+bitten.' Being informed that this sort of lie was a harmless one, and
+was called a dream, he asked whether dead people ever dreamed[114] while
+they were lying in the ground. He is one of the most curious and
+interesting studies possible."
+
+The second case had come in on the very day that Dickens visited the
+place. "When I was there" (8th of July) "there had come in, that
+morning, a girl of ten years old, born deaf and dumb and blind, and so
+perfectly untaught that she has not learnt to have the least control
+even over the performance of the common natural functions. . . . And yet
+she _laughs sometimes_ (good God! conceive what at!)--and is dreadfully
+sensitive from head to foot, and very much alarmed, for some hours
+before the coming on of a thunder storm. Mr. Haldimand has been long
+trying to induce her parents to send her to the asylum. At last they
+have consented; and when I saw her, some of the little blind girls were
+trying to make friends with her, and to lead her gently about. She was
+dressed in just a loose robe from the necessity of changing her
+frequently, but had been in a bath, and had had her nails cut (which
+were previously very long and dirty), and was not at all
+ill-looking--quite the reverse; with a remarkably good and pretty little
+mouth, but a low and undeveloped head of course. It was pointed out to
+me, as very singular, that the moment she is left alone, or freed from
+anybody's touch (which is the same thing to her), she instantly
+crouches down with her hands up to her ears, in exactly the position of
+a child before its birth; and so remains. I thought this such a strange
+coincidence with the utter want of advancement in her moral being, that
+it made a great impression on me; and conning it over and over, I began
+to think that this is surely the invariable action of savages too, and
+that I have seen it over and over again described in books of voyages
+and travels. Not having any of these with me, I turned to _Robinson
+Crusoe_; and I find De Foe says, describing the savages who came on the
+island after Will Atkins began to change for the better and commanded
+under the grave Spaniard for the common defence, 'their posture was
+generally sitting upon the ground, with their knees up towards their
+mouth, and the head put between the two hands, leaning down upon the
+knees'--exactly the same attitude!" In his next week's letter he
+reported further: "I have not been to the Blind asylum again yet, but
+they tell me that the deaf and dumb and blind child's _face_ is
+improving obviously, and that she takes great delight in the first
+effort made by the Director to connect himself with an occupation of her
+time. He gives her, every day, two smooth round pebbles to roll over and
+over between her two hands. She appears to have an idea that it is to
+lead to something; distinctly recognizes the hand that gives them to
+her, as a friendly and protecting one; and sits for hours quite busy."
+
+To one part of his very thoughtful suggestion I objected, and would have
+attributed to a mere desire for warmth, in her as in the savage, what he
+supposed to be part of an undeveloped or embryo state explaining also
+the absence of sentient and moral being. To this he replied (25th of
+July): "I do not think that there is reason for supposing that the
+savage attitude originates in the desire of warmth, because all naked
+savages inhabit hot climates; and their instinctive attitude, if it had
+reference to heat or cold, would probably be the coolest possible; like
+their delight in water, and swimming. I do not think there is any race
+of savage men, however low in grade, inhabiting cold climates, who do
+not kill beasts and wear their skins. The girl decidedly improves in
+face, and, if one can yet use the word as applied to her, in manner too.
+No communication by the speech of touch has yet been established with
+her, but the time has not been long enough." In a later letter he tells
+me (24th of August): "The deaf, dumb, and blind girl is decidedly
+improved, and very much improved, in this short time. No communication
+is yet established with her, but that is not to be expected. They have
+got her out of that strange, crouching position; dressed her neatly; and
+accustomed her to have a pleasure in society. She laughs frequently, and
+also claps her hands and jumps; having, God knows how, some inward
+satisfaction. I never saw a more tremendous thing in its way, in my
+life, than when they stood her, t'other day, in the centre of a group of
+blind children who sang a chorus to the piano; and brought her hand, and
+kept it, in contact with the instrument. A shudder pervaded her whole
+being, her breath quickened, her colour deepened,--and I can compare it
+to nothing but returning animation in a person nearly dead. It was
+really awful to see how the sensation of the music fluttered and stirred
+the locked-up soul within her." The same letter spoke again of the
+youth: "The male subject is well and jolly as possible. He is very fond
+of smoking. I have arranged to supply him with cigars during our stay
+here; so he and I are in amazing sympathy. I don't know whether he
+thinks I grow them, or make them, or produce them by winking, or what.
+But it gives him a notion that the world in general belongs to me.". . .
+Before his kind friend left Lausanne the poor fellow had been taught to
+say, "Monsieur Dickens m'a donne les cigares," and at their leave-taking
+his gratitude was expressed by incessant repetition of these words for a
+full half-hour.
+
+Certainly by no man was gratitude more persistently earned, than by
+Dickens, from all to whom nature or the world had been churlish or
+unfair. Not to those only made desolate by poverty or the temptations
+incident to it, but to those whom natural defects or infirmities had
+placed at a disadvantage with their kind, he gave his first
+consideration; helping them personally where he could, sympathising and
+sorrowing with them always, but above all applying himself to the
+investigation of such alleviation or cure as philosophy or science might
+be able to apply to their condition. This was a desire so eager as
+properly to be called one of the passions of his life, visible in him to
+the last hour of it.
+
+Only a couple of weeks, themselves not idle ones, had passed over him at
+Rosemont when he made a dash at the beginning of his real work; from
+which indeed he had only been detained so long by the non-arrival of a
+box dispatched from London before his own departure, containing not his
+proper writing materials only, but certain quaint little bronze figures
+that thus early stood upon his desk, and were as much needed for the
+easy flow of his writing as blue ink or quill pens. "I have not been
+idle" (28th of June) "since I have been here, though at first I was
+'kept out' of the big box as you know. I had a good deal to write for
+Lord John about the Ragged schools. I set to work and did that. A good
+deal for Miss Coutts, in reference to her charitable projects. I set to
+work and did _that_. Half of the children's New Testament[115] to write,
+or pretty nearly. I set to work and did _that_. Next I cleared off the
+greater part of such correspondence as I had rashly pledged myself to;
+and then. . . .
+
+ BEGAN DOMBEY!
+
+I performed this feat yesterday--only wrote the first slip--but there it
+is, and it is a plunge straight over head and ears into the story. . . .
+Besides all this, I have really gone with great vigour at the French,
+where I find myself greatly assisted by the Italian; and am subject to
+two descriptions of mental fits in reference to the Christmas book: one,
+of the suddenest and wildest enthusiasm; one, of solitary and anxious
+consideration. . . . By the way, as I was unpacking the big box I took
+hold of a book, and said to 'Them,'--'Now, whatever passage my thumb
+rests on, I shall take as having reference to my work.' It was TRISTRAM
+SHANDY, and opened at these words, 'What a work it is likely to turn
+out! Let us begin it!'"
+
+The same letter told me that he still inclined strongly to "the field of
+battle notion" for his Christmas volume, but was not as yet advanced in
+it; being curious first to see whether its capacity seemed to strike me
+at all. My only objection was to his adventure of opening two stories at
+once, of which he did not yet see the full danger; but for the moment
+the Christmas fancy was laid aside, and not resumed, except in passing
+allusions, until after the close of August, when the first two numbers
+of _Dombey_ were done. The interval supplied fresh illustration of his
+life in his new home, not without much interest; and as I have shown
+what a pleasant social circle, "wonderfully friendly and
+hospitable"[116] to the last, already had grouped itself round him in
+Lausanne, and how full of "matter to be heard and learn'd" he found such
+institutions as its prison and blind school, the picture will receive
+attractive touches if I borrow from his letters written during this
+outset of _Dombey_, some farther notices as well of the general
+progress of his work, as of what was specially interesting or amusing to
+him at the time, and of how the country and the people impressed him. In
+all of these his character will be found strongly marked.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[109] "We have hardly seen a cloud in the sky since you and I parted at
+Ramsgate, and the heat has been extraordinary."
+
+[110] "The green woods and green shades about here," he says in another
+letter, "are more like Cobham in Kent, than anything we dream of at the
+foot of the Alpine passes."
+
+[111] To these the heat interposed occasional difficulties. "Setting off
+last night" (5th of July) "at six o'clock, in accordance with my usual
+custom, for a long walk, I was really quite floored when I got to the
+top of a long steep hill leading out of the town--the same by which we
+entered it. I believe the great heats, however, seldom last more than a
+week at a time; there are always very long twilights, and very delicious
+evenings; and now that there is moonlight, the nights are wonderful. The
+peacefulness and grandeur of the Mountains and the Lake are
+indescribable. There comes a rush of sweet smells with the morning air
+too, which is quite peculiar to the country."
+
+[112] "One of her brothers by the bye, now dead, had large property in
+Ireland--all Nenagh, and the country about; and Cerjat told me, as we
+were talking about one thing and another, that when he went over there
+for some months to arrange the widow's affairs, he procured a copy of
+the curse which had been read at the altar by the parish priest of
+Nenagh, against any of the flock who didn't subscribe to the O'Connell
+tribute."
+
+[113] In a note may be preserved another passage from the same letter.
+"I have been queer and had trembling legs for the last week. But it has
+been almost impossible to sleep at night. There is a breeze to-day (25th
+of July) and I hope another storm is coming up. . . . There is a theatre
+here; and whenever a troop of players pass through the town, they halt
+for a night and act. On the day of our tremendous dinner party of eight,
+there was an infant phenomenon; whom I should otherwise have seen. Last
+night there was a Vaudeville company; and Charley, Roche, and Anne went.
+The Brave reports the performances to have resembled Greenwich Fair. . . .
+There are some Promenade Concerts in the open air in progress now: but
+as they are just above one part of our garden we don't go: merely
+sitting outside the door instead, and hearing it all where we are. . . .
+Mont Blanc has been very plain lately. One heap of snow. A Frenchman got
+to the top, the other day."
+
+[114] ". . . Ay, there's the rub;
+ For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
+ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil. . . ."
+
+[115] This was an abstract, in plain language for the use of his
+children, of the narrative in the Four Gospels. Allusion was made,
+shortly after his death, to the existence of such a manuscript, with
+expression of a wish that it might be published; but nothing would have
+shocked himself so much as any suggestion of that kind. The little piece
+was of a peculiarly private character, written for his children, and
+exclusively and strictly for their use only.
+
+[116] So he described it. "I do not think," he adds, "we could have
+fallen on better society. It is a small circle certainly, but quite
+large enough. The Watsons improve very much on acquaintance. Everybody
+is very well informed; and we are all as social and friendly as people
+can be, and very merry. We play whist with great dignity and gravity
+sometimes, interrupted only by the occasional facetiousness of the
+inimitable."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+SWISS PEOPLE AND SCENERY.
+
+1846.
+
+ The Mountains and Lake--Manners of the
+ People--A Country Fete--Rifle-shooting--A
+ Marriage--Gunpowder Festivities--Progress in
+ Work--Hints to Artist for Illustrating
+ Dombey--Henry Hallam--Sight-seers from
+ England--Trip to Chamounix--Mule
+ Travelling--Mer de Glace--Tete Noire Pass--An
+ Accident--Castle of Chillon
+ described--Political Celebration--Good Conduct
+ of the People--Protestant and Catholic Cantons.
+
+
+WHAT at once had struck him as the wonderful feature in the mountain
+scenery was its everchanging and yet unchanging aspect. It was never
+twice like the same thing to him. Shifting and altering, advancing and
+retreating, fifty times a day, it was unalterable only in its grandeur.
+The lake itself too had every kind of varying beauty for him. By
+moonlight it was indescribably solemn; and before the coming on of a
+storm had a strange property in it of being disturbed, while yet the sky
+remained clear and the evening bright, which he found to be mysterious
+and impressive in an especial degree. Such a storm had come among his
+earliest and most grateful experiences; a degree of heat worse even than
+in Italy[117] having disabled him at the outset for all exertion until
+the lightning, thunder, and rain arrived. The letter telling me this
+(5th July) described the fruit as so abundant in the little farm, that
+the trees of the orchard in front of his house were bending beneath it;
+spoke of a field of wheat sloping down to the side window of his
+dining-room as already cut and carried; and said that the roses, which
+the hurricane of rain had swept away, were come back lovelier and in
+greater numbers than ever.
+
+Of the ordinary Swiss people he formed from the first a high opinion
+which everything during his stay among them confirmed. He thought it the
+greatest injustice to call them "the Americans of the Continent." In his
+first letters he said of the peasantry all about Lausanne that they were
+as pleasant a people as need be. He never passed, on any of the roads,
+man, woman, or child, without a salutation; and anything churlish or
+disagreeable he never noticed in them. "They have not," he continued,
+"the sweetness and grace of the Italians, or the agreeable manners of
+the better specimens of French peasantry, but they are admirably
+educated (the schools of this canton are extraordinarily good, in every
+little village), and always prepared to give a civil and pleasant
+answer. There is no greater mistake. I was talking to my landlord[118]
+about it the other day, and he said he could not conceive how it had
+ever arisen, but that when he returned from his eighteen years' service
+in the English navy he shunned the people, and had no interest in them
+until they gradually forced their real character upon his observation.
+We have a cook and a coachman here, taken at hazard from the people of
+the town; and I never saw more obliging servants, or people who did
+their work so truly _with a will_. And in point of cleanliness, order,
+and punctuality to the moment, they are unrivalled. . . ."
+
+The first great gathering of the Swiss peasantry which he saw was in the
+third week after his arrival, when a country fete was held at a place
+called The Signal; a deep green wood, on the sides and summit of a very
+high hill overlooking the town and all the country round; and he gave me
+very pleasant account of it. "There were various booths for eating and
+drinking, and the selling of trinkets and sweetmeats; and in one place
+there was a great circle cleared, in which the common people waltzed and
+polka'd, without cessation, to the music of a band. There was a great
+roundabout for children (oh my stars what a family were proprietors of
+it! A sunburnt father and mother, a humpbacked boy, a great poodle-dog
+possessed of all sorts of accomplishments, and a young murderer of
+seventeen who turned the machinery); and there were some games of chance
+and skill established under trees. It was very pretty. In some of the
+drinking booths there were parties of German peasants, twenty together
+perhaps, singing national drinking-songs, and making a most exhilarating
+and musical chorus by rattling their cups and glasses on the table and
+drinking them against each other, to a regular tune. You know it as a
+stage dodge, but the real thing is splendid. Farther down the hill,
+other peasants were rifle-shooting for prizes, at targets set on the
+other side of a deep ravine, from two to three hundred yards off. It was
+quite fearful to see the astonishing accuracy of their aim, and how,
+every time a rifle awakened the ten thousand echoes of the green glen,
+some men crouching behind a little wall immediately in front of the
+targets, sprung up with large numbers in their hands denoting where the
+ball had struck the bull's eye--and then in a moment disappeared again.
+Standing in a ring near these shooters was another party of Germans
+singing hunting-songs, in parts, most melodiously. And down in the
+distance was Lausanne, with all sorts of haunted-looking old towers
+rising up before the smooth water of the lake, and an evening sky all
+red, and gold, and bright green. When it closed in quite dark, all the
+booths were lighted up; and the twinkling of the lamps among the forest
+of trees was beautiful. . . ." To this pretty picture, a letter of a little
+later date, describing a marriage on the farm, added farther comical
+illustration of the rifle-firing propensities of the Swiss, and had
+otherwise also whimsical touches of character. "One of the farmer's
+people--a sister, I think--was married from here the other day. It is
+wonderful to see how naturally the smallest girls are interested in
+marriages. Katey and Mamey were as excited as if they were eighteen. The
+fondness of the Swiss for gunpowder on interesting occasions, is one of
+the drollest things. For three days before, the farmer himself, in the
+midst of his various agricultural duties, plunged out of a little door
+near my windows, about once in every hour, and fired off a rifle. I
+thought he was shooting rats who were spoiling the vines; but he was
+merely relieving his mind, it seemed, on the subject of the approaching
+nuptials. All night afterwards, he and a small circle of friends kept
+perpetually letting off guns under the casement of the bridal chamber. A
+Bride is always drest here, in black silk; but this bride wore merino of
+that colour, observing to her mother when she bought it (the old lady is
+82, and works on the farm), 'You know, mother, I am sure to want
+mourning for you, soon; and the same gown will do.'"[119]
+
+Meanwhile, day by day, he was steadily moving on with his first number;
+feeling sometimes the want of streets in an "extraordinary nervousness
+it would be hardly possible to describe," that would come upon him after
+he had been writing all day; but at all other times finding the repose
+of the place very favourable to industry. "I am writing slowly at first,
+of course" (5th of July), "but I hope I shall have finished the first
+number in the course of a fortnight at farthest. I have done the first
+chapter, and begun another. I say nothing of the merits thus far, or of
+the idea beyond what is known to you; because I prefer that you should
+come as fresh as may be upon them. I shall certainly have a great
+surprise for people at the end of the fourth number;[120] and I think
+there is a new and peculiar sort of interest, involving the necessity of
+a little bit of delicate treatment whereof I will expound my idea to you
+by and by. When I have done this number, I may take a run to Chamounix
+perhaps. . . . My thoughts have necessarily been called away from the
+Christmas book. The first _Dombey_ done, I think I should fly off to
+that, whenever the idea presented itself vividly before me. I still
+cherish the Battle fancy, though it is nothing but a fancy as yet." A
+week later he told me that he hoped to finish the first number by that
+day week or thereabouts, when he should then run and look for his
+Christmas book in the glaciers at Chamounix. His progress to this point
+had been pleasing him. "I think _Dombey_ very strong--with great
+capacity in its leading idea; plenty of character that is likely to
+tell; and some rollicking facetiousness, to say nothing of pathos. I
+hope you will soon judge of it for yourself, however; and I know you
+will say what you think. I have been very constantly at work." Six days
+later I heard that he had still eight slips to write, and for a week had
+put off Chamounix.
+
+But though the fourth chapter yet was incomplete, he could repress no
+longer the desire to write to me of what he was doing (18th of July). "I
+think the general idea of _Dombey_ is interesting and new, and has great
+material in it. But I don't like to discuss it with you till you have
+read number one, for fear I should spoil its effect. When done--about
+Wednesday or Thursday, please God--I will send it in two days' posts,
+seven letters each day. If you have it set at once (I am afraid you
+couldn't read it, otherwise than in print) I know you will impress on B.
+& E. the necessity of the closest secrecy. The very name getting out,
+would be ruinous. The points for illustration, and the enormous care
+required, make me excessively anxious. The man for Dombey, if Browne
+could see him, the class man to a T, is Sir A---- E----, of D----'s.
+Great pains will be necessary with Miss Tox. The Toodle family should
+not be too much caricatured, because of Polly. I should like Browne to
+think of Susan Nipper, who will not be wanted in the first number. After
+the second number, they will all be nine or ten years older, but this
+will not involve much change in the characters, except in the children
+and Miss Nipper. What a brilliant thing to be telling you all these
+names so familiarly, when you know nothing about 'em! I quite enjoy it.
+By the bye, I hope you may like the introduction of Solomon Gills.[121]
+I think he lives in a good sort of house. . . . One word more. What do you
+think, as a name for the Christmas book, of THE BATTLE OF LIFE? It is
+not a name I have conned at all, but has just occurred to me in
+connection with that foggy idea. If I can see my way, I think I will
+take it next, and clear it off. If you knew how it hangs about me, I am
+sure you would say so too. It would be an immense relief to have it
+done, and nothing standing in the way of _Dombey_."
+
+Within the time left for it the opening number was done, but two little
+incidents preceded still the trip to Chamounix. The first was a visit
+from Hallam to Mr. Haldimand. "Heavens! how Hallam did talk yesterday! I
+don't think I ever saw him so tremendous. Very good-natured and
+pleasant, in his way, but Good Heavens! how he did talk. That famous day
+you and I remember was nothing to it. His son was with him, and his
+daughter (who has an impediment in her speech, as if nature were
+determined to balance that faculty in the family), and his niece, a
+pretty woman, the wife of a clergyman and a friend of Thackeray's. It
+strikes me that she must be 'the little woman' he proposed to take us to
+drink tea with, once, in Golden-square. Don't you remember? His great
+favourite? She is quite a charming person anyhow." I hope to be pardoned
+for preserving an opinion which more familiar later acquaintance
+confirmed, and which can hardly now give anything but pleasure to the
+lady of whom it is expressed. To the second incident he alludes more
+briefly. "As Haldimand and Mrs. Marcet and the Cerjats had devised a
+small mountain expedition for us for to-morrow, I didn't like to allow
+Chamounix to stand in the way. So we go with them first, and start on
+our own account on Tuesday. We are extremely pleasant with these
+people." The close of the same letter (25th of July), mentioning two
+pieces of local news, gives intimation of the dangers incident to all
+Swiss travelling, and of such special precautions as were necessary for
+the holiday among the mountains he was now about to take. "My first news
+is that a crocodile is said to have escaped from the Zoological gardens
+at Geneva, and to be now 'zigzag-zigging' about the lake. But I can't
+make out whether this is a great fact, or whether it is a pious fraud to
+prevent too much bathing and liability to accidents. The other piece of
+news is more serious. An English family whose name I don't know,
+consisting of a father, mother, and daughter, arrived at the hotel
+Gibbon here last Monday, and started off on some mountain expedition in
+one of the carriages of the country. It was a mere track, the road, and
+ought to have been travelled only by mules, but the Englishman persisted
+(as Englishmen do) in going on in the carriage; and in answer to all the
+representations of the driver that no carriage had ever gone up there,
+said he needn't be afraid he wasn't going to be paid for it, and so
+forth. Accordingly, the coachman got down and walked by the horses'
+heads. It was fiery hot; and, after much tugging and rearing, the horses
+began to back, and went down bodily, carriage and all, into a deep
+ravine. The mother was killed on the spot; and the father and daughter
+are lying at some house hard by, not expected to recover."
+
+His next letter (written on the second of August) described his own
+first real experience of mountain-travel. "I begin my letter to-night,
+but only begin, for we returned from Chamounix in time for dinner just
+now, and are pretty considerably done up. We went by a mountain pass not
+often crossed by ladies, called the Col de Balme, where your imagination
+may picture Kate and Georgy on mules _for ten hours at a stretch_,
+riding up and down the most frightful precipices. We returned by the
+pass of the Tete Noire, which Talfourd knows, and which is of a
+different character, but astonishingly fine too. Mont Blanc, and the
+Valley of Chamounix, and the Mer de Glace, and all the wonders of that
+most wonderful place, are above and beyond one's wildest expectations. I
+cannot imagine anything in nature more stupendous or sublime. If I were
+to write about it now, I should quite rave--such prodigious impressions
+are rampant within me. . . . You may suppose that the mule-travelling is
+pretty primitive. Each person takes a carpet-bag strapped on the mule
+behind himself or herself: and that is all the baggage that can be
+carried. A guide, a thorough-bred mountaineer, walks all the way,
+leading the lady's mule; I say the lady's par excellence, in compliment
+to Kate; and all the rest struggle on as they please. The cavalcade
+stops at a lone hut for an hour and a half in the middle of the day, and
+lunches brilliantly on whatever it can get. Going by that Col de Balme
+pass, you climb up and up and up for five hours and more, and
+look--from a mere unguarded ledge of path on the side of the
+precipice--into such awful valleys, that at last you are firm in the
+belief that you have got above everything in the world, and that there
+can be nothing earthly overhead. Just as you arrive at this conclusion,
+a different (and oh Heaven! what a free and wonderful) air comes blowing
+on your face; you cross a ridge of snow; and lying before you (wholly
+unseen till then), towering up into the distant sky, is the vast range
+of Mont Blanc, with attendant mountains diminished by its majestic side
+into mere dwarfs tapering up into innumerable rude Gothic pinnacles;
+deserts of ice and snow; forests of firs on mountain sides, of no
+account at all in the enormous scene; villages down in the hollow, that
+you can shut out with a finger; waterfalls, avalanches, pyramids and
+towers of ice, torrents, bridges; mountain upon mountain until the very
+sky is blocked away, and you must look up, overhead, to see it. Good
+God, what a country Switzerland is, and what a concentration of it is to
+be beheld from that one spot! And (think of this in Whitefriars and in
+Lincoln's-inn!) at noon on the second day from here, the first day being
+but half a one by the bye and full of uncommon beauty, you lie down on
+that ridge and see it all! . . . I think I must go back again (whether you
+come or not!) and see it again before the bad weather arrives. We have
+had sunlight, moonlight, a perfectly transparent atmosphere with not a
+cloud, and the grand plateau on the very summit of Mont Blanc so clear
+by day and night that it was difficult to believe in intervening chasms
+and precipices, and almost impossible to resist the idea that one might
+sally forth and climb up easily. I went into all sorts of places; armed
+with a great pole with a spike at the end of it, like a leaping-pole,
+and with pointed irons buckled on to my shoes; and am all but knocked
+up. I was very anxious to make the expedition to what is called 'The
+Garden:' a green spot covered with wild flowers, lying across the Mer de
+Glace, and among the most awful mountains: but I could find no
+Englishman at the hotels who was similarly disposed, and the Brave
+_wouldn't go_. No sir! He gave in point blank (having been horribly
+blown in a climbing excursion the day before), and couldn't stand it. He
+is too heavy for such work, unquestionably.[122] In all other respects,
+I think he has exceeded himself on this journey; and if you could have
+seen him riding a very small mule, up a road exactly like the broken
+stairs of Rochester-castle; with a brandy bottle slung over his
+shoulder, a small pie in his hat, a roast fowl looking out of his
+pocket, and a mountain staff of six feet long carried cross-wise on the
+saddle before him; you'd have said so. He was (next to me) the
+admiration of Chamounix, but he utterly quenched me on the road."
+
+On the road as they returned there had been a small adventure, the day
+before this letter was written. Dickens was jingling slowly up the Tete
+Noire pass (his mule having thirty-seven bells on its head), riding at
+the moment quite alone, when--"an Englishman came bolting out of a
+little chalet in a most inaccessible and extraordinary place, and said
+with great glee 'There has been an accident here sir!' I had been
+thinking of anything else you please; and, having no reason to suppose
+him an Englishman except his language, which went for nothing in the
+confusion, stammered out a reply in French and stared at him, in a very
+damp shirt and trowsers, as he stared at me in a similar costume. On his
+repeating the announcement, I began to have a glimmering of common
+sense; and so arrived at a knowledge of the fact that a German lady had
+been thrown from her mule and had broken her leg, at a short distance
+off, and had found her way in great pain to that cottage, where the
+Englishman, a Prussian, and a Frenchman, had presently come up; and the
+Frenchman, by extraordinary good fortune, was a surgeon! They were all
+from Chamounix, and the three latter were walking in company. It was
+quite charming to see how attentive they were. The lady was from
+Lausanne; where she had come from Frankfort to make excursions with her
+two boys, who are at the college here, during the vacation. She had no
+other attendants, and the boys were crying and very frightened. The
+Englishman was in the full glee of having just cut up one white dress,
+two chemises, and three pocket handkerchiefs, for bandages; the
+Frenchman had set the leg skilfully; the Prussian had scoured a
+neighboring wood for some men to carry her forward; and they were all at
+it, behind the hut, making a sort of handbarrow on which to bear her.
+When it was constructed, she was strapped upon it; had her poor head
+covered over with a handkerchief, and was carried away; and we all went
+on in company: Kate and Georgy consoling and tending the sufferer, who
+was very cheerful, but had lost her husband only a year." With the same
+delightful observation, and missing no touch of kindly character that
+might give each actor his place in the little scene, the sequel is
+described; but it does not need to add more. It was hoped that by means
+of relays of men at Martigny the poor lady might have been carried on
+some twenty miles, in the cooler evening, to the head of the lake, and
+so have been got into the steamer; but she was too exhausted to be borne
+beyond the inn, and there she had to remain until joined by relatives
+from Frankfort.
+
+A few days' rest after his return were interposed, before he began his
+second number; and until the latter has been completed, and the
+Christmas story taken in hand, I do not admit the reader to his full
+confidences about his writing. But there were other subjects that amused
+and engaged him up to that date, as well when he was idle as when again
+he was at work, to which expression so full of character is given in his
+letters that they properly find mention here.
+
+Between the second and the ninth of August he went down one evening to
+the lake, five minutes after sunset, when the sky was covered with
+sullen black clouds reflected in the deep water, and saw the Castle of
+Chillon. He thought it the best deserving and least exaggerated in
+repute, of all the places he had seen. "The insupportable solitude and
+dreariness of the white walls and towers, the sluggish moat and
+drawbridge, and the lonely ramparts, I never saw the like of. But there
+is a court-yard inside; surrounded by prisons, oubliettes, and old
+chambers of torture; so terrifically sad, that death itself is not more
+sorrowful. And oh! a wicked old Grand Duke's bedchamber upstairs in the
+tower, with a secret staircase down into the chapel, where the bats were
+wheeling about; and Bonnivard's dungeon; and a horrible trap whence
+prisoners were cast out into the lake; and a stake all burnt and
+crackled up, that still stands in the torture-ante-chamber to the saloon
+of justice (!)--what tremendous places! Good God, the greatest mystery
+in all the earth, to me, is how or why the world was tolerated by its
+Creator through the good old times, and wasn't dashed to fragments."
+
+On the ninth of August he wrote to me that there was to be a prodigious
+fete that day in Lausanne, in honour of the first anniversary of the
+proclamation of the New Constitution:[123] "beginning at sunrise with
+the firing of great guns, and twice two thousand rounds of rifles by two
+thousand men; proceeding at eleven o'clock with a great service, and
+some speechifying, in the church; and ending to-night with a great ball
+in the public promenade, and a general illumination of the town." The
+authorities had invited him to a place of honour in the ceremony; and
+though he did not go ("having been up till three o'clock in the morning,
+and being fast asleep at the appointed time"), the reply that sent his
+thanks expressed also his sympathy. He was the readier with this from
+having discovered, in the "old" or "gentlemanly" party of the place
+("including of course the sprinkling of English who are always tory,
+hang 'em!"), so wonderfully sore a feeling about the revolution thus
+celebrated, that to avoid its fete the majority had gone off by steamer
+the day before, and those who remained were prophesying assaults on the
+unilluminated houses, and other excesses. Dickens had no faith in such
+predictions. "The people are as perfectly good tempered and quiet
+always, as people can be. I don't know what the last Government may have
+been, but they seem to me to do very well with this, and to be
+rationally and cheaply provided for. If you believed what the
+discontented assert, you wouldn't believe in one solitary man or woman
+with a grain of goodness or civility. I find nothing _but_ civility; and
+I walk about in all sorts of out-of-the-way places, where they live
+rough lives enough, in solitary cottages." The issue was told in two
+postscripts to his letter, and showed him to be so far right. "P.S. 6
+o'clock afternoon. The fete going on, in great force. Not one of 'the
+old party' to be seen. I went down with one to the ground before dinner,
+and nothing would induce him to go within the barrier with me. Yet what
+they call a revolution was nothing but a change of government.
+Thirty-six thousand people, in this small canton, petitioned against the
+Jesuits--God knows with good reason. The Government chose to call them
+'a mob.' So, to prove that they were not, they turned the Government
+out. I honour them for it. They are a genuine people, these Swiss. There
+is better metal in them than in all the stars and stripes of all the
+fustian banners of the so-called, and falsely called, U-nited States.
+They are a thorn in the sides of European despots, and a good wholesome
+people to live near Jesuit-ridden Kings on the brighter side of the
+mountains." "P.P.S. August 10th. . . . The fete went off as quietly as I
+supposed it would; and they danced all night."
+
+These views had forcible illustration in a subsequent letter, where he
+describes a similar revolution that occurred at Geneva before he left
+the country; and nothing could better show his practical good sense in a
+matter of this kind. The description will be given shortly; and
+meanwhile I subjoin a comment made by him, not less worthy of attention,
+upon my reply to his account of the anti-Jesuit celebration at Lausanne.
+"I don't know whether I have mentioned before, that in the valley of the
+Simplon hard by here, where (at the bridge of St. Maurice, over the
+Rhone) this Protestant canton ends and a Catholic canton begins, you
+might separate two perfectly distinct and different conditions of
+humanity by drawing a line with your stick in the dust on the ground. On
+the Protestant side, neatness; cheerfulness; industry; education;
+continual aspiration, at least, after better things. On the Catholic
+side, dirt, disease, ignorance, squalor, and misery. I have so
+constantly observed the like of this, since I first came abroad, that I
+have a sad misgiving that the religion of Ireland lies as deep at the
+root of all its sorrows, even as English misgovernment and Tory
+villainy." Almost the counterpart of this remark is to be found in one
+of the later writings of Macaulay.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[117] "When it is very hot, it is hotter than in Italy. The over-hanging
+roofs of the houses, and the quantity of wood employed in their
+construction (where they use tile and brick in Italy), render them
+perfect forcing-houses. The walls and floors, hot to the hand all the
+night through, interfere with sleep; and thunder is almost always
+booming and rumbling among the mountains." Besides this, though there
+were no mosquitoes as in Genoa, there was at first a plague of flies,
+more distressing even than at Albaro. "They cover everything eatable,
+fall into everything drinkable, stagger into the wet ink of
+newly-written words and make tracks on the writing paper, clog their
+legs in the lather on your chin while you are shaving in the morning,
+and drive you frantic at any time when there is daylight if you fall
+asleep."
+
+[118] His preceding letter had sketched his landlord for me. . . . "There
+was an annual child's fete at the Signal the other night: given by the
+town. It was beautiful to see perhaps a hundred couple of children
+dancing in an immense ring in a green wood. Our three eldest were among
+them, presided over by my landlord, who was 18 years in the English
+navy, and is the Sous Prefet of the town--a very good fellow indeed;
+quite an Englishman. Our landlady, nearly twice his age, used to keep
+the Inn (a famous one) at Zurich: and having made L50,000 bestowed it on
+a young husband. She might have done worse."
+
+[119] The close of this letter sent family remembrances in
+characteristic form. "Kate, Georgy, Mamey, Katey, Charley, Walley,
+Chickenstalker, and Sampson Brass, commend themselves unto your Honour's
+loving remembrance." The last but one, who continued long to bear the
+name, was Frank; the last, who very soon will be found to have another,
+was Alfred.
+
+[120] The life of Paul was nevertheless prolonged to the fifth number.
+
+[121] The mathematical-instrument-maker, who Mr. Taine describes as a
+marine store dealer.
+
+[122] Poor fellow! he had latent disease of the heart, which developed
+itself rapidly on Dickens's return to England.
+
+[123] Out of the excitements consequent on the public festivities arose
+some domestic inconveniences. I will give one of them. "Fanchette the
+cook, distracted by the forthcoming fete, madly refused to buy a duck
+yesterday as ordered by the Brave, and a battle of life ensued between
+those two powers. The Brave is of opinion that 'datter woman have went
+mad.' But she seems calm to-day; and I suppose won't poison the
+family. . . ."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+SKETCHES CHIEFLY PERSONAL.
+
+1846.
+
+ Home Politics--Malthus Philosophy--Mark
+ Lemon--An Incident of Character--Hood's _Tylney
+ Hall_--Duke of Wellington--Lord Grey--A
+ Recollection of his Reporting Days--Returns to
+ _Dombey_--Two English Travellers--Party among
+ the Hills--Lord Vernon--A Wonderful
+ Carriage--Reading of First _Dombey_--A Sketch
+ from Life--Trip to Great St. Bernard--Ascent of
+ the Mountain--The Convent--Scene at the
+ Mountain Top--Bodies found in the Snow--The
+ Holy Fathers--A Holy Brother and _Pickwick_.
+
+
+SOME sketches from the life in his pleasantest vein now claim to be
+taken from the same series of letters; and I will prefix one or two less
+important notices, for the most part personal also, that have
+characteristic mention of his opinions in them.
+
+Home-politics he criticized in what he wrote on the 24th of August, much
+in the spirit of his last excellent remark on the Protestant and
+Catholic cantons; having no sympathy with the course taken by the whigs
+in regard to Ireland after they had defeated Peel on his coercion bill,
+and resumed the government. "I am perfectly appalled by the hesitation
+and cowardice of the whigs. To bring in that arms bill, bear the brunt
+of the attack upon it, take out the obnoxious clauses, still retain the
+bill, and finally withdraw it, seems to me the meanest and most halting
+way of going to work that ever was taken. I cannot believe in them.
+Lord John must be helpless among them. They seem somehow or other never
+to know what cards they hold in their hands, and to play them out
+blindfold. The contrast with Peel (as he was last) is, I agree with you,
+certainly not favourable. I don't believe now they ever would have
+carried the repeal of the corn law, if they could." Referring in the
+same letter[124] to the reluctance of public men of all parties to give
+the needful help to schemes of emigration, he ascribed it to a secret
+belief "in the gentle politico-economical principle that a surplus
+population must and ought to starve;" in which for himself he never
+could see anything but disaster for all who trusted to it. "I am
+convinced that its philosophers would sink any government, any cause,
+any doctrine, even the most righteous. There is a sense and humanity in
+the mass, in the long run, that will not bear them; and they will wreck
+their friends always, as they wrecked them in the working of the
+Poor-law-bill. Not all the figures that Babbage's calculating machine
+could turn up in twenty generations, would stand in the long run against
+the general heart."
+
+Of other topics in his letters, one or two have the additional
+attractiveness derivable from touches of personal interest when these
+may with propriety be printed. Hardly within the class might have fallen
+a mention of Mark Lemon, of whom our recent play, and his dramatic
+adaptation of the _Chimes_, had given him pleasant experiences, if I
+felt less strongly not only that its publication would have been gladly
+sanctioned by the subject of it, but that it will not now displease
+another to whom also it refers, herself the member of a family in
+various ways distinguished on the stage, and to whom, since her
+husband's death, well-merited sympathy and respect have been paid.
+"After turning Mrs. Lemon's portrait over, in my mind, I am convinced
+that there is not a grain of bad taste in the matter, and that there is
+a manly composure and courage in the proceeding deserving of the utmost
+respect. If Lemon were one of your braggart honest men, he would set a
+taint of bad taste upon that action as upon everything else he might say
+or do; but being what he is, I admire him for it greatly, and hold it to
+be a proof of an exalted nature and a true heart. Your idea of him, is
+mine. I am sure he is an excellent fellow. We talk about not liking such
+and such a man because he doesn't look one in the face,--but how much we
+should esteem a man who looks the world in the face, composedly, and
+neither shirks it nor bullies it. Between ourselves, I say with shame
+and self-reproach that I am quite sure if Kate had been a Columbine her
+portrait would not be hanging, 'in character,' in Devonshire-terrace."
+
+He speaks thus of a novel by Hood. "I have been reading poor Hood's
+_Tylney Hall_; the most extraordinary jumble of impossible extravagance,
+and especial cleverness, I ever saw. The man drawn to the life from the
+pirate-bookseller, is wonderfully good; and his recommendation to a
+reduced gentleman from the university, to rise from nothing as he, the
+pirate, did, and go round to the churches and see whether there's an
+opening, and begin by being a beadle, is one of the finest things I ever
+read, in its way." The same letter has a gentle little trait of the
+great duke, touching in its simplicity, and worth preserving. "I had a
+letter from Tagart the day before yesterday, with a curious little
+anecdote of the Duke of Wellington in it. They have had a small cottage
+at Walmer; and one day--the other day only--the old man met their little
+daughter Lucy, a child about Mamey's age, near the garden; and having
+kissed her, and asked her what was her name, and who and what her
+parents were, tied a small silver medal round her neck with a bit of
+pink ribbon, and asked the child to keep it in remembrance of him. There
+is something good, and aged, and odd in it. Is there not?"
+
+Another of his personal references was to Lord Grey, to whose style of
+speaking and general character of mind he had always a strongly-expressed
+dislike, drawn not impartially or quite justly from the days of reaction
+that followed the reform debates, when the whig leader's least
+attractive traits were presented to the young reporter. "He is a very
+intelligent agreeable fellow, the said Watson by the bye" (he is
+speaking of the member of the Lausanne circle with whom he established
+friendliest after-intercourse); "he sat for Northamptonshire in the
+reform bill time, and is high sheriff of his county and all the rest of
+it; but has not the least nonsense about him, and is a thorough good
+liberal. He has a charming wife, who draws well, and is making a sketch
+of Rosemont for us that shall be yours in Paris." (It is already, by
+permission of its present possessor, the reader's, and all the world's
+who may take interest in the little doll's house of Lausanne which
+lodged so illustrious a tenant.) "He was giving me some good
+recollections of Lord Grey the other evening when we were playing at
+battledore (old Lord Grey I mean), and of the constitutional
+impossibility he and Lord Lansdowne and the rest laboured under, of ever
+personally attaching a single young man, in all the excitement of that
+exciting time, to the leaders of the party. It was quite a delight to
+me, as I listened, to recall my own dislike of his style of speaking,
+his fishy coldness, his uncongenial and unsympathetic politeness, and
+his insufferable though most gentlemanly artificiality. The shape of his
+head (I see it now) was misery to me, and weighed down my youth. . . ."
+
+It was now the opening of the second week in August; and before he
+finally addressed himself to the second number of _Dombey_, he had again
+turned a lingering look in the direction of his Christmas book. "It
+would be such a great relief to me to get that small story out of the
+way." Wisely, however, again he refrained, and went on with _Dombey_; at
+which he had been working for a little time when he described to me
+(24th of August) a visit from two English travellers, of one of whom
+with the slightest possible touch he gives a speaking likeness.[125]
+
+"Not having your letter as usual, I sat down to write to you on
+speculation yesterday, but lapsed in my uncertainty into _Dombey_, and
+worked at it all day. It was, as it has been since last Tuesday morning,
+incessantly raining regular mountain rain. After dinner, at a little
+after seven o'clock, I was walking up and down under the little
+colonnade in the garden, racking my brain about _Dombeys_ and _Battles
+of Lives_, when two travel-stained-looking men approached, of whom one,
+in a very limp and melancholy straw hat, ducked, perpetually to me as he
+came up the walk. I couldn't make them out at all; and it wasn't till I
+got close up to them that I recognised A. and (in the straw hat) N. They
+had come from Geneva by the steamer, and taken a scrambling dinner on
+board. I gave them some fine Rhine wine, and cigars innumerable. A.
+enjoyed himself and was quite at home. N. (an odd companion for a man of
+genius) was snobbish, but pleased and good-natured. A. had a five pound
+note in his pocket which he had worn down, by careless carrying about,
+to some two-thirds of its original size, and which was so ragged in its
+remains that when he took it out bits of it flew about the table. 'Oh
+Lor you know--now really--like Goldsmith you know--or any of those great
+men!' said N. with the very 'snatches in his voice and burst of
+speaking' that reminded Leigh Hunt of Cloten. . . . The clouds were lying,
+as they do in such weather here, on the earth, and our friends saw no
+more of Lake Leman than of Battersea. Nor had they, it might appear,
+seen more of the Mer de Glace, on their way here; their talk about it
+bearing much resemblance to that of the man who had been to Niagara and
+said it was nothing but water."
+
+His next letter described a day's party of the Cerjats, Watsons, and
+Haldimands, among the neighbouring hills, which, contrary to his custom
+while at work, he had been unable to resist the temptation of joining.
+They went to a mountain-lake twelve miles off, had dinner at the
+public-house on the lake, and returned home by Vevay at which they
+rested for tea; and where pleasant talk with Mr. Cerjat led to anecdotes
+of an excellent friend of ours, formerly resident at Lausanne, with
+which the letter closed. Our friend was a distinguished writer, and a
+man of many sterling fine qualities, but with a habit of occasional free
+indulgence in coarseness of speech, which, though his earlier life had
+made it as easy to acquire as difficult to drop, did always less than
+justice to a very manly, honest, and really gentle nature. He had as
+much genuinely admirable stuff in him as any favourite hero of Smollett
+or Fielding, and I never knew anyone who reminded me of those characters
+so much. "It would seem, Mr. Cerjat tells me, that he was, when here,
+infinitely worse in his general style of conversation, than
+now--sermuchser, as Toodles says, that Cerjat describes himself as
+having always been in unspeakable agony when he was at his table, lest
+he should forget himself (or remember himself, as I suggested) and break
+out before the ladies. There happened to be living here at that time a
+stately English baronet and his wife, who had two milksop sons,
+concerning whom they cherished the idea of accomplishing their education
+into manhood coexistently with such perfect purity and innocence, that
+they were hardly to know their own sex. Accordingly, they were sent to
+no school or college, but had masters of all sorts at home, and thus
+reached eighteen years or so, in what Falstaff calls a kind of male
+green-sickness. At this crisis of their innocent existence, our ogre
+friend encountered these lambs at dinner, with their father, at Cerjat's
+house; and, as if possessed by a devil, launched out into such frightful
+and appalling impropriety--ranging over every kind of forbidden topic
+and every species of forbidden word and every sort of scandalous
+anecdote--that years of education in Newgate would have been as nothing
+compared with their experience of that one afternoon. After turning
+paler and paler, and more and more stoney, the baronet, with a
+half-suppressed cry, rose and fled. But the sons--intent on the
+ogre--remained behind instead of following him; and are supposed to have
+been ruined from that hour. Isn't that a good story? I can SEE our
+friend and his pupils now. . . . Poor fellow! He seems to have a hard time
+of it with his wife. She had no interest whatever in her children; and
+was such a fury, that, being dressed to go out to dinner, she would
+sometimes, on no other provocation than a pin out of its place or some
+such thing, fall upon a little maid she had, beat her till she couldn't
+stand, then tumble into hysterics, and be carried to bed. He suffered
+martyrdom with her; and seems to have been himself, in all good-natured
+easy-going ways, just what we know him now."
+
+There were at this time some fresh arrivals of travelling English at
+Lausanne, outside their own little circle, and among them another
+baronet and his family made amusing appearance. "We have another English
+family here, one Sir Joseph and his lady, and ten children. Sir Joseph,
+a large baronet something in the Graham style, with a little,
+loquacious, flat-faced, damaged-featured, _old young_ wife. They are
+fond of society, and couldn't well have less. They delight in a view,
+and live in a close street at Ouchy, down among the drunken boatmen and
+the drays and omnibuses, where nothing whatever is to be seen but the
+locked wheels of carts scraping down the uneven, steep, stone pavement.
+The baronet plays double-dummy all day long, with an unhappy Swiss whom
+he has entrapped for that purpose; the baronet's lady pays visits; and
+the baronet's daughters play a Lausanne piano, which must be heard to be
+appreciated. . . ."
+
+Another sketch in the same letter touches little more than the
+eccentricities (but all in good taste and good humour) of the subject of
+it, who is still gratefully remembered by English residents in Italy for
+his scholarly munificence, and for very valuable service conferred by it
+on Italian literature. "Another curious man is backwards and forwards
+here--a Lord Vernon,[126] who is well-informed, a great Italian scholar
+deep in Dante, and a very good-humoured gentleman, but who has fallen
+into the strange infatuation of attending every rifle-match that takes
+place in Switzerland, accompanied by two men who load rifles for him,
+one after another, which he has been frequently known to fire off, two a
+minute, for fourteen hours at a stretch, without once changing his
+position or leaving the ground. He wins all kinds of prizes; gold
+watches, flags, teaspoons, tea-boards, and so forth; and is constantly
+travelling about with them, from place to place, in an extraordinary
+carriage, where you touch a spring and a chair flies out, touch another
+spring and a bed appears, touch another spring and a closet of pickles
+opens, touch another spring and disclose a pantry. While Lady Vernon
+(said to be handsome and accomplished) is continually cutting across
+this or that Alpine pass in the night, to meet him on the road, for a
+minute or two, on one of his excursions; these being the only times at
+which she can catch him. The last time he saw her, was five or six
+months ago, when they met and supped together on the St. Gothard! It is
+a monomania with him, of course. He is a man of some note; seconded one
+of Lord Melbourne's addresses; and had forty thousand a year, now
+reduced to ten, but nursing and improving every day. He was with us last
+Monday, and comes back from some out-of-the-way place to join another
+small picnic next Friday. As I have said, he is the very soul of good
+nature and cheerfulness, but one can't help being melancholy to see a
+man wasting his life in such a singular delusion. Isn't it odd? He knows
+my books very well, and seems interested in everything concerning them;
+being indeed accomplished in books generally, and attached to many
+elegant tastes."
+
+But the most agreeable addition to their own special circle was referred
+to in his first September letter, just when he was coming to the close
+of his second number of _Dombey_. "There are two nice girls here, the
+Ladies Taylor, daughters of Lord Headfort. Their mother was daughter (I
+think) of Sir John Stevenson, and Moore dedicated one part of the Irish
+Melodies to her. They inherit the musical taste, and sing very well. A
+proposal is on foot for our all bundling off on Tuesday (16 strong) to
+the top of the Great St. Bernard. But the weather seems to have broken,
+and the autumn rains to have set in; which I devoutly hope will break up
+the party. It would be a most serious hindrance to me, just now; but I
+have rashly promised. Do you know young Romilly? He is coming over from
+Geneva when 'the reading' comes off, and is a fine fellow I am told.
+There is not a bad little theatre here; and by way of an artificial
+crowd, I should certainly have got it open with an amateur company, if
+we were not so few that the only thing we want is the audience.". . . The
+"reading" named by him was that of his first number, which was to "come
+off" as soon as I could get the proofs out to him; but which the changes
+needful to be made, and to be mentioned hereafter, still delayed. The
+St. Bernard holiday, which within sight of his Christmas-book labour he
+would fain have thrown over, came off as proposed very fortunately for
+the reader, who might otherwise have lost one of his pleasantest
+descriptions. But before giving it, one more little sketch of character
+may be interposed as delicately done as anything in his writings.
+Steele's observation is in the outline, and Charles Lamb's humour in its
+touch of colouring.
+
+". . . There are two old ladies (English) living here who may serve me for
+a few lines of gossip--as I have intended they should, over and over
+again, but I have always forgotten it. There were originally four old
+ladies, sisters, but two of them have faded away in the course of
+eighteen years, and withered by the side of John Kemble in the cemetery.
+They are very little, and very skinny; and each of them wears a row of
+false curls, like little rolling-pins, so low upon her brow, that there
+is no forehead; nothing above the eyebrows but a deep horizontal
+wrinkle, and then the curls. They live upon some small annuity. For
+thirteen years they have wanted very much to move to Italy, as the
+eldest old lady says the climate of this part of Switzerland doesn't
+agree with her, and preys upon her spirits; but they have never been
+able to go, because of the difficulty of moving 'the books.' This
+tremendous library belonged once upon a time to the father of these old
+ladies, and comprises about fifty volumes. I have never been able to
+see what they are, because one of the old ladies always sits before
+them; but they look, outside, like very old backgammon-boards. The two
+deceased sisters died in the firm persuasion that this precious property
+could never be got over the Simplon without some gigantic effort to
+which the united family was unequal. The two remaining sisters live, and
+will die also, in the same belief. I met the eldest (evidently drooping)
+yesterday, and recommended her to try Genoa. She looked shrewdly at the
+snow that closes up the mountain prospect just now, and said that when
+the spring was quite set in, and the avalanches were down, and the
+passes well open, she would certainly try that place, if they could
+devise any plan, in the course of the winter, for moving 'the books.'
+The whole library will be sold by auction here, when they are both dead,
+for about a napoleon; and some young woman will carry it home in two
+journeys with a basket."
+
+The last letter sent me before he fell upon his self-appointed task for
+Christmas, contained a delightful account of the trip to the Great St.
+Bernard. It was dated on the sixth of September.
+
+"The weather obstinately clearing, we started off last Tuesday for the
+Great St. Bernard, returning here on Friday afternoon. The party
+consisted of eleven people and two servants--Haldimand, Mr. and Mrs.
+Cerjat and one daughter, Mr. and Mrs. Watson, two Ladies Taylor, Kate,
+Georgy, and I. We were wonderfully unanimous and cheerful; went away
+from here by the steamer; found at its destination a whole omnibus
+provided by the Brave (who went on in advance everywhere); rode therein
+to Bex; found two large carriages ready to take us to Martigny; slept
+there; and proceeded up the mountain on mules next day. Although the St.
+Bernard convent is, as I dare say you know, the highest inhabited spot
+but one in the world, the ascent is extremely gradual and uncommonly
+easy: really presenting no difficulties at all, until within the last
+league, when the ascent, lying through a place called the valley of
+desolation, is very awful and tremendous, and the road is rendered
+toilsome by scattered rocks and melting snow. The convent is a most
+extraordinary place, full of great vaulted passages, divided from each
+other with iron gratings; and presenting a series of the most
+astonishing little dormitories, where the windows are so small (on
+account of the cold and snow), that it is as much as one can do to get
+one's head out of them. Here we slept: supping, thirty strong, in a
+rambling room with a great wood-fire in it set apart for that purpose;
+with a grim monk, in a high black sugar-loaf hat with a great knob at
+the top of it, carving the dishes. At five o'clock in the morning the
+chapel bell rang in the dismallest way for matins: and I, lying in bed
+close to the chapel, and being awakened by the solemn organ and the
+chaunting, thought for a moment I had died in the night and passed into
+the unknown world.
+
+"I wish to God you could see that place. A great hollow on the top of a
+range of dreadful mountains, fenced in by riven rocks of every shape and
+colour: and in the midst, a black lake, with phantom clouds perpetually
+stalking over it. Peaks, and points, and plains of eternal ice and snow,
+bounding the view, and shutting out the world on every side: the lake
+reflecting nothing: and no human figure in the scene. The air so fine,
+that it is difficult to breathe without feeling out of breath; and the
+cold so exquisitely thin and sharp that it is not to be described.
+Nothing of life or living interest in the picture, but the grey dull
+walls of the convent. No vegetation of any sort or kind. Nothing
+growing, nothing stirring. Everything iron-bound, and frozen up. Beside
+the convent, in a little outhouse with a grated iron door which you may
+unbolt for yourself, are the bodies of people found in the snow who have
+never been claimed and are withering away--not laid down, or stretched
+out, but standing up, in corners and against walls; some erect and
+horribly human, with distinct expressions on the faces; some sunk down
+on their knees; some dropping over on one side; some tumbled down
+altogether, and presenting a heap of skulls and fibrous dust. There is
+no other decay in that atmosphere; and there they remain during the
+short days and the long nights, the only human company out of doors,
+withering away by grains, and holding ghastly possession of the mountain
+where they died.
+
+"It is the most distinct and individual place I have seen, even in this
+transcendent country. But, for the Saint Bernard holy fathers and
+convent in themselves, I am sorry to say that they are a piece of as
+sheer humbug as we ever learnt to believe in, in our young days. Trashy
+French sentiment and the dogs (of which, by the bye, there are only
+three remaining) have done it all. They are a lazy set of fellows; not
+over fond of going out themselves; employing servants to clear the road
+(which has not been important or much used as a pass these hundred
+years); rich; and driving a good trade in Innkeeping: the convent being
+a common tavern in everything but the sign. No charge is made for their
+hospitality, to be sure; but you are shown to a box in the chapel, where
+everybody puts in more than could, with any show of face, be charged for
+the entertainment; and from this the establishment derives a right good
+income. As to the self-sacrifice of living up there, they are obliged to
+go there young, it is true, to be inured to the climate: but it is an
+infinitely more exciting and various life than any other convent can
+offer; with constant change and company through the whole summer; with a
+hospital for invalids down in the valley, which affords another change;
+and with an annual begging-journey to Geneva and this place and all the
+places round for one brother or other, which affords farther change. The
+brother who carved at our supper could speak some English, and had just
+had _Pickwick_ given him!--what a humbug he will think me when he tries
+to understand it! If I had had any other book of mine with me, I would
+have given it him, that I might have had some chance of being
+intelligible. . . ."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[124] Where he makes remark also on a class of offences which are still
+most inadequately punished: "I hope you will follow up your idea about
+the defective state of the law in reference to women, by some remarks on
+the inadequate punishment of that ruffian flippantly called by the
+liners the Wholesale Matrimonial Speculator. My opinion is, that in any
+well-ordered state of society, and advanced spirit of social
+jurisprudence, he would have been flogged more than once (privately),
+and certainly sentenced to transportation for no less a term than the
+rest of his life. Surely the man who threw the woman out of window was
+no worse, if so bad."
+
+[125] Ten days before there had been a visit from Mr. Ainsworth and his
+daughters on their way to Geneva. "I breakfasted with him at the hotel
+Gibbon next morning and they dined here afterwards, and we walked about
+all day, talking of our old days at Kensal-lodge." The same letter told
+me: "We had a regatta at Ouchy the other day, mainly supported by the
+contributions of the English handfull. It concluded with a rowing-match
+by women, which was very funny. I wish you could have seen Roche appear
+on the Lake, rowing, in an immense boat, Cook, Anne, two nurses, Katey,
+Mamey, Walley, Chickenstalker, and Baby; no boatmen or other degrading
+assistance; and all sorts of Swiss tubs splashing about them . . . Senior
+is coming here to-morrow, I believe, with his wife; and they talk of
+Brunel and his wife as on their way. We dine at Haldimand's to meet
+Senior--which solitary and most interesting piece of intelligence is all
+the news I know of . . . Take care you don't back out of your Paris
+engagement; but that we really do have (please God) some happy hours
+there. Kate, Georgy, Mamey, Katey, Charley, Walley, Chickenstalker, and
+Baby, send loves. . . . I am all anxiety and fever to know what we start
+_Dombey_ with!"
+
+[126] This was the fourth Baron Vernon, who succeeded to the title in
+1829, and died seven years after the date of Dickens's description, in
+his 74th year.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+LITERARY LABOUR AT LAUSANNE.
+
+1846.
+
+ A Picture completed--Self-judgments--Christmas
+ Fancies--Second Number of _Dombey_--A Personal
+ Revelation--First Thought of Public
+ Readings--Two Tales in Hand--Christmas Book
+ given up--Goes to Geneva--Disquietudes of
+ Authorship--Shadows from _Dombey_--A New Social
+ Experience--Eccentricities--Feminine Smoking
+ Party--Visit of the Talfourds--Christmas Book
+ resumed--Lodging his Friends.
+
+
+SOMETHING of the other side of the medal has now to be presented. His
+letters enable us to see him amid his troubles and difficulties of
+writing, as faithfully as in his leisure and enjoyments; and when, to
+the picture thus given of Dickens's home life in Switzerland, some
+account has been added of the vicissitudes of literary labour undergone
+in the interval, as complete a representation of the man will be
+afforded as could be taken from any period of his career. Of the larger
+life whereof it is part, the Lausanne life is indeed a perfect
+microcosm, wanting only the London streets. This was his chief present
+want, as will shortly be perceived: but as yet the reader does not feel
+it, and he sees otherwise in all respects at his best the great observer
+and humourist; interested in everything that commended itself to a
+thoroughly earnest and eagerly enquiring nature; popular beyond measure
+with all having intercourse with him; the centre, and very soul, of
+social enjoyment; letting nothing escape a vision that was not more keen
+than kindly; and even when apparently most idle, never idle in the sense
+of his art, but adding day by day to experiences that widened its range,
+and gave freer and healthier play to an imagination always busily at
+work, alert and active in a singular degree, and that seemed to be quite
+untiring. At his heart there was a genuine love of nature at all times;
+and strange as it may seem to connect this with such forms of humorous
+delineation as are most identified with his genius, it is yet the
+literal truth that the impressions of this noble Swiss scenery were with
+him during the work of many subsequent years: a present and actual,
+though it might be seldom a directly conscious, influence. When he said
+afterwards, that, while writing the book on which he is now engaged, he
+had not seen less clearly each step of the wooden midshipman's
+staircase, each pew of the church in which Florence was married, or each
+bed in the dormitory of Doctor Blimber's establishment, because he was
+himself at the time by the lake of Geneva, he might as truly have said
+that he saw them all the more clearly even because of that circumstance.
+He worked his humour to its greatest results by the freedom and force of
+his imagination; and while the smallest or commonest objects around him
+were food for the one, the other might have pined or perished without
+additional higher aliment. Dickens had little love for Wordsworth, but
+he was himself an example of the truth the great poet never tired of
+enforcing, that Nature has subtle helps for all who are admitted to
+become free of her wonders and mysteries.
+
+Another noticeable thing in him is impressed upon these letters, as upon
+many also heretofore quoted, for indeed all of them are marvellously
+exact in the reproduction of his nature. He did not think lightly of his
+work; and the work that occupied him at the time was for the time
+paramount with him. But the sense he entertained, whether right or
+wrong, of the importance of what he had to do, of the degree to which it
+concerned others that the power he held should be exercised
+successfully, and of the estimate he was justified in forming as the
+fair measure of its worth or greatness, does not carry with it of
+necessity presumption or self-conceit. Few men have had less of either.
+It was part of the intense individuality by which he effected so much,
+to set the high value which in general he did upon what he was striving
+to accomplish; he could not otherwise have mastered one half the work he
+designed; and we are able to form an opinion, more just now for
+ourselves than it might have seemed to us then from others, of the
+weight and truth of such self-judgment. The fussy pretension of small
+men in great places, and the resolute self-assertion of great men in
+small places, are things essentially different. _Respice finem_. The
+exact relative importance of all our pursuits is to be arrived at by
+nicer adjustments of the Now and the Hereafter than are possible to
+contemporary judgments; and there have been some indications since his
+death confirmatory of the belief, that the estimate which he thought
+himself entitled to form of the labours to which his life was devoted,
+will be strengthened, not lessened, by time.
+
+Dickens proposed to himself, it will be remembered, to write at Lausanne
+not only the first four numbers of his larger book, but the Christmas
+book suggested to him by his fancy of a battle field; and reserving what
+is to be said of _Dombey_ to a later chapter, this and its successor
+will deal only with what he finished as well as began in Switzerland,
+and will show at what cost even so much was achieved amid his other and
+larger engagements.
+
+He had restless fancies and misgivings before he settled to his first
+notion. "I have been thinking this last day or two," he wrote on the
+25th of July, "that good Christmas characters might be grown out of the
+idea of a man imprisoned for ten or fifteen years; his imprisonment
+being the gap between the people and circumstances of the first part and
+the altered people and circumstances of the second, and his own changed
+mind. Though I shall probably proceed with the Battle idea, I should
+like to know what you think of this one?" It was afterwards used in a
+modified shape for the _Tale of Two Cities_. "I shall begin the little
+story straightway," he wrote a few weeks later; "but I have been dimly
+conceiving a very ghostly and wild idea, which I suppose I must now
+reserve for the _next_ Christmas book. _Nous verrons._ It will mature in
+the streets of Paris by night, as well as in London." This took
+ultimately the form of the _Haunted Man_, which was not written until
+the winter of 1848. At last I knew that his first slip was done, and
+that even his eager busy fancy would not turn him back again.
+
+But other unsatisfied wants and cravings had meanwhile broken out in
+him, of which I heard near the close of the second number of _Dombey_.
+The first he had finished at the end of July; and the second, which he
+began on the 8th of August, he was still at work upon in the first week
+of September, when this remarkable announcement came to me. It was his
+first detailed confession of what he felt so continuously, and if that
+were possible even more strongly, as the years went on, that there is no
+single passage in any of his letters which throws such a flood of
+illuminative light into the portions of his life which always awaken the
+greatest interest. Very much that is to follow must be read by it. "You
+can hardly imagine," he wrote on the 30th of August, "what infinite
+pains I take, or what extraordinary difficulty I find in getting on
+FAST. Invention, thank God, seems the easiest thing in the world; and I
+seem to have such a preposterous sense of the ridiculous, after this
+long rest" (it was now over two years since the close of _Chuzzlewit_),
+"as to be constantly requiring to restrain myself from launching into
+extravagances in the height of my enjoyment. But the difficulty of going
+at what I call a rapid pace, is prodigious; it is almost an
+impossibility. I suppose this is partly the effect of two years' ease,
+and partly of the absence of streets and numbers of figures. I can't
+express how much I want these. It seems as if they supplied something to
+my brain, which it cannot bear, when busy, to lose. For a week or a
+fortnight I can write prodigiously in a retired place (as at
+Broadstairs), and a day in London sets me up again and starts me. But
+the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic
+lantern, is IMMENSE!! I don't say this at all in low spirits, for we
+are perfectly comfortable here, and I like the place very much indeed,
+and the people are even more friendly and fond of me than they were in
+Genoa. I only mention it as a curious fact, which I have never had an
+opportunity of finding out before. _My_ figures seem disposed to
+stagnate without crowds about them. I wrote very little in Genoa (only
+the _Chimes_), and fancied myself conscious of some such influence
+there--but Lord! I had two miles of streets at least, lighted at night,
+to walk about in; and a great theatre to repair to, every night." At the
+close of the letter he told me that he had pretty well matured the
+general idea of the Christmas book, and was burning to get to work on
+it. He thought it would be all the better, for a change, to have no
+fairies or spirits in it, but to make it a simple domestic tale.[127]
+
+In less than a week from this date his second number was finished, his
+first slip of the little book done, and his confidence greater. They had
+had wonderful weather,[128] so clear that he could see from the
+Neuchatel road the whole of Mont Blanc, six miles distant, as plainly
+as if he were standing close under it in the courtyard of the little inn
+at Chamounix; and, though again it was raining when he wrote, his
+"nailed shoes" were by him and his "great waterproof cloak" in
+preparation for a "fourteen-mile walk" before dinner. Then, after three
+days more, came something of a sequel to the confession before made,
+which will be read with equal interest. "The absence of any accessible
+streets continues to worry me, now that I have so much to do, in a most
+singular manner. It is quite a little mental phenomenon. I should not
+walk in them in the day time, if they were here, I dare say: but at
+night I want them beyond description. I don't seem able to get rid of my
+spectres unless I can lose them in crowds. However, as you say, there
+are streets in Paris, and good suggestive streets too: and trips to
+London will be nothing then. WHEN I have finished the Christmas book, I
+shall fly to Geneva for a day or two, before taking up with _Dombey_
+again. I like this place better and better; and never saw, I think, more
+agreeable people than our little circle is made up of. It is so little,
+that one is not 'bothered' in the least; and their interest in the
+inimitable seems to strengthen daily. I read them the first number last
+night 'was a' week, with unrelateable success; and old Mrs. Marcet, who
+is devilish 'cute, guessed directly (but I didn't tell her she was
+right) that little Paul would die. They were all so apprehensive that it
+was a great pleasure to read it; and I shall leave here, if all goes
+well, in a brilliant shower of sparks struck out of them by the promised
+reading of the Christmas book." Little did either of us then imagine to
+what these readings were to lead, but even thus early they were taking
+in his mind the shape of a sort of jest that the smallest opportunity of
+favour might have turned into earnest. In his very next letter he wrote
+to me: "I was thinking the other day that in these days of lecturings
+and readings, a great deal of money might possibly be made (if it were
+not infra dig) by one's having Readings of one's own books. It would be
+an _odd_ thing. I think it would take immensely. What do you say? Will
+you step to Dean-street, and see how Miss Kelly's engagement-book (it
+must be an immense volume!) stands? Or shall I take the St. James's?" My
+answer is to be inferred from his rejoinder: but even at this time,
+while heightening and carrying forward his jest, I suspected him of
+graver desires than he cared to avow; and the time was to come, after a
+dozen years, when with earnestness equal to his own I continued to
+oppose, for reasons to be stated in their place, that which he had set
+his heart upon too strongly to abandon, and which I still can only wish
+he had preferred to surrender with all that seemed to be its enormous
+gains! "I don't think you have exercised your usual judgment in taking
+Covent-garden for me. I doubt it is too large for my purpose. However, I
+shall stand by whatever you propose to the proprietors."
+
+Soon came the changes of trouble and vexation I had too surely seen.
+"You remember," he wrote, "your objection about the two stories. I made
+over light of it. I ought to have considered that I have never before
+really tried the opening of two together--having always had one pretty
+far ahead when I have been driving a pair of them. I know it all now.
+The apparent impossibility of getting each into its place, coupled with
+that craving for streets, so thoroughly put me off the track, that, up
+to Wednesday or Thursday last, I really contemplated, at times, the
+total abandonment of the Christmas book this year, and the limitation of
+my labours to _Dombey and Son_! I cancelled the beginning of a first
+scene--which I have never done before--and, with a notion in my head,
+ran wildly about and about it, and could not get the idea into any
+natural socket. At length, thank Heaven, I nailed it all at once; and
+after going on comfortably up to yesterday, and working yesterday from
+half-past nine to six, I was last night in such a state of enthusiasm
+about it that I think I was an inch or two taller. I am a little cooler
+to-day, with a headache to boot; but I really begin to hope you will
+think it a pretty story, with some delicate notions in it agreeably
+presented, and with a good human Christmas groundwork. I fancy I see a
+great domestic effect in the last part."
+
+That was written on the 20th of September; but six days later changed
+the picture and surprised me not a little. I might grudge the space thus
+given to one of the least important of his books but that the
+illustration goes farther than the little tale it refers to, and is a
+picture of him in his moods of writing, with their weakness as well as
+strength upon him, of a perfect truth and applicability to every period
+of his life. Movement and change while he was working were not mere
+restlessness, as we have seen; it was no impatience of labour, or desire
+of pleasure, that led at such times to his eager craving for the fresh
+crowds and faces in which he might lose or find the creatures of his
+fancy; and recollecting this, much hereafter will be understood that
+might else be very far from clear, in regard to the sensitive conditions
+under which otherwise he carried on these exertions of his brain. "I am
+going to write you" (26th of September) "a most startling piece of
+intelligence. I fear there may be NO CHRISTMAS BOOK! I would give the
+world to be on the spot to tell you this. Indeed I once thought of
+starting for London to-night. I have written nearly a third of it. It
+promises to be pretty; quite a new idea in the story, I hope; but to
+manage it without the supernatural agency now impossible of
+introduction, and yet to move it naturally within the required space, or
+with any shorter limit than a _Vicar of Wakefield_, I find to be a
+difficulty so perplexing--the past _Dombey_ work taken into
+account--that I am fearful of wearing myself out if I go on, and not
+being able to come back to the greater undertaking with the necessary
+freshness and spirit. If I had nothing but the Christmas book to do, I
+WOULD do it; but I get horrified and distressed beyond conception at the
+prospect of being jaded when I come back to the other, and making it a
+mere race against time. I have written the first part; I know the end
+and upshot of the second; and the whole of the third (there are only
+three in all). I know the purport of each character, and the plain idea
+that each is to work out; and I have the principal effects sketched on
+paper. It cannot end _quite_ happily, but will end cheerfully and
+pleasantly. But my soul sinks before the commencement of the second
+part--the longest--and the introduction of the under-idea. (The main one
+already developed, with interest.) I don't know how it is. I suppose it
+is the having been almost constantly at work in this quiet place; and
+the dread for the _Dombey_; and the not being able to get rid of it, in
+noise and bustle. The beginning two books together is also, no doubt, a
+fruitful source of the difficulty; for I am now sure I could not have
+invented the _Carol_ at the commencement of the _Chuzzlewit_, or gone to
+a new book from the _Chimes_. But this is certain. I am sick, giddy, and
+capriciously despondent. I have bad nights; am full of disquietude and
+anxiety; and am constantly haunted by the idea that I am wasting the
+marrow of the larger book, and ought to be at rest. One letter that I
+wrote you before this, I have torn up. In that the Christmas book was
+wholly given up for this year: but I now resolve to make one effort
+more. I will go to Geneva to-morrow, and try on Monday and Tuesday
+whether I can get on at all bravely, in the changed scene. If I cannot,
+I am convinced that I had best hold my hand at once; and not fritter my
+spirits and hope away, with that long book before me. You may suppose
+that the matter is very grave when I can so nearly abandon anything in
+which I am deeply interested, and fourteen or fifteen close MS. pages of
+which, that have made me laugh and cry, are lying in my desk. Writing
+this letter at all, I have a great misgiving that the letter I shall
+write you on Tuesday night will not make it better. Take it, for
+Heaven's sake, as an extremely serious thing, and not a fancy of the
+moment. Last Saturday after a very long day's work, and last Wednesday
+after finishing the first part, I was full of eagerness and pleasure. At
+all other times since I began, I have been brooding and brooding over
+the idea that it was a wild thing to dream of, ever: and that I ought to
+be at rest for the _Dombey_."
+
+The letter came, written on Wednesday not Tuesday night, and it left the
+question still unsettled. "When I came here" (Geneva, 30th of September)
+"I had a bloodshot eye; and my head was so bad, with a pain across the
+brow, that I thought I must have got cupped. I have become a great deal
+better, however, and feel quite myself again to-day. . . . I still have not
+made up my mind as to what I CAN do with the Christmas book. I would
+give any money that it were possible to consult with you. I have begun
+the second part this morning, and have done a very fair morning's work
+at it, but I do not feel it _in hand_ within the necessary space and
+divisions: and I have a great uneasiness in the prospect of falling
+behind hand with the other labour, which is so transcendantly important.
+I feel quite sure that unless I (being in reasonably good state and
+spirits) like the Christmas book myself, I had better not go on with it;
+but had best keep my strength for _Dombey_, and keep my number in
+advance. On the other hand I am dreadfully averse to abandoning it, and
+am so torn between the two things that I know not what to do. It is
+impossible to express the wish I have that I could take counsel with
+you. Having begun the second part I will go on here, to-morrow and
+Friday (Saturday, the Talfourds come to us at Lausanne, leaving on
+Monday morning), unless I see new reason to give it up in the meanwhile.
+Let it stand thus--that my next Monday's letter shall finally decide the
+question. But if you have not already told Bradbury and Evans of my last
+letter I think it will now be best to do so. . . . This non-publication of
+a Christmas book, if it must be, I try to think light of with the
+greater story just begun, and with this _Battle of Life_ story (of which
+I really think the leading idea is very pretty) lying by me, for future
+use. But I would like you to consider, in the event of my not going on,
+how best, by timely announcement, in November's or December's _Dombey_,
+I may seem to hold the ground prospectively. . . . Heaven send me a good
+deliverance! If I don't do it, it will be the first time I ever
+abandoned anything I had once taken in hand; and I shall not have
+abandoned it until after a most desperate fight. I could do it, but for
+the _Dombey_, as easily as I did last year or the year before. But I
+cannot help falling back on that continually: and this, combined with
+the peculiar difficulties of the story for a Christmas book, and my
+being out of sorts, discourages me sadly. . . . Kate is here, and sends her
+love.". . . A postscript was added on the following day. "Georgy has come
+over from Lausanne, and joins with Kate, &c. &c. My head remains greatly
+better. My eye is recovering its old hue of beautiful white, tinged with
+celestial blue. If I hadn't come here, I think I should have had some
+bad low fever. The sight of the rushing Rhone seemed to stir my blood
+again. I don't think I shall want to be cupped, this bout; but it
+looked, at one time, worse than I have confessed to you. If I have any
+return, I will have it done immediately."
+
+He stayed two days longer at Geneva, which he found to be a very good
+place; pleasantly reporting himself as quite dismayed at first by the
+sight of gas in it, and as trembling at the noise in its streets, which
+he pronounced to be fully equal to the uproar of Richmond in Surrey; but
+deriving from it some sort of benefit both in health and in writing. So
+far his trip had been successful, though he had to leave the place
+hurriedly to welcome his English visitors to Rosemont.
+
+One social and very novel experience he had in his hotel, however, the
+night before he left, which may be told before he hastens back to
+Lausanne; for it could hardly now offend any one even if the names were
+given. "And now sir I will describe, modestly, tamely, literally, the
+visit to the small select circle which I promised should make your hair
+stand on end. In our hotel were Lady A, and Lady B, mother and daughter,
+who came to the Peschiere shortly before we left it, and who have a deep
+admiration for your humble servant the inimitable B. They are both very
+clever. Lady B, extremely well-informed in languages, living and dead;
+books, and gossip; very pretty; with two little children, and not yet
+five and twenty. Lady A, plump, fresh, and rosy; matronly, but full of
+spirits and good looks. Nothing would serve them but we _must_ dine with
+them; and accordingly, on Friday at six, we went down to their room. I
+knew them to be rather odd. For instance, I have known Lady A, _full
+dressed_, walk alone through the streets of Genoa, the squalid Italian
+bye streets, to the Governor's soiree; and announce herself at the
+palace of state, by knocking at the door. I have also met Lady B, full
+dressed, without any cap or bonnet, walking a mile to the opera, with
+all sorts of jingling jewels about her, beside a sedan chair in which
+sat enthroned her mama. Consequently, I was not surprised at such little
+sparkles in the conversation (from the young lady) as 'Oh God what a
+sermon we had here, last Sunday!' 'And did you ever read such infernal
+trash as Mrs. Gore's?'--and the like. Still, but for Kate and Georgy
+(who were decidedly in the way, as we agreed afterwards), I should have
+thought it all very funny; and, as it was, I threw the ball back again,
+was mighty free and easy, made some rather broad jokes, and was highly
+applauded. 'You smoke, don't you?' said the young lady, in a pause of
+this kind of conversation. 'Yes,' I said, 'I generally take a cigar
+after dinner when I am alone.' 'I'll give you a good 'un,' said she,
+'when we go up-stairs.' Well sir, in due course we went up stairs, and
+there we were joined by an American lady residing in the same hotel, who
+looked like what we call in old England 'a reg'lar Bunter'--fluffy face
+(rouged); considerable development of figure; one groggy eye; blue satin
+dress made low with short sleeves, and shoes of the same. Also a
+daughter; face likewise fluffy; figure likewise developed; dress
+likewise low, with short sleeves, and shoes of the same; and one eye not
+yet actually groggy, but going to be. American lady married at sixteen;
+daughter sixteen now, often mistaken for sisters, &c. &c. &c. When that
+was over, Lady B brought out a cigar box, and gave me a cigar, made of
+negrohead she said, which would quell an elephant in six whiffs. The box
+was full of cigarettes--good large ones, made of pretty strong tobacco;
+I always smoke them here, and used to smoke them at Genoa, and I knew
+them well. When I lighted my cigar, Lady B lighted hers, at mine; leaned
+against the mantelpiece, in conversation with me; put out her stomach,
+folded her arms, and with her pretty face cocked up sideways and her
+cigarette smoking away like a Manchester cotton mill, laughed, and
+talked, and smoked, in the most gentlemanly manner I ever beheld. Lady A
+immediately lighted her cigar; American lady immediately lighted hers;
+and in five minutes the room was a cloud of smoke, with us four in the
+centre pulling away bravely, while American lady related stories of her
+'Hookah' up stairs, and described different kinds of pipes. But even
+this was not all. For presently two Frenchmen came in, with whom, and
+the American lady, Lady B sat down to whist. The Frenchmen smoked of
+course (they were really modest gentlemen, and seemed dismayed), and
+Lady B played for the next hour or two with a cigar continually in her
+mouth--never out of it. She certainly smoked six or eight. Lady A gave
+in soon--I think she only did it out of vanity. American lady had been
+smoking all the morning. I took no more; and Lady B and the Frenchmen
+had it all to themselves.
+
+"Conceive this in a great hotel, with not only their own servants, but
+half a dozen waiters coming constantly in and out! I showed no atom of
+surprise; but I never _was_ so surprised, so ridiculously taken aback,
+in my life; for in all my experience of 'ladies' of one kind and
+another, I never saw a woman--not a basket woman or a gypsy--smoke,
+before!" He lived to have larger and wider experience, but there was
+enough to startle as well as amuse him in the scene described.
+
+But now Saturday is come; he has hurried back for the friends who are on
+their way to his cottage; and on his arrival, even before they have
+appeared, he writes to tell me his better news of himself and his work.
+
+"In the breathless interval" (Rosemont: 3rd of October) "between our
+return from Geneva and the arrival of the Talfourds (expected in an hour
+or two), I cannot do better than write to you. For I think you will be
+well pleased if I anticipate my promise, and Monday, at the same time. I
+have been greatly better at Geneva, though I still am made uneasy by
+occasional giddiness and headache: attributable, I have not the least
+doubt, to the absence of streets. There is an idea here, too, that
+people are occasionally made despondent and sluggish in their spirits by
+this great mass of still water, lake Leman. At any rate I have been very
+uncomfortable: at any rate I am, I hope, greatly better: and (lastly) at
+any rate I hope and trust, _now_, the Christmas book will come in due
+course!! I have had three very good days' work at Geneva, and trust I
+may finish the second part (the third is the shortest) by this day week.
+Whenever I finish it, I will send you the first two together. I do not
+think they can begin to illustrate it, until the third arrives; for it
+is a single minded story, as it were, and an artist should know the
+end: which I don't think very likely, unless he reads it." Then, after
+relating a superhuman effort he was making to lodge his visitors in his
+doll's house ("I didn't like the idea of turning them out at night. It
+is so dark in these lanes, and groves, when the moon's not bright"), he
+sketched for me what he possibly might, and really did, accomplish. He
+would by great effort finish the small book on the 20th; would fly to
+Geneva for a week to work a little at _Dombey_, if he felt "pretty
+sound;" in any case would finish his number three by the 10th of
+November; and on that day would start for Paris: "so that, instead of
+resting unprofitably here, I shall be using my interval of idleness to
+make the journey and get into a new house, and shall hope so to put a
+pinch of salt on the tail of the sliding number in advance. . . . I am
+horrified at the idea of getting the blues (and bloodshots) again."
+Though I did not then know how gravely ill he had been, I was fain to
+remind him that it was bad economy to make business out of rest itself;
+but I received prompt confirmation that all was falling out as he
+wished. The Talfourds stayed two days: "and I think they were very
+happy. He was in his best aspect; the manner so well known to us, not
+the less loveable for being laughable; and if you could have seen him
+going round and round the coach that brought them, as a preliminary to
+paying the voiturier to whom he couldn't speak, in a currency he didn't
+understand, you never would have forgotten it." His friends left
+Lausanne on the 5th; and five days later he sent me two-thirds of the
+manuscript of his Christmas book.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[127] Writing on Sunday he had said: "I hope to finish the second number
+to-morrow, and to send it off bodily by Tuesday's post. On Wednesday I
+purpose, please God, beginning the _Battle of Life_. I shall peg away at
+that, without turning aside to _Dombey_ again; and _if_ I can only do it
+within the month!" I had to warn him, on receiving these intimations,
+that he was trying too much.
+
+[128] The storm of rain formerly mentioned by him had not been repeated,
+but the weather had become unsettled, and he thus referred to the
+rainfall which made that summer so disastrous in England. "What a storm
+that must have been in London! I wish we could get something like it,
+here. . . . It is thundering while I write, but I fear it don't look black
+enough for a clearance. The echoes in the mountains are of such a
+stupendous sort, that a peal of thunder five or ten minutes long, is
+here the commonest of circumstances. . . ." That was early in August, and
+at the close of the month he wrote: "I forgot to tell you that yesterday
+week, at half-past 7 in the morning, we had a smart shock of an
+earthquake, lasting, perhaps, a quarter of a minute. It awoke me in bed.
+The sensation was so curious and unlike any other, that I called out at
+the top of my voice I was sure it was an earthquake."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+REVOLUTION AT GENEVA, CHRISTMAS BOOK, AND LAST DAYS IN SWITZERLAND.
+
+1846.
+
+ At Lausanne--Large Sale of _Dombey_--Christmas
+ Book done--At Geneva--Back to _Dombey_--Rising
+ against the Jesuits--The Fight in Geneva--Rifle
+ against Cannon--Genevese "Aristocracy"--Swiss
+ "Rabble"--Traces left by the
+ Revolution--Smaller Revolution in
+ Whitefriars--_Daily News_ changes--Letters
+ about his _Battle of Life_--Sketch of
+ Story--Difficulty in Plot--His own
+ Comments--Date of Story--Reply to
+ Criticism--Stanfield's Offer of
+ Illustrations--Doubts of Third Part--Tendency
+ to Blank Verse--Stanfield's Designs--Grave
+ Mistake by Leech--Last Days in
+ Switzerland--Mountain Winds--A Ravine in the
+ Hills--Sadness of Leave-taking--Travelling to
+ Paris.
+
+
+"I SEND you in twelve letters, counting this as one, the first two parts
+(thirty-five slips) of the Christmas book. I have two present anxieties
+respecting it. One to know that you have received it safely; and the
+second to know how it strikes you. Be sure you read the first and second
+parts together. . . . There seems to me to be interest in it, and a pretty
+idea; and it is unlike the others. . . . There will be some minor points
+for consideration: as, the necessity for some slight alterations in one
+or two of the Doctor's speeches in the first part; and whether it should
+be called 'The Battle of Life. A Love Story'--to express both a love
+story in the common acceptation of the phrase, and also a story of love;
+with one or two other things of that sort. We can moot these by and by.
+I made a tremendous day's work of it yesterday and was horribly
+excited--so I am going to rush out, as fast as I can: being a little
+used up, and sick. . . . But never say die! I have been to the glass to
+look at my eye. Pretty bright!"
+
+I made it brighter next day by telling him that the first number of
+_Dombey_ had outstripped in sale the first of _Chuzzlewit_ by more than
+twelve thousand copies; and his next letter, sending the close of his
+little tale, showed his need of the comfort my pleasant news had given
+him. "I really do not know what this story is worth. I am so floored:
+wanting sleep, and never having had my head free from it for this month
+past. I think there are some places in this last part which I may bring
+better together in the proof, and where a touch or two may be of
+service; particularly in the scene between Craggs and Michael Warden,
+where, as it stands, the interest seems anticipated. But I shall have
+the benefit of your suggestions, and my own then cooler head, I hope;
+and I will be very careful with the proofs, and keep them by me as long
+as I can. . . . Mr. Britain must have another Christian name, then? 'Aunt
+Martha' is the Sally of whom the Doctor speaks in the first part. Martha
+is a better name. What do you think of the concluding paragraph? Would
+you leave it for happiness' sake? It is merely experimental. . . . I am
+flying to Geneva to-morrow morning." (That was on the 18th of October;
+and on the 20th he wrote from Geneva.) "We came here yesterday, and we
+shall probably remain until Katey's birthday, which is next Thursday
+week. I shall fall to work on number three of _Dombey_ as soon as I can.
+At present I am the worse for wear, but nothing like as much so as I
+expected to be on Sunday last. I had not been able to sleep for some
+time, and had been hammering away, morning, noon, and night. A bottle of
+hock on Monday, when Elliotson dined with us (he went away homeward
+yesterday morning), did me a world of good; the change comes in the very
+nick of time; and I feel in Dombeian spirits already. . . . But I have
+still rather a damaged head, aching a good deal occasionally, as it is
+doing now, though I have not been cupped--yet. . . . I dreamed all last
+week that the _Battle of Life_ was a series of chambers impossible to be
+got to rights or got out of, through which I wandered drearily all
+night. On Saturday night I don't think I slept an hour. I was
+perpetually roaming through the story, and endeavouring to dove-tail the
+revolution here into the plot. The mental distress, quite horrible."
+
+Of the "revolution" he had written to me a week before, from Lausanne;
+where the news had just reached them, that, upon the Federal Diet
+decreeing the expulsion of the Jesuits, the Roman Catholic cantons had
+risen against the decree, the result being that the Protestants had
+deposed the grand council and established a provisional government,
+dissolving the Catholic league. His interest in this, and prompt seizure
+of what really was brought into issue by the conflict, is every way
+characteristic of Dickens. "You will know," he wrote from Lausanne on
+the 11th of October, "long before you get this, all about the
+revolution at Geneva. There were stories of plots against the
+Government when I was there, but I didn't believe them; for all sorts of
+lies are always afloat against the radicals, and wherever there is a
+consul from a Catholic Power the most monstrous fictions are in
+perpetual circulation against them: as in this very place, where the
+Sardinian consul was gravely whispering the other day that a society
+called the Homicides had been formed, whereof the president of the
+council of state, the O'Connell of Switzerland and a clever fellow, was
+a member; who were sworn on skulls and cross-bones to exterminate men of
+property, and so forth. There was a great stir here, on the day of the
+fight in Geneva. We heard the guns (they shook this house) all day; and
+seven hundred men marched out of this town of Lausanne to go and help
+the radical party--arriving at Geneva just after it was all over. There
+is no doubt they had received secret help from here; for a powder
+barrel, found by some of the Genevese populace with 'Canton de Vaud'
+painted on it, was carried on a pole about the streets as a standard, to
+show that they were sympathized with by friends outside. It was a poor
+mean fight enough, I am told by Lord Vernon, who was present and who was
+with us last night. The Government was afraid; having no confidence
+whatever, I dare say, in its own soldiers; and the cannon were fired
+everywhere except at the opposite party, who (I mean the revolutionists)
+had barricaded a bridge with an omnibus only, and certainly in the
+beginning might have been turned with ease. The precision of the common
+men with the rifle was especially shown by a small party of _five_, who
+waited on the ramparts near one of the gates of the town, to turn a
+body of soldiery who were coming in to the Government assistance. They
+picked out every officer and struck him down instantly, the moment the
+party appeared; there were three or four of them; upon which the
+soldiers gravely turned round and walked off. I dare say there are not
+fifty men in this place who wouldn't click your card off a target a
+hundred and fifty yards away, at least. I have seen them, time after
+time, fire across a great ravine as wide as the ornamental ground in St.
+James's-park, and never miss the bull's-eye.
+
+"It is a horribly ungentlemanly thing to say here, though I _do_ say it
+without the least reserve--but my sympathy is all with the radicals. I
+don't know any subject on which this indomitable people have so good a
+right to a strong feeling as Catholicity--if not as a religion, clearly
+as a means of social degradation. They know what it is. They live close
+to it. They have Italy beyond their mountains. They can compare the
+effect of the two systems at any time in their own valleys; and their
+dread of it, and their horror of the introduction of Catholic priests
+and emissaries into their towns, seems to me the most rational feeling
+in the world. Apart from this, you have no conception of the
+preposterous, insolent little aristocracy of Geneva: the most ridiculous
+caricature the fancy can suggest of what we know in England. I was
+talking to two famous gentlemen (very intelligent men) of that place,
+not long ago, who came over to invite me to a sort of reception
+there--which I declined. Really their talk about 'the people' and 'the
+masses,' and the necessity they would shortly be under of shooting a few
+of them as an example for the rest, was a kind of monstrosity one might
+have heard at Genoa. The audacious insolence and contempt of the people
+by their newspapers, too, is quite absurd. It is difficult to believe
+that men of sense can be such donkeys politically. It was precisely such
+a state of things that brought about the change here. There was a most
+respectful petition presented on the Jesuit question, signed by its tens
+of thousands of small farmers; the regular peasants of the canton, all
+splendidly taught in public schools, and intellectually as well as
+physically a most remarkable body of labouring men. This document is
+treated by the gentlemanly party with the most sublime contempt, and the
+signatures are said to be the signatures of 'the rabble.' Upon which,
+each man of the rabble shoulders his rifle, and walks in upon a given
+day agreed upon among them to Lausanne; and the gentlemanly party walk
+out without striking a blow."
+
+Such traces of the "revolution" as he found upon his present visit to
+Geneva he described in writing to me from the hotel de l'Ecu on the 20th
+of October. "You never would suppose from the look of this town that
+there had been anything revolutionary going on. Over the window of my
+old bedroom there is a great hole made by a cannon-ball in the
+house-front; and two of the bridges are under repair. But these are
+small tokens which anything else might have brought about as well. The
+people are all at work. The little streets are rife with every sight and
+sound of industry; the place is as quiet by ten o'clock as
+Lincoln's-inn-fields; and the only outward and visible sign of public
+interest in political events is a little group at every street corner,
+reading a public announcement from the new Government of the forthcoming
+election of state-officers, in which the people are reminded of their
+importance as a republican institution, and desired to bear in mind
+their dignity in all their proceedings. Nothing very violent or bad
+could go on with a community so well educated as this. It is the best
+antidote to American experiences, conceivable. As to the nonsense 'the
+gentlemanly interest' talk about, their opposition to property and so
+forth, there never was such mortal absurdity. One of the principal
+leaders in the late movement has a stock of watches and jewellery here
+of immense value--and had, during the disturbance--perfectly
+unprotected. James Fahzey has a rich house and a valuable collection of
+pictures; and, I will be bound to say, twice as much to lose as half the
+conservative declaimers put together. This house, the liberal one, is
+one of the most richly furnished and luxurious hotels on the continent.
+And if I were a Swiss with a hundred thousand pounds, I would be as
+steady against the Catholic cantons and the propagation of Jesuitism as
+any radical among 'em: believing the dissemination of Catholicity to be
+the most horrible means of political and social degradation left in the
+world. Which these people, thoroughly well educated, know perfectly. . . .
+The boys of Geneva were very useful in bringing materials for the
+construction of the barricades on the bridges; and the enclosed song may
+amuse you. They sing it to a tune that dates from the great French
+Revolution--a very good one."
+
+But revolutions may be small as well as their heroes, and while he thus
+was sending me his Gamin de Geneve I was sending him news of a sudden
+change in Whitefriars which had quite as vivid interest for him. Not
+much could be told him at first, but his curiosity instantly arose to
+fever pitch. "In reference to that _Daily News_ revolution," he wrote
+from Geneva on the 26th, "I have been walking and wondering all day
+through a perfect Miss Burney's Vauxhall of conjectural dark walks.
+Heaven send you enlighten me fully on Wednesday, or number three will
+suffer!" Two days later he resumed, as he was beginning his journey back
+to Lausanne. "I am in a great state of excitement on account of your
+intelligence, and desperately anxious to know all about it. I shall be
+put out to an unspeakable extent if I don't find your letter awaiting
+me. God knows there has been small comfort for either of us in the _D.
+N._'s nine months." There was not much to tell then, and there is less
+now; but at last the discomfort was over for us both, as I had been
+unable to reconcile myself to a longer continuance of the service I had
+given in Whitefriars since he quitted it. The subject may be left with
+the remark made upon it in his first letter after returning to Rosemont.
+"I certainly am very glad of the result of the _Daily News_ business,
+though my gladness is dashed with melancholy to think that you should
+have toiled there so long, to so little purpose. I escaped more easily.
+However, it is all past now. . . . As to the undoubted necessity of the
+course you took, I have not a grain of question in my mind. That, being
+what you are, you had only one course to take and have taken it, I no
+more doubt than that the Old Bailey is not Westminster Abbey. In the
+utmost sum at which you value yourself, you were bound to leave; and
+now you _have_ left, you will come to Paris, and there, and at home
+again, we'll have, please God, the old kind of evenings and the old life
+again, as it used to be before those daily nooses caught us by the legs
+and sometimes tripped us up. Make a vow (as I have done) never to go
+down that court with the little news-shop at the corner, any more, and
+let us swear by Jack Straw as in the ancient times. . . . I am beginning to
+get over my sorrow for your nights up aloft in Whitefriars, and to feel
+nothing but happiness in the contemplation of your enfranchisement. God
+bless you!"
+
+The time was now shortening for him at Lausanne; but before my sketches
+of his pleasant days there close, the little story of his Christmas book
+may be made complete by a few extracts from the letters that followed
+immediately upon the departure of the Talfourds. Without comment they
+will explain its closing touches, his own consciousness of the
+difficulties in working out the tale within limits too confined not to
+render its proper development imperfect, and his ready tact in dealing
+with objection and suggestion from without. His condition while writing
+it did not warrant me in pressing what I might otherwise have thought
+necessary; but as the little story finally left his hands, it had points
+not unworthy of him; and a sketch of its design will render the
+fragments from his letters more intelligible. I read it lately with a
+sense that its general tone of quiet beauty deserved well the praise
+which Jeffrey in those days had given it. "I like and admire the
+_Battle_ extremely," he said in a letter on its publication, sent me by
+Dickens and not included in Lord Cockburn's Memoir. "It is better than
+any other man alive could have written, and has passages as fine as
+anything that ever came from the man himself. The dance of the sisters
+in that autumn orchard is of itself worth a dozen inferior tales, and
+their reunion at the close, and indeed all the serious parts, are
+beautiful, some traits of Clemency charming."
+
+Yet it was probably here the fact, as with the _Chimes_, that the
+serious parts were too much interwoven with the tale to render the
+subject altogether suitable to the old mirth-bringing season; but this
+had also some advantages. The story is all about two sisters, the
+younger of whom, Marion, sacrifices her own affection to give happiness
+to the elder, Grace. But Grace had already made the same sacrifice for
+this younger sister; life's first and hardest battle had been won by her
+before the incidents begin; and when she is first seen, she is busying
+herself to bring about her sister's marriage with Alfred Heathfield,
+whom she has herself loved, and whom she has kept wholly unconscious, by
+a quiet change in her bearing to him, of what his own still disengaged
+heart would certainly not have rejected. Marion, however, had earlier
+discovered this, though it is not until her victory over herself that
+Alfred knows it; and meanwhile he is become her betrothed. The sisters
+thus shown at the opening, one believing her love undiscovered and the
+other bent for the sake of that love on surrendering her own, each
+practising concealment and both unselfishly true, form a pretty and
+tender picture. The second part is intended to give to Marion's flight
+the character of an elopement; and so to manage this as to show her all
+the time unchanged to the man she is pledged to, yet flying from, was
+the author's difficulty. One Michael Warden is the _deus ex machina_ by
+whom it is solved, hardly with the usual skill; but there is much art in
+rendering his pretensions to the hand of Marion, whose husband he
+becomes after an interval of years, the means of closing against him all
+hope of success, in the very hour when her own act might seem to be
+opening it to him. During the same interval Grace, believing Marion to
+be gone with Warden, becomes Alfred's wife; and not until reunion after
+six years' absence is the truth entirely known to her. The struggle, to
+all of them, has been filled and chastened with sorrow; but joy revisits
+them at its close. Hearts are not broken by the duties laid upon them;
+nor is life shown to be such a perishable holiday, that amidst noble
+sorrow and generous self-denial it must lose its capacity for happiness.
+The tale thus justifies its place in the Christmas series. What Jeffrey
+says of Clemency, too, may suggest another word. The story would not be
+Dickens's if we could not discover in it the power peculiar to him of
+presenting the commonest objects with freshness and beauty, of detecting
+in the homeliest forms of life much of its rarest loveliness, and of
+springing easily upward from everyday realities into regions of
+imaginative thought. To this happiest direction of his art, Clemency and
+her husband render new tribute; and in her more especially, once again,
+we recognize one of those true souls who fill so large a space in his
+writings, for whom the lowest seats at life's feasts are commonly kept,
+but whom he moves and welcomes to a more fitting place among the prized
+and honoured at the upper tables.
+
+"I wonder whether you foresaw the end of the Christmas book! There are
+two or three places in which I can make it prettier, I think, by slight
+alterations. . . . I trust to Heaven you may like it. What an affecting
+story I could have made of it in one octavo volume. Oh to think of the
+printers transforming my kindly cynical old father into Doctor Taddler!"
+(28th of October.)
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"Do you think it worth while, in the illustrations, to throw the period
+back at all for the sake of anything good in the costume? The story may
+have happened at any time within a hundred years. Is it worth having
+coats and gowns of dear old Goldsmith's day? or thereabouts? I really
+don't know what to say. The probability is, if it has not occurred to
+you or to the artists, that it is hardly worth considering; but I ease
+myself of it by throwing it out to you. It may be already too late, or
+you may see reason to think it best to 'stick to the _last_' (I feel it
+necessary to italicize the joke), and abide by the ladies' and
+gentlemen's spring and winter fashions of this time. Whatever you think
+best, in this as in all other things, is best, I am sure. . . . I would go,
+in the illustrations, for 'beauty' as much as possible; and I should
+like each part to have a general illustration to it at the beginning,
+shadowing out its drift and bearing: much as Browne goes at that kind of
+thing on _Dombey_ covers. I don't think I should fetter your discretion
+in the matter farther. The better it is illustrated, the better I shall
+be pleased of course." (29th of October.)
+
+". . . I only write to say that it is of no use my writing at length,
+until I have heard from you; and that I will wait until I shall have
+read your promised communication (as my father would call it) to-morrow.
+I have glanced over the proofs of the last part and really don't wonder,
+some of the most extravagant mistakes occurring in Clemency's account to
+Warden, that the marriage of Grace and Alfred should seem rather
+unsatisfactory to you. Whatever is done about that must be done with the
+lightest hand, for the reader MUST take something for granted; but I
+think it next to impossible, without dreadful injury to the effect, to
+introduce a scene between Marion and Michael. The introduction must be
+in the scene between the sisters, and must be put, mainly, into the
+mouth of Grace. Rely upon it there is no other way, in keeping with the
+spirit of the tale. With this amendment, and a touch here and there in
+the last part (I know exactly where they will come best), I think it may
+be pretty and affecting, and comfortable too. . . ." (31st of October.)
+
+ * * * * *
+
+". . . I shall hope to touch upon the Christmas book as soon as I get your
+opinion. I wouldn't do it without. I am delighted to hear of noble old
+Stanny. Give my love to him, and tell him I think of turning Catholic.
+It strikes me (it may have struck you perhaps) that another good place
+for introducing a few lines of dialogue, is at the beginning of the
+scene between Grace and her husband, where he speaks about the messenger
+at the gate." (4th of November.)
+
+"Before I reply to your questions I wish to remark generally of the
+third part that all the passion that can be got into it, through my
+interpretation at all events, is there. I know that, by what it cost me;
+and I take it to be, as a question of art and interest, in the very
+nature of the story that it _should_ move at a swift pace after the
+sisters are in each other's arms again. Anything after that would drag
+like lead, and must. . . . Now for your questions. I don't think any little
+scene with Marion and anybody can prepare the way for the last paragraph
+of the tale: I don't think anything but a printer's line _can_ go
+between it and Warden's speech. A less period than ten years? Yes. I see
+no objection to six. I have no doubt you are right. Any word from Alfred
+in his misery? Impossible: you might as well try to speak to somebody in
+an express train. The preparation for his change is in the first part,
+and he kneels down beside her in that return scene. He is left alone
+with her, as it were, in the world. I am quite confident it is wholly
+impossible for me to alter that. . . . BUT (keep your eye on me) when
+Marion went away, she left a letter for Grace in which she charged her
+to encourage the love that Alfred would conceive for her, and FOREWARNED
+her that years would pass before they met again, &c. &c. This coming out
+in the scene between the sisters, and something like it being expressed
+in the opening of the little scene between Grace and her husband before
+the messenger at the gate, will make (I hope) a prodigious difference;
+and I will try to put in something with Aunt Martha and the Doctor which
+shall carry the tale back more distinctly and unmistakeably to the
+battle-ground. I hope to make these alterations next week, and to send
+the third part back to you before I leave here. If you think it can
+still be improved after that, say so to me in Paris and I will go at it
+again. I wouldn't have it limp, if it can fly. I say nothing to you of a
+great deal of this being already expressed in the sentiment of the
+beginning, because your delicate perception knows all that already.
+Observe for the artists. Grace will now only have _one child_--little
+Marion.". . . (At night, on same day.). . . "You recollect that I asked you
+to read it all together, for I knew that I was working for that? But I
+have no doubt of _your_ doubts, and will do what I have said. . . . I had
+thought of marking the time in the little story, and will do so. . . .
+Think, once more, of the period between the second and third parts. I
+will do the same." (7th of November.)
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"I hope you will think the third part (when you read it in type with
+these amendments) very much improved. I think it so. If there should
+still be anything wanting, in your opinion, pray suggest it to me in
+Paris. I am bent on having it right, if I can. . . . If in going over the
+proofs you find the tendency to blank verse (I _cannot_ help it, when I
+am very much in earnest) too strong, knock out a word's brains here and
+there." (13th of November. Sending the proofs back.)
+
+ * * * * *
+
+". . . Your Christmas book illustration-news makes me jump for joy. I will
+write you at length to-morrow. I should like this dedication: This
+Christmas Book is cordially inscribed To my English Friends in
+Switzerland. Just those two lines, and nothing more. When I get the
+proofs again I think I may manage another word or two about the
+battle-field, with advantage. I am glad you like the alterations. I feel
+that they make it complete, and that it would have been incomplete
+without your suggestions." (21st of November. From Paris.)
+
+I had managed, as a glad surprise for him, to enlist both Stanfield and
+Maclise in the illustration of the story, in addition to the
+distinguished artists whom the publishers had engaged for it, Leech and
+Richard Doyle; and among the subjects contributed by Stanfield are three
+morsels of English landscape which had a singular charm for Dickens at
+the time, and seem to me still of their kind quite faultless. I may add
+a curious fact, never mentioned until now. In the illustration which
+closes the second part of the story, where the festivities to welcome
+the bridegroom at the top of the page contrast with the flight of the
+bride represented below, Leech made the mistake of supposing that
+Michael Warden had taken part in the elopement, and has introduced his
+figure with that of Marion. We did not discover this until too late for
+remedy, the publication having then been delayed, for these drawings, to
+the utmost limit; and it is highly characteristic of Dickens, and of the
+true regard he had for this fine artist, that, knowing the pain he must
+give in such circumstances by objection or complaint, he preferred to
+pass it silently. Nobody made remark upon it, and there the illustration
+still stands; but any one who reads the tale carefully will at once
+perceive what havoc it makes of one of the most delicate turns in it.
+
+"When I first saw it, it was with a horror and agony not to be
+expressed. Of course I need not tell _you_, my dear fellow, Warden has
+no business in the elopement scene. _He_ was never there! In the first
+hot sweat of this surprise and novelty, I was going to implore the
+printing of that sheet to be stopped, and the figure taken out of the
+block. But when I thought of the pain this might give to our
+kind-hearted Leech; and that what is such a monstrous enormity to me, as
+never having entered my brain, may not so present itself to others, I
+became more composed: though the fact is wonderful to me. No doubt a
+great number of copies will be printed by the time this reaches you, and
+therefore I shall take it for granted that it stands as it is. Leech
+otherwise is very good, and the illustrations altogether are by far the
+best that have been done for any of the Christmas books. You know how I
+build up temples in my mind that are not made with hands (or expressed
+with pen and ink, I am afraid), and how liable I am to be disappointed
+in these things. But I really am _not_ disappointed in this case.
+Quietness and beauty are preserved throughout. Say everything to Mac and
+Stanny, more than everything! It is a delight to look at these little
+landscapes of the dear old boy. How gentle and elegant, and yet how
+manly and vigorous, they are! I have a perfect joy in them."
+
+Of the few days that remained of his Lausanne life, before he journeyed
+to Paris, there is not much requiring to be said. His work had continued
+during the whole of the month before departure to occupy him so entirely
+as to leave room for little else, and even occasional letters to very
+dear friends at home were intermitted. Here is one example of many. "I
+will write to Landor as soon as I can possibly make time, but I really
+am so much at my desk perforce, and so full of work, whether I am there
+or elsewhere, between the Christmas book and _Dombey_, that it is the
+most difficult thing in the world for me to make up my mind to write a
+letter to any one but you. I ought to have written to Macready. I wish
+you would tell him, with my love, how I am situated in respect of pen,
+ink, and paper. One of the Lausanne papers, treating of free trade, has
+been very copious lately in its mention of LORD GOBDEN. Fact; and I
+think it a good name." Then, as the inevitable time approached, he cast
+about him for such comfort as the coming change might bring, to set
+against the sorrow of it; and began to think of Paris, "'in a less
+romantic and more homely contemplation of the picture,' as not wholly
+undesirable. I have no doubt that constant change, too, is indispensable
+to me when I am at work: and at times something more than a doubt will
+force itself upon me whether there is not something in a Swiss valley
+that disagrees with me. Certainly, whenever I live in Switzerland again,
+it shall be on the hill-top. Something of the _goitre_ and _cretin_
+influence seems to settle on my spirits sometimes, on the lower
+ground.[129] How sorry, ah yes! how sorry I shall be to leave the
+little society nevertheless. We have been thoroughly good-humoured and
+agreeable together, and I'll always give a hurrah for the Swiss and
+Switzerland."
+
+One or two English travelling by Lausanne had meanwhile greeted him as
+they were passing home, and a few days given him by Elliotson had been
+an enjoyment without a drawback. It was now the later autumn, very high
+winds were coursing through the valley, and his last letter but one
+described the change which these approaches of winter were making in the
+scene. "We have had some tremendous hurricanes at Lausanne. It is an
+extraordinary place now for wind, being peculiarly situated among
+mountains--between the Jura, and the Simplon, St. Gothard, St. Bernard,
+and Mont Blanc ranges; and at night you would swear (lying in bed) you
+were at sea. You cannot imagine wind blowing so, over earth. It is very
+fine to hear. The weather generally, however, has been excellent. There
+is snow on the tops of nearly all the hills, but none has fallen in the
+valley. On a bright day, it is quite hot between eleven and half past
+two. The nights and mornings are cold. For the last two or three days,
+it has been thick weather; and I can see no more of Mont Blanc from
+where I am writing now than if I were in Devonshire terrace, though last
+week it bounded all the Lausanne walks. I would give a great deal that
+you could take a walk with me about Lausanne on a clear cold day. It is
+impossible to imagine anything more noble and beautiful than the scene;
+and the autumn colours in the foliage are more brilliant and vivid now
+than any description could convey to you. I took Elliotson, when he was
+with us, up to a ravine I had found out in the hills eight hundred or a
+thousand feet deep! Its steep sides dyed bright yellow, and deep red, by
+the changing leaves; a sounding torrent rolling down below; the lake of
+Geneva lying at its foot; one enormous mass and chaos of trees at its
+upper end; and mountain piled on mountain in the distance, up into the
+sky! He really was struck silent by its majesty and splendour."
+
+He had begun his third number of _Dombey_ on the 26th of October, on the
+4th of the following month he was half through it, on the 7th he was in
+the "agonies" of its last chapter, and on the 9th, one day before that
+proposed for its completion, all was done. This was marvellously rapid
+work, after what else he had undergone; but within a week, Monday the
+16th being the day for departure, they were to strike their tents, and
+troubled and sad were the few days thus left him for preparation and
+farewell. He included in his leave-taking his deaf, dumb, and blind
+friends; and, to use his own homely phrase, was yet more terribly "down
+in the mouth" at taking leave of his hearing, speaking, and seeing
+friends. "I shall see you soon, please God, and that sets all to rights.
+But I don't believe there are many dots on the map of the world where we
+shall have left such affectionate remembrances behind us, as in
+Lausanne. It was quite miserable this last night, when we left them at
+Haldimand's."
+
+He shall himself describe how they travelled post to Paris, occupying
+five days. "We got through the journey charmingly, though not quite so
+quickly as we hoped. The children as good as usual, and even Skittles
+jolly to the last. (That name has long superseded Sampson Brass, by the
+bye. I call him so, from something skittle-playing and public-housey in
+his countenance.) We have been up at five every morning, and on the road
+before seven. We were three carriages: a sort of wagon, with a cabriolet
+attached, for the luggage; a ramshackle villainous old swing upon wheels
+(hired at Geneva), for the children; and for ourselves, that travelling
+chariot which I was so kind as to bring here for sale. It was very cold
+indeed crossing the Jura--nothing but fog and frost; but when we were
+out of Switzerland and across the French frontier, it became warmer, and
+continued so. We stopped at between six and seven each evening; had two
+rather queer inns, wild French country inns; but the rest good. They
+were three hours and a half examining the luggage at the frontier
+custom-house--atop of a mountain, in a hard and biting frost; where Anne
+and Roche had sharp work I assure you, and the latter insisted on
+volunteering the most astonishing and unnecessary lies about my books,
+for the mere pleasure of deceiving the officials. When we were out of
+the mountain country, we came at a good pace, but were a day late in
+getting to our hotel here."
+
+They were in Paris when that was written; at the hotel Brighton; which
+they had reached in the evening of Friday the 20th of November.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[129] "I may tell you," he wrote to me from Paris at the end of
+November, "now it is all over. I don't know whether it was the hot
+summer, or the anxiety of the two new books coupled with D. N.
+remembrances and reminders, but I was in that state in Switzerland, when
+my spirits sunk so, I felt myself in serious danger. Yet I had little
+pain in my side; excepting that time at Genoa I have hardly had any
+since poor Mary died, when it came on so badly; and I walked my fifteen
+miles a day constantly, at a great pace."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+THREE MONTHS IN PARIS.
+
+1846-1847.
+
+ Lord Brougham--French Sunday--A House
+ taken--His French Abode--A Former
+ Tenant--Sister Fanny's Illness--The King of the
+ Barricades--The Morgue--Parisian
+ Population--Americans and French--Unsettlement
+ of Plans--A True Friend--Hard Frost--Alarming
+ Neighbour--A Fellow-litterateur--London
+ Visit--Return to
+ Paris--Begging-letter-writers--A Boulogne
+ Reception--French-English--Citizen
+ Dickens--Sight-seeing--Evening with Victor
+ Hugo--At the Bibliotheque Royale--Adventure
+ with a Coachman--Illness of Eldest Son--Visit
+ of his Father--The "Man that put together
+ Dombey."
+
+
+NO man enjoyed brief residence in a hotel more than Dickens, but
+"several tons of luggage, other tons of servants, and other tons of
+children" are not desirable accompaniments to this kind of life; and his
+first day in Paris did not close before he had offered for an "eligible
+mansion." That same Saturday night he took a "colossal" walk about the
+city, of which the brilliancy and brightness almost frightened him; and
+among other things that attracted his notice was "rather a good book
+announced in a bookseller's window as _Les Mysteres de Londres par Sir
+Trollopp_. Do you know him?" A countryman better known had given him
+earlier greeting. "The first man who took hold of me in the street,
+immediately outside this door, was Bruffum in his check trousers, and
+without the proper number of buttons on his shirt, who was going away
+this morning, he told me, but coming back in two months, when we would
+go and dine--at some place known to him and fame."
+
+Next day he took another long walk about the streets, and lost himself
+fifty times. This was Sunday, and he hardly knew what to say of it, as
+he saw it there and then. The bitter observance of that day he always
+sharply resisted, believing a little rational enjoyment to be not
+opposed to either rest or religion; but here was another matter. "The
+dirty churches, and the clattering carts and waggons, and the open shops
+(I don't think I passed fifty shut up, in all my strollings in and out),
+and the work-a-day dresses and drudgeries, are not comfortable. Open
+theatres and so forth I am well used to, of course, by this time; but so
+much toil and sweat on what one would like to see, apart from religious
+observances, a sensible holiday, is painful."
+
+The date of his letter was the 22nd of November, and it had three
+postscripts.[130] The first, "Monday afternoon," told me a house was
+taken; that, unless the agreement should break off on any unforeseen
+fight between Roche and the agent ("a French Mrs. Gamp"), I was to
+address him at No. 48, Rue de Courcelles, Faubourg St. Honore; and that
+he would merely then advert to the premises as in his belief the "most
+ridiculous, extraordinary, unparalleled, and preposterous" in the whole
+world; being something between a baby-house, a "shades," a haunted
+castle, and a mad kind of clock. "They belong to a Marquis Castellan,
+and you will be ready to die of laughing when you go over them." The
+second P.S. declared that his lips should be sealed till I beheld for
+myself. "By Heaven it is not to be imagined by the mind of man!" The
+third P.S. closed the letter. "One room is a tent. Another room is a
+grove. Another room is a scene at the Victoria. The upstairs rooms are
+like fanlights over street-doors. The nurseries--but no, no, no, no
+more! . . ."
+
+His following letter nevertheless sent more, even in the form of an
+additional protestation that never till I saw it should the place be
+described. "I will merely observe that it is fifty yards long, and
+eighteen feet high, and that the bedrooms are exactly like opera-boxes.
+It has its little courtyard and garden, and porter's house, and cordon
+to open the door, and so forth; and is a Paris mansion in little. There
+is a gleam of reason in the drawing-room. Being a gentleman's house, and
+not one furnished to let, it has some very curious things in it; some of
+the oddest things you ever beheld in your life; and an infinity of easy
+chairs and sofas. . . . Bad weather. It is snowing hard. There is not a
+door or window here--but that's nothing! there's not a door or window in
+all Paris--that shuts; not a chink in all the billions of trillions of
+chinks in the city that can he stopped to keep the wind out. And the
+cold!--but you shall judge for yourself; and also of this preposterous
+dining-room. The invention, sir, of Henry Bulwer, who when he had
+executed it (he used to live here), got frightened at what he had done,
+as well he might, and went away. . . . The Brave called me aside on
+Saturday night, and showed me an improvement he had effected in the
+decorative way. 'Which,' he said, 'will very much s'prize Mis'r Fors'er
+when he come.' You are to be deluded into the belief that there is a
+perspective of chambers twenty miles in length, opening from the
+drawing-room. . . ."
+
+My visit was not yet due, however, and what occupied or interested him
+in the interval may first be told. He had not been two days in Paris
+when a letter from his father made him very anxious for the health of
+his eldest sister. "I was going to the play (a melodrama in eight acts,
+five hours long), but hadn't the heart to leave home after my father's
+letter," he is writing on the 30th of November, "and sent Georgy and
+Kate by themselves. There seems to be no doubt whatever that Fanny is in
+a consumption." She had broken down in an attempt to sing at a party in
+Manchester; and subsequent examination by Sir Charles Bell's son, who
+was present and took much interest in her, too sadly revealed the cause.
+"He advised that neither she nor Burnett should be told the truth, and
+my father has not disclosed it. In worldly circumstances they are very
+comfortable, and they are very much respected. They seem to be happy
+together, and Burnett has a great deal of teaching. You remember my
+fears about her when she was in London the time of Alfred's marriage,
+and that I said she looked to me as if she were in a decline? Kate took
+her to Elliotson, who said that her lungs were certainly not affected
+then. And she cried for joy. Don't you think it would be better for her
+to be brought up, if possible, to see Elliotson again? I am deeply,
+deeply grieved about it." This course was taken, and for a time there
+seemed room for hope; but the result will be seen. In the same letter I
+heard of poor Charles Sheridan, well known to us both, dying of the same
+terrible disease; and his chief, Lord Normanby, whose many acts of
+sympathy and kindness had inspired strong regard in Dickens, he had
+already found "as informal and good-natured as ever, but not so gay as
+usual, and having an anxious, haggard way with him, as if his
+responsibilities were more than he had bargained for." Nor, to account
+for this, had Dickens far to seek, when a little leisure enabled him to
+see something of what was passing in Paris in that last year of Louis
+Philippe's reign. What first impressed him most unfavourably was a
+glimpse in the Champs Elysees, of the King himself coming in from the
+country. "There were two carriages. His was surrounded by horseguards.
+It went at a great pace, and he sat very far back in a corner of it, I
+promise you. It was strange to an Englishman to see the Prefet of Police
+riding on horseback some hundreds of yards in advance of the cortege,
+turning his head incessantly from side to side, like a figure in a Dutch
+clock, and scrutinizing everybody and everything, as if he suspected all
+the twigs in all the trees in the long avenue."
+
+But these and other political indications were only, as they generally
+prove to be, the outward signs of maladies more deeply-seated. He saw
+almost everywhere signs of canker eating into the heart of the people
+themselves. "It is a wicked and detestable place, though wonderfully
+attractive; and there can be no better summary of it, after all, than
+Hogarth's unmentionable phrase." He sent me no letter that did not
+contribute something of observation or character. He went at first
+rather frequently to the Morgue, until shocked by something so repulsive
+that he had not courage for a long time to go back; and on that same
+occasion he had noticed the keeper smoking a short pipe at his little
+window, "and giving a bit of fresh turf to a linnet in a cage." Of the
+condition generally of the streets he reported badly; the quays on the
+other side of the Seine were not safe after dark; and here was his own
+night experience of one of the best quarters of the city. "I took Georgy
+out, the night before last, to show her the Palais Royal lighted up; and
+on the Boulevard, a street as bright as the brightest part of the Strand
+or Regent-street, we saw a man fall upon another, close before us, and
+try to tear the cloak off his back. It was in a little dark corner near
+the Porte St. Denis, which stands out in the middle of the street. After
+a short struggle, the thief fled (there were thousands of people walking
+about), and was captured just on the other side of the road."
+
+An incident of that kind might mean little or much: but what he
+proceeded to remark of the ordinary Parisian workpeople and smaller
+shopkeepers, had a more grave complexion; and may be thought perhaps
+still to yield some illustration, not without value, to the story of
+the quarter of a century that has passed since, and even to some of the
+appalling events of its latest year or two. "It is extraordinary what
+nonsense English people talk, write, and believe, about foreign
+countries. The Swiss (so much decried) will do anything for you, if you
+are frank and civil; they are attentive and punctual in all their
+dealings; and may be relied upon as steadily as the English. The
+Parisian workpeople and smaller shopkeepers are more like (and unlike)
+Americans than I could have supposed possible. To the American
+indifference and carelessness, they add a procrastination and want of
+the least heed about keeping a promise or being exact, which is
+certainly not surpassed in Naples. They have the American
+semi-sentimental independence too, and none of the American vigour or
+purpose. If they ever get free trade in France (as I suppose they will,
+one day), these parts of the population must, for years and years, be
+ruined. They couldn't get the means of existence, in competition with
+the English workmen. Their inferior manual dexterity, their lazy habits,
+perfect unreliability, and habitual insubordination, would ruin them in
+any such contest, instantly. They are fit for nothing but
+soldiering--and so far, I believe, the successors in the policy of your
+friend Napoleon have reason on their side. Eh bien, mon ami, quand vous
+venez a Paris, nous nous mettrons a quatre epingles, et nous verrons
+toutes les merveilles de la cite, et vous en jugerez. God bless me, I
+beg your pardon! It comes so natural."
+
+On the 30th he wrote to me that he had got his papers into order and
+hoped to begin that day. But the same letter told me of the
+unsettlement thus early of his half-formed Paris plans. Three months
+sooner than he designed he should be due in London for family reasons;
+should have to keep within the limit of four months abroad; and as his
+own house would not be free till July, would have to hire one from the
+end of March. "In these circumstances I think I shall send Charley to
+King's-college after Christmas. I am sorry he should lose so much
+French, but don't you think to break another half-year's schooling would
+be a pity? Of my own will I would not send him to King's-college at all,
+but to Bruce-castle instead. I suppose, however, Miss Coutts is best. We
+will talk over all this when I come to London." The offer to take charge
+of his eldest son's education had been pressed upon Dickens by this true
+friend, to whose delicate and noble consideration for him it would
+hardly become me to make other allusion here. Munificent as the kindness
+was, however, it was yet only the smallest part of the obligation which
+Dickens felt that he owed this lady; to whose generous schemes for the
+neglected and uncared-for classes of the population, in all which he
+deeply sympathised, he did the very utmost to render, through many
+years, unstinted service of his time and his labour, with sacrifice
+unselfish as her own. His proposed early visit to London, named in this
+letter, was to see the rehearsal of his Christmas story, dramatised by
+Mr. Albert Smith for Mr. and Mrs. Keeley at the Lyceum; and my own
+proposed visit to Paris was to be in the middle of January. "It will
+then be the height of the season, and a good time for testing the
+unaccountable French vanity which really does suppose there are no fogs
+here, but that they are all in London."[131]
+
+The opening of his next letter, which bore date the 6th of December, and
+its amusing sequel, will sufficiently speak for themselves. "Cold
+intense. The water in the bedroom-jugs freezes into solid masses from
+top to bottom, bursts the jugs with reports like small cannon, and rolls
+out on the tables and wash-stands, hard as granite. I stick to the
+shower-bath, but have been most hopelessly out of sorts--writing sorts;
+that's all. Couldn't begin, in the strange place; took a violent dislike
+to my study, and came down into the drawing-room; couldn't find a corner
+that would answer my purpose; fell into a black contemplation of the
+waning month; sat six hours at a stretch, and wrote as many lines, &c.
+&c. &c. . . . Then, you know what arrangements are necessary with the
+chairs and tables; and then what correspondence had to be cleared off;
+and then how I tried to settle to my desk, and went about and about it,
+and dodged at it, like a bird at a lump of sugar. In short I have just
+begun; five printed pages finished, I should say; and hope I shall be
+blessed with a better condition this next week, or I shall be
+behind-hand. I shall try to go at it--hard. I can't do more. . . . There is
+rather a good man lives in this street, and I have had a correspondence
+with him which is preserved for your inspection. His name is Barthelemy.
+He wears a prodigious Spanish cloak, a slouched hat, an immense beard,
+and long black hair. He called the other day and left his card. Allow me
+to enclose his card, which has originality and merit.
+
+[Illustration: =Rue de Courcelles=
+
+ _Barthelemy_
+
+ =49.=]
+
+Roche said I wasn't at home. Yesterday, he wrote me to say that he too
+was a 'Litterateur'--that he had called, in compliment to my
+distinguished reputation--'qu'il n'avait pas ete recu--qu'il n'etait pas
+habitue a cette sorte de procede--et qu'il pria Monsieur Dickens
+d'oublier son nom, sa memoire, sa carte, et sa visite, et de considerer
+qu'elle n'avait pas ete rendu!' Of course I wrote him a very polite
+reply immediately, telling him good-humouredly that he was quite
+mistaken, and that there were always two weeks in the beginning of every
+month when M. Dickens ne pouvait rendre visite a personne. He wrote back
+to say that he was more than satisfied; that it was his case too, at
+the end of every month; and that when busy himself, he not only can't
+receive or pay visits, but--'tombe, generalement, aussi, dans des
+humeurs noires qui approchent de l'anthropophagie!!!' I think that's
+pretty well."
+
+He was in London eight days, from the 15th to the 23rd of December;[132]
+and among the occupations of his visit, besides launching his little
+story on the stage, was the settlement of form for a cheap edition of
+his writings, which began in the following year. It was to be printed in
+double-columns, and issued weekly in three-halfpenny numbers; there were
+to be new prefaces, but no illustrations; and for each book something
+less than a fourth of the original price was to be charged. Its success
+was very good, but did not come even near to the mark of the later
+issues of his writings. His own feeling as to this, however, though any
+failure at the moment affected him on other grounds, was always that of
+a quiet confidence; and he had expressed this in a proposed dedication
+of this very edition, which for other reasons was ultimately laid aside.
+It will be worth preserving here. "This cheap edition of my books is
+dedicated to the English people, in whose approval, if the books be true
+in spirit, they will live, and out of whose memory, if they be false,
+they will very soon die."
+
+Upon his return to Paris I had frequent report of his progress with his
+famous fifth number, on the completion of which I was to join him. The
+day at one time seemed doubtful. "It would be miserable to have to work
+while you were here. Still, I make such sudden starts, and am so
+possessed of what I am going to do, that the fear may prove to be quite
+groundless, and if any alteration would trouble you, let the 13th stand
+at all hazards." The cold he described as so intense, and the price of
+fuel so enormous, that though the house was not half warmed ("as you'll
+say, when you feel it") it cost him very near a pound a day.
+Begging-letter writers had found out "Monsieur Dickens, le romancier
+celebre," and waylaid him at the door and in the street as numerously as
+in London: their distinguishing peculiarity being that they were nearly
+all of them "Chevaliers de la Garde Imperiale de sa Majeste Napoleon le
+Grand," and that their letters bore immense seals with coats of arms as
+large as five-shilling pieces. His friends the Watsons passed new year's
+day with him on their way to Rockingham from Lausanne, leaving that
+country covered with snow and the Bise blowing cruelly over it, but
+describing it as nothing to the cold of Paris. On the day that closed
+the old year he had gone into the Morgue and seen an old man with grey
+head lying there. "It seemed the strangest thing in the world that it
+should have been necessary to take any trouble to stop such a feeble,
+spent, exhausted morsel of life. It was just dusk when I went in; the
+place was empty; and he lay there, all alone, like an impersonation of
+the wintry eighteen hundred and forty-six. . . . I find I am getting
+inimitable, so I'll stop."
+
+The time for my visit having come, I had grateful proof of the minute
+and thoughtful provision characteristic of him in everything. My dinner
+had been ordered to the second at Boulogne, my place in the malle-poste
+taken, and these and other services announced in a letter, which, by way
+of doing its part also in the kindly work of preparation, broke out into
+French. He never spoke that language very well, his accent being somehow
+defective; but he practised himself into writing it with remarkable ease
+and fluency. "I have written to the Hotel des Bains at Boulogne to send
+on to Calais and take your place in the malle-poste. . . . Of course you
+know that you'll be assailed with frightful shouts all along the two
+lines of ropes from all the touters in Boulogne, and of course you'll
+pass on like the princess who went up the mountain after the talking
+bird; but don't forget quietly to single out the Hotel des Bains
+commissionnaire. The following circumstances will then occur. My
+experience is more recent than yours, and I will throw them into a
+dramatic form. . . . You are filtered into the little office, where there
+are some soldiers; and a gentleman with a black beard and a pen and ink
+sitting behind a counter. _Barbe Noire_ (to the lord of L. I. F.).
+Monsieur, votre passeport. _Monsieur._ Monsieur, le voici! _Barbe
+Noire._ Ou allez-vous, monsieur? _Monsieur._ Monsieur, je vais a Paris.
+_Barbe Noire._ Quand allez-vous partir, monsieur? _Monsieur._ Monsieur,
+je vais partir aujourd'hui. Avec la malle-poste. _Barbe Noire._ C'est
+bien. (To Gendarme.) Laissez sortir monsieur! _Gendarme._ Par ici,
+monsieur, s'il vous plait. Le gendarme ouvert une tres petite porte.
+Monsieur se trouve subitement entoure de tous les gamins, agents,
+commissionnaires, porteurs, et polissons, en general, de Boulogne, qui
+s'elancent sur lui, en poussant des cris epouvantables. Monsieur est,
+pour le moment, tout-a-fait effraye et bouleverse. Mais monsieur reprend
+ses forces et dit, de haute voix: 'Le Commissionnaire de l'Hotel des
+Bains!' _Un petit homme_ (s'avancant rapidement, et en souriant
+doucement). Me voici, monsieur. Monsieur Fors Tair, n'est-ce pas? . . .
+Alors. . . . Alors monsieur se promene _a_ l'Hotel des Bains, ou monsieur
+trouvera qu'un petit salon particulier, en haut, est deja prepare pour
+sa reception, et que son diner est deja commande, aux soins du brave
+Courier, _a midi et demi_. . . . Monsieur mangera son diner pres du feu,
+avec beaucoup de plaisir, et il boirera de vin rouge a la sante de
+Monsieur de Boze, et sa famille interessante et aimable. La malle-poste
+arrivera au bureau de la poste aux lettres a deux heures ou peut-etre un
+peu plus tard. Mais monsieur chargera le commissionnaire d'y
+l'accompagner de bonne heure, car c'est beaucoup mieux de l'attendre que
+de la perdre. La malle-poste arrive, monsieur s'assiera, aussi
+confortablement qu'il le peut, et il y restera jusqu'a son arrive au
+bureau de la poste aux lettres a Paris. Parceque, le convoi (_train_)
+n'est pas l'affaire de monsieur, qui continuera s'asseoir dans la
+malle-poste, sur le chemin de fer, et apres le chemin de fer, jusqu'il
+se trouve a la basse-cour du bureau de la poste aux lettres a Paris, ou
+il trouvera une voiture qui a ete depeche de la Rue de Courcelles,
+quarante-huit. Mais monsieur aura la bonte d'observer--Si le convoi
+arriverait a Amiens apres le depart du convoi a minuit, il faudra y
+rester jusqu'a l'arrive d'un autre convoi a trois heures moins un quart.
+En attendant, monsieur peut rester au buffet (_refreshment room_), ou
+l'on peut toujours trouver un bon feu, et du cafe chaud, et des tres
+bonnes choses a boire et a manger, pendant toute la nuit.--Est-ce que
+monsieur comprend parfaitement toutes ces regles pour sa guidance?--Vive
+le Roi des Francais! Roi de la nation la plus grande, et la plus noble,
+et la plus extraordinairement merveilleuse, du monde! A bas des Anglais!
+
+ "CHARLES DICKENS,
+ "Francais naturalise, et Citoyen de Paris."
+
+
+We passed a fortnight together, and crowded into it more than might seem
+possible to such a narrow space. With a dreadful insatiability we passed
+through every variety of sight-seeing, prisons, palaces, theatres,
+hospitals, the Morgue and the Lazare, as well as the Louvre, Versailles,
+St. Cloud, and all the spots made memorable by the first revolution. The
+excellent comedian Regnier, known to us through Macready and endeared by
+many kindnesses, incomparable for his knowledge of the city and
+unwearying in friendly service, made us free of the green-room of the
+Francais, where, on the birthday of Moliere, we saw his "Don Juan"
+revived. At the Conservatoire we witnessed the masterly teaching of
+Samson; at the Odeon saw a new play by Ponsard, done but indifferently;
+at the Varietes "Gentil-Bernard," with four grisettes as if stepped out
+of a picture by Watteau; at the Gymnase "Clarisse Harlowe," with a
+death-scene of Rose Cheri which comes back to me, through the distance
+of time, as the prettiest piece of pure and gentle stage-pathos in my
+memory; at the Porte St. Martin "Lucretia Borgia" by Hugo; at the
+Cirque, scenes of the great revolution, and all the battles of
+Napoleon; at the Comic Opera, "Gibby"; and at the Palais Royal the usual
+new-year's piece, in which Alexandre Dumas was shown in his study beside
+a pile of quarto volumes five feet high, which proved to be the first
+tableau of the first act of the first piece to be played on the first
+night of his new theatre. That new theatre, the Historique, we also saw
+verging to a very short-lived completeness; and we supped with Dumas
+himself, and Eugene Sue, and met Theophile Gautier and Alphonse Karr. We
+saw Lamartine also, and had much friendly intercourse with Scribe, and
+with the kind good-natured Amedee Pichot. One day we visited in the Rue
+du Bac the sick and ailing Chateaubriand, whom we thought like Basil
+Montagu; found ourselves at the other extreme of opinion in the
+sculpture-room of David d'Angers; and closed that day at the house of
+Victor Hugo, by whom Dickens was received with infinite courtesy and
+grace. The great writer then occupied a floor in a noble corner-house in
+the Place Royale, the old quarter of Ninon l'Enclos and the people of
+the Regency, of whom the gorgeous tapestries, the painted ceilings, the
+wonderful carvings and old golden furniture, including a canopy of state
+out of some palace of the middle age, quaintly and grandly reminded us.
+He was himself, however, the best thing we saw; and I find it difficult
+to associate the attitudes and aspect in which the world has lately
+wondered at him, with the sober grace and self-possessed quiet gravity
+of that night of twenty-five years ago. Just then Louis Philippe had
+ennobled him, but the man's nature was written noble. Rather under the
+middle size, of compact close-buttoned-up figure, with ample dark hair
+falling loosely over his close-shaven face, I never saw upon any
+features so keenly intellectual such a soft and sweet gentility, and
+certainly never heard the French language spoken with the picturesque
+distinctness given to it by Victor Hugo. He talked of his childhood in
+Spain, and of his father having been Governor of the Tagus in Napoleon's
+wars; spoke warmly of the English people and their literature; declared
+his preference for melody and simplicity over the music then fashionable
+at the Conservatoire; referred kindly to Ponsard, laughed at the actors
+who had murdered his tragedy at the Odeon, and sympathized with the
+dramatic venture of Dumas. To Dickens he addressed very charming
+flattery, in the best taste; and my friend long remembered the enjoyment
+of that evening.
+
+There is little to add of our Paris holiday, if indeed too much has not
+been said already. We had an adventure with a drunken coachman, of which
+the sequel showed at least the vigour and decisiveness of the police in
+regard to hired vehicles[133] in those last days of the Orleans
+monarchy. At the Bibliotheque Royale we were much interested by seeing,
+among many other priceless treasures, Gutenberg's types, Racine's notes
+in his copy of Sophocles, Rousseau's music, and Voltaire's note upon
+Frederick of Prussia's letter. Nor should I omit that in what Dickens
+then told me, of even his small experience of the social aspects of
+Paris, there seemed but the same disease which raged afterwards through
+the second Empire. Not many days after I left, all Paris was crowding to
+the sale of a lady of the demi-monde, Marie du Plessis, who had led the
+most brilliant and abandoned of lives, and left behind her the most
+exquisite furniture and the most voluptuous and sumptuous bijouterie.
+Dickens wished at one time to have pointed the moral of this life and
+death of which there was great talk in Paris while we were together. The
+disease of satiety, which only less often than hunger passes for a
+broken heart, had killed her. "What do you want?" asked the most famous
+of the Paris physicians, at a loss for her exact complaint. At last she
+answered: "To see my mother." She was sent for; and there came a simple
+Breton peasant-woman clad in the quaint garb of her province, who prayed
+by her bed until she died. Wonderful was the admiration and sympathy;
+and it culminated when Eugene Sue bought her prayer-book at the sale.
+Our last talk before I quitted Paris, after dinner at the Embassy, was
+of the danger underlying all this, and of the signs also visible
+everywhere of the Napoleon-worship which the Orleanists themselves had
+most favoured. Accident brought Dickens to England a fortnight later,
+when again we met together, at Gore-house, the self-contained reticent
+man whose doubtful inheritance was thus rapidly preparing to fall to
+him.[134]
+
+The accident was the having underwritten his number of _Dombey_ by two
+pages, which there was not time to supply otherwise than by coming to
+London to write them.[135] This was done accordingly; but another
+greater trouble followed. He had hardly returned to Paris when his
+eldest son, whom I had brought to England with me and placed in the
+house of Doctor Major, then head-master of King's-college-school, was
+attacked by scarlet fever; and this closed prematurely Dickens's
+residence in Paris. But though he and his wife at once came over, and
+were followed after some days by the children and their aunt, the
+isolation of the little invalid could not so soon be broken through. His
+father at last saw him, nearly a month before the rest, in a lodging in
+Albany-street, where his grandmother, Mrs. Hogarth, had devoted herself
+to the charge of him; and an incident of the visit, which amused us all
+very much, will not unfitly introduce the subject that waits me in my
+next chapter.
+
+An elderly charwoman employed about the place had shown so much sympathy
+in the family trouble, that Mrs. Hogarth specially told her of the
+approaching visit, and who it was that was coming to the sick-room.
+"Lawk ma'am!" she said. "Is the young gentleman upstairs the son of the
+man that put together _Dombey_?" Reassured upon this point, she
+explained her question by declaring that she never thought there was a
+man that _could_ have put together _Dombey_. Being pressed farther as to
+what her notion was of this mystery of a _Dombey_ (for it was known she
+could not read), it turned out that she lodged at a snuff-shop kept by a
+person named Douglas, where there were several other lodgers; and that
+on the first Monday of every month there was a Tea, and the landlord
+read the month's number of _Dombey_, those only of the lodgers who
+subscribed to the tea partaking of that luxury, but all having the
+benefit of the reading; and the impression produced on the old charwoman
+revealed itself in the remark with which she closed her account of it.
+"Lawk ma'am! I thought that three or four men must have put together
+_Dombey_!"
+
+Dickens thought there was something of a compliment in this, and was not
+ungrateful.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[130] It had also the mention of another floating fancy for the weekly
+periodical which was still and always present to his mind, and which
+settled down at last, as the reader knows, into _Household Words_. "As
+to the Review, I strongly incline to the notion of a kind of _Spectator_
+(Addison's)--very cheap, and pretty frequent. We must have it thoroughly
+discussed. It would be a great thing to found something. If the mark
+between a sort of _Spectator_, and a different sort of _Athenaeum_, could
+be well hit, my belief is that a deal might be done. But it should be
+something with a marked and distinctive and obvious difference, in its
+design, from any other existing periodical."
+
+[131] Some smaller items of family news were in the same letter. "Mamey
+and Katey have come out in Parisian dresses, and look very fine. They
+are not proud, and send their loves. Skittles is cutting teeth, and gets
+cross towards evening. Frankey is smaller than ever, and Walter very
+large. Charley in statu quo. Everything is enormously dear. Fuel,
+stupendously so. In airing the house, we burnt five pounds' worth of
+firewood in one week!! We mix it with coal now, as we used to do in
+Italy, and find the fires much warmer. To warm the house thoroughly,
+this singular habitation requires fires on the ground floor. We burn
+three. . . ."
+
+[132] "I shall bring the Brave, though I have no use for him. He'd die
+if I didn't."
+
+[133] Dickens's first letter after my return described it to me. "Do you
+remember my writing a letter to the prefet of police about that
+coachman? I heard no more about it until this very day" (12th of
+February), "when, at the moment of your letter arriving, Roche put his
+head in at the door (I was busy writing in the Baronial drawing-room)
+and said, 'Here is datter cocher!'--Sir, he had been in prison ever
+since! and being released this morning, was sent by the police to pay
+back the franc and a half, and to beg pardon, and to get a certificate
+that he had done so, or he could not go on the stand again! Isn't this
+admirable? But the culminating point of the story (it could happen with
+nobody but me) is that he WAS DRUNK WHEN HE CAME!! Not very, but his eye
+was fixed, and he swayed in his sabots, and smelt of wine, and told
+Roche incoherently that he wouldn't have done it (committed the offence,
+that is) if the people hadn't made him. He seemed to be troubled with a
+phantasmagorial belief that all Paris had gathered round us that night
+in the Rue St. Honore, and urged him on with frantic shouts. . . . Snow,
+frost, and cold. . . . The Duke of Bordeaux is very well, and dines at
+the Tuileries to-morrow. . . . _When_ I have done, I will write you a
+brilliant letter. . . . Loves from all. . . . Your blue and golden bed
+looks desolate." The allusion to the Duc de Bordeaux was to remind me
+pleasantly of a slip of his own during our talk with Chateaubriand,
+when, at a loss to say something interesting to the old royalist, he
+bethought him to enquire with sympathy when he had last seen the
+representative of the elder branch of Bourbons, as if he were resident
+in the city then and there!
+
+[134] This was on Sunday, the 21st of February, when a party were
+assembled of whom I think the French Emperor, his cousin the Prince
+Napoleon, Doctor Quin, Dickens's eldest son, and myself, are now the
+only survivors. Lady Blessington had received the day before from her
+brother Major Power, who held a military appointment in Hobart Town, a
+small oil-painting of a girl's face by the murderer Wainewright
+(mentioned on a former page as having been seen by us together in
+Newgate), who was among the convicts there under sentence of
+transportation, and who had contrived somehow to put the expression of
+his own wickedness into the portrait of a nice kind-hearted girl. Major
+Power knew nothing of the man's previous history at this time, and had
+employed him on the painting out of a sort of charity. As soon as the
+truth went back, Wainewright was excluded from houses before open to
+him, and shortly after died very miserably. What Reynolds said of
+portrait painting, to explain its frequent want of refinement, that a
+man could only put into a face what he had in himself, was forcibly
+shown in this incident. The villain's story altogether moved Dickens to
+the same interest as it had excited in another profound student of
+humanity (Sir Edward Lytton), and, as will be seen, he also introduced
+him into one of his later writings.
+
+[135] ". . . I am horrified to find that the first chapter makes _at
+least_ two pages less than I had supposed, and I have a terrible
+apprehension that there will not be copy enough for the number! As it
+could not possibly come out short, and as there would be no greater
+possibility of sending to me, in this short month, to supply what may be
+wanted, I decide--after the first burst of nervousness is gone--_to
+follow this letter by Diligence to-morrow morning_. The malle poste is
+full for days and days. I shall hope to be with you some time on
+Friday." C. D. to J. F. Paris: Wednesday, 17th February, 1847.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFE
+
+OF
+
+CHARLES DICKENS
+
+BY
+
+JOHN FORSTER.
+
+THREE VOLUMES IN TWO.
+
+VOL. II.
+
+ BOSTON:
+ JAMES R. OSGOOD & COMPANY,
+ (LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.)
+ 1875.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+DOMBEY AND SON.
+
+1846-1848.
+
+ Drift of the Tale--Why undervalued--Mistakes of
+ Critics--Adherence to First Design--Design as
+ to Paul and Sister--As to Dombey and
+ Daughter--Real Character of Hero--Walter
+ Gay--Omissions proposed--Anxiety as to Face of
+ his Hero--Passage of Original MS.
+ omitted--Artist-fancies for Mr. Dombey--Dickens
+ and his Illustrators--Hints for Artist--Letter
+ to Cruikshank--An Experience of Ben
+ Jonson's--Sale of the First Number--A Reading
+ of the Second Number--Scene at Mrs.
+ Pipchin's--The Mrs. Pipchin of his
+ Childhood--First Thought of his
+ Autobiography--Paul's School-life--Jeffrey's
+ Forecast of the Tale--A Damper to the Spirit--A
+ Fancy for New Zealand--Close of Paul's
+ Life--Jeffrey on Paul's Death--Florence and
+ Little Nell--Jeffrey on the Edith
+ Scenes--Edith's First Destiny--Jack
+ Bunsby--Dombey Household--Blimber
+ Establishment--Supposed Originals.
+
+
+THOUGH his proposed new "book in shilling numbers" had been mentioned to
+me three months before he quitted England, he knew little himself at
+that time or when he left excepting the fact, then also named, that it
+was to do with Pride what its predecessor had done with Selfishness. But
+this limit he soon overpassed; and the succession of independent groups
+of character, surprising for the variety of their forms and handling,
+with which he enlarged and enriched his plan, went far beyond the range
+of the passion of Mr. Dombey and Mr. Dombey's second wife.
+
+Obvious causes have led to grave under-estimates of this novel. Its
+first five numbers forced up interest and expectation so high that the
+rest of necessity fell short; but it is not therefore true of the
+general conception that thus the wine of it had been drawn, and only the
+lees left. In the treatment of acknowledged masterpieces in literature
+it not seldom occurs that the genius and the art of the master have not
+pulled together to the close; but if a work of imagination is to forfeit
+its higher meed of praise because its pace at starting has not been
+uniformly kept, hard measure would have to be dealt to books of
+undeniable greatness. Among other critical severities it was said here,
+that Paul died at the beginning not for any need of the story, but only
+to interest its readers somewhat more; and that Mr. Dombey relented at
+the end for just the same reason. What is now to be told will show how
+little ground existed for either imputation. The so-called "violent
+change" in the hero has more lately been revived in the notices of Mr.
+Taine, who says of it that "_it spoils a fine novel_;" but it will be
+seen that in the apparent change no unnaturalness of change was
+involved, and certainly the adoption of it was not a sacrifice to
+"public morality." While every other portion of the tale had to submit
+to such varieties in development as the characters themselves entailed,
+the design affecting Paul and his father had been planned from the
+opening, and was carried without alteration to the close. And of the
+perfect honesty with which Dickens himself repelled such charges as
+those to which I have adverted, when he wrote the preface to his
+collected edition, remarkable proof appears in the letter to myself
+which accompanied the manuscript of his proposed first number. No other
+line of the tale had at this time been placed on paper.
+
+When the first chapter only was done, and again when all was finished
+but eight slips, he had sent me letters formerly quoted. What follows
+came with the manuscript of the first four chapters on the 25th of July.
+"I will now go on to give you an outline of my immediate intentions in
+reference to _Dombey_. I design to show Mr. D. with that one idea of the
+Son taking firmer and firmer possession of him, and swelling and
+bloating his pride to a prodigious extent. As the boy begins to grow up,
+I shall show him quite impatient for his getting on, and urging his
+masters to set him great tasks, and the like. But the natural affection
+of the boy will turn towards the despised sister; and I purpose showing
+her learning all sorts of things, of her own application and
+determination, to assist him in his lessons; and helping him always.
+When the boy is about ten years old (in the fourth number), he will be
+taken ill, and will die; and when he is ill, and when he is dying, I
+mean to make him turn always for refuge to the sister still, and keep
+the stern affection of the father at a distance. So Mr. Dombey--for all
+his greatness, and for all his devotion to the child--will find himself
+at arms' length from him even then; and will see that his love and
+confidence are all bestowed upon his sister, whom Mr. Dombey has
+used--and so has the boy himself too, for that matter--as a mere
+convenience and handle to him. The death of the boy is a death-blow, of
+course, to all the father's schemes and cherished hopes; and 'Dombey and
+Son,' as Miss Tox will say at the end of the number, 'is a Daughter
+after all.'. . . From that time, I purpose changing his feeling of
+indifference and uneasiness towards his daughter into a positive hatred.
+For he will always remember how the boy had his arm round her neck when
+he was dying, and whispered to her, and would take things only from her
+hand, and never thought of him. . . . At the same time I shall change _her_
+feeling towards _him_ for one of a greater desire to love him, and to be
+loved by him; engendered in her compassion for his loss, and her love
+for the dead boy whom, in his way, he loved so well too. So I mean to
+carry the story on, through all the branches and offshoots and
+meanderings that come up; and through the decay and downfall of the
+house, and the bankruptcy of Dombey, and all the rest of it; when his
+only staff and treasure, and his unknown Good Genius always, will be
+this rejected daughter, who will come out better than any son at last,
+and whose love for him, when discovered and understood, will be his
+bitterest reproach. For the struggle with himself which goes on in all
+such obstinate natures, will have ended then; and the sense of his
+injustice, which you may be sure has never quitted him, will have at
+last a gentler office than that of only making him more harshly
+unjust. . . . I rely very much on Susan Nipper grown up, and acting partly
+as Florence's maid, and partly as a kind of companion to her, for a
+strong character throughout the book. I also rely on the Toodles, and on
+Polly, who, like everybody else, will be found by Mr. Dombey to have
+gone over to his daughter and become attached to her. This is what cooks
+call 'the stock of the soup.' All kinds of things will be added to it,
+of course." Admirable is the illustration thus afforded of his way of
+working, and very interesting the evidence it gives of the genuine
+feeling for his art with which this book was begun.
+
+The close of the letter put an important question affecting gravely a
+leading person in the tale. . . . "About the boy, who appears in the last
+chapter of the first number, I think it would be a good thing to
+disappoint all the expectations that chapter seems to raise of his happy
+connection with the story and the heroine, and to show him gradually and
+naturally trailing away, from that love of adventure and boyish
+light-heartedness, into negligence, idleness, dissipation, dishonesty,
+and ruin. To show, in short, that common, every-day, miserable
+declension of which we know so much in our ordinary life; to exhibit
+something of the philosophy of it, in great temptations and an easy
+nature; and to show how the good turns into bad, by degrees. If I kept
+some little notion of Florence always at the bottom of it, I think it
+might be made very powerful and very useful. What do you think? Do you
+think it may be done, without making people angry? I could bring out
+Solomon Gills and Captain Cuttle well, through such a history; and I
+descry, anyway, an opportunity for good scenes between Captain Cuttle
+and Miss Tox. This question of the boy is very important. . . . Let me hear
+all you think about it. Hear! I wish I could.". . .
+
+For reasons that need not be dwelt upon here, but in which Dickens
+ultimately acquiesced, Walter was reserved for a happier future; and the
+idea thrown out took subsequent shape, amid circumstances better suited
+to its excellent capabilities, in the striking character of Richard
+Carstone in the tale of _Bleak House_. But another point had risen
+meanwhile for settlement not admitting of delay. In the first enjoyment
+of writing after his long rest, to which a former letter has referred,
+he had over-written his number by nearly a fifth; and upon his proposal
+to transfer the fourth chapter to his second number, replacing it by
+another of fewer pages, I had to object that this might damage his
+interest at starting. Thus he wrote on the 7th of August: ". . . I have
+received your letter to-day with the greatest delight, and am overjoyed
+to find that you think so well of the number. I thought well of it
+myself, and that it was a great plunge into a story; but I did not know
+how far I might be stimulated by my paternal affection. . . . What should
+you say, for a notion of the illustrations, to 'Miss Tox introduces the
+Party?' and 'Mr. Dombey and family?' meaning Polly Toodle, the baby, Mr.
+Dombey, and little Florence: whom I think it would be well to have.
+Walter, his uncle, and Captain Cuttle, might stand over. It is a great
+question with me, now, whether I had not better take this last chapter
+bodily out, and make it the last chapter of the second number; writing
+some other new one to close the first number. I think it would be
+impossible to take out six pages without great pangs. Do you think such
+a proceeding as I suggest would weaken number one very much? I wish you
+would tell me, as soon as you can after receiving this, what your
+opinion is on the point. If you thought it would weaken the first
+number, beyond the counterbalancing advantage of strengthening the
+second, I would cut down somehow or other, and let it go. I shall be
+anxious to hear your opinion. In the meanwhile I will go on with the
+second, which I have just begun. I have not been quite myself since we
+returned from Chamounix, owing to the great heat." Two days later: "I
+have begun a little chapter to end the first number, and certainly think
+it will be well to keep the ten pages of Wally and Co. entire for number
+two. But this is still subject to your opinion, which I am very anxious
+to know. I have not been in writing cue all the week; but really the
+weather has rendered it next to impossible to work." Four days later: "I
+shall send you with this (on the chance of your being favourable to that
+view of the subject) a small chapter to close the first number, in lieu
+of the Solomon Gills one. I have been hideously idle all the week, and
+have done nothing but this trifling interloper: but hope to begin again
+on Monday--ding dong. . . . The inkstand is to be cleaned out to-night, and
+refilled, preparatory to execution. I trust I may shed a good deal of
+ink in the next fortnight." Then, the day following, on arrival of my
+letter, he submitted to a hard necessity. "I received yours to-day. A
+decided facer to me! I had been counting, alas! with a miser's greed,
+upon the gained ten pages. . . . No matter. I have no doubt you are right,
+and strength is everything. The addition of two lines to each page, or
+something less,--coupled with the enclosed cuts, will bring it all to
+bear smoothly. In case more cutting is wanted, I must ask you to try
+your hand. I shall agree to whatever you propose." These cuttings,
+absolutely necessary as they were, were not without much disadvantage;
+and in the course of them he had to sacrifice a passage foreshadowing
+his final intention as to Dombey. It would have shown, thus early,
+something of the struggle with itself that such pride must always go
+through; and I think it worth preserving in a note.[136]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Several letters now expressed his anxiety and care about the
+illustrations. A nervous dread of caricature in the face of his
+merchant-hero, had led him to indicate by a living person the type of
+city-gentleman he would have had the artist select; and this is all he
+meant by his reiterated urgent request, "I do wish he could get a
+glimpse of A, for he is the very Dombey." But as the glimpse of A was
+not to be had, it was resolved to send for selection by himself glimpses
+of other letters of the alphabet, actual heads as well as fanciful
+ones; and the sheetful I sent out, which he returned when the choice was
+made, I here reproduce in fac-simile. In itself amusing, it has now the
+important use of showing, once for all, in regard to Dickens's
+intercourse with his artists, that they certainly had not an easy time
+with him; that, even beyond what is ordinary between author and
+illustrator, his requirements were exacting; that he was apt, as he has
+said himself, to build up temples in his mind not always makeable with
+hands; that in the results he had rarely anything but disappointment;
+and that of all notions to connect with him the most preposterous would
+be that which directly reversed these relations, and depicted him as
+receiving from any artist the inspiration he was always vainly striving
+to give. An assertion of this kind was contradicted in my first volume;
+but it has since been repeated so explicitly, that to prevent any
+possible misconstruction from a silence I would fain have persisted in,
+the distasteful subject is again reluctantly introduced.
+
+It originated with a literary friend of the excellent artist by whom
+_Oliver Twist_ was illustrated from month to month, during the earlier
+part of its monthly issue. This gentleman stated, in a paper written and
+published in America, that Mr. Cruikshank, by executing the plates
+before opportunity was afforded him of seeing the letter press, had
+suggested to the writer the finest effects in his story; and to this,
+opposing my clear recollection of all the time the tale was in progress,
+it became my duty to say that within my own personal knowledge the
+alleged fact was not true. "Dickens," the artist is reported an saying
+to his admirer, "ferreted out that bundle of drawings, and when he came
+to the one which represents Fagin in the cell, he silently studied it
+for half an hour, and told me he was tempted to change the whole plot of
+his story. . . . I consented to let him write up to my designs; and that
+was the way in which Fagin, Sikes, and Nancy were created." Happily I
+was able to add the complete refutation of this folly by producing a
+letter of Dickens written at the time, which proved incontestably that
+the closing illustrations, including the two specially named in support
+of the preposterous charge, Sikes and his Dog, and Fagin in his Cell,
+had not even been seen by Dickens until his finished book was on the eve
+of appearance. As however the distinguished artist, notwithstanding the
+refreshment of his memory by this letter, has permitted himself again to
+endorse the statement of his friend, I can only again print, on the same
+page which contains the strange language used by him, the words with
+which Dickens himself repels its imputation on his memory. To some it
+may be more satisfactory if I print the latter in fac-simile; and so
+leave for ever a charge in itself so incredible that nothing would have
+justified farther allusion to it but the knowledge of my friend's old
+and true regard for Mr. Cruikshank, of which evidence will shortly
+appear, and my own respect for an original genius well able to subsist
+of itself without taking what belongs to others.
+
+[Illustration: My dear Cruikshank,
+
+I returned suddenly to town yesterday afternoon to look at the latter
+["last" crossed out] pages of Oliver Twist before it was delivered to
+the booksellers, when I saw the majority of the plates in the last
+volume for the first time.
+
+With reference to the last one, Rose Maylie and Oliver. Without entering
+into the question of great haste or [word crossed out] any other cause
+which may have led to its being what it is. I am quite sure there can be
+little difference of opinion between us with [word crossed out] respect
+to the result--may]
+
+ [Illustration: I ask you whether you will object
+ to designing [word crossed out] this plate
+ afresh and doing so ~at once~ in order that as
+ few impressions as possible of the present one
+ may go forth?
+
+ I feel confident [words crossed out] you know me
+ too well to feel hurt by this enquiry, and with
+ that confidence in you I have lost no time in
+ preparing it.][137]
+
+Resuming the _Dombey_ letters I find him on the 30th of August in better
+heart about his illustrator. "I shall gladly acquiesce in whatever more
+changes or omissions you propose. Browne seems to be getting on well. . . .
+He will have a good subject in Paul's christening. Mr. Chick is like
+D, if you'll mention that when you think of it. The little chapter of
+Miss Tox and the Major, which you alas! (but quite wisely) rejected from
+the first number, I have altered for the last of the second. I have not
+quite finished the middle chapter yet--having, I should say, three good
+days' work to do at it; but I hope it will be all a worthy successor to
+number one. I will send it as soon as finished." Then, a little later:
+"Browne is certainly interesting himself, and taking pains. I think the
+cover very good: perhaps with a little too much in it, but that is an
+ungrateful objection." The second week of September brought me the
+finished MS. of number two; and his letter of the 3rd of October,
+noticing objections taken to it, gives additional touches to this
+picture of him while at work. The matter that engages him is one of his
+masterpieces. There is nothing in all his writings more perfect, for
+what it shows of his best qualities, than the life and death of Paul
+Dombey. The comedy is admirable; nothing strained, everything hearty and
+wholesome in the laughter and fun; all who contribute to the mirth,
+Doctor Blimber and his pupils, Mr. Toots, the Chicks and the Toodles,
+Miss Tox and the Major, Paul and Mrs. Pipchin, up to his highest mark;
+and the serious scenes never falling short of it, from the death of
+Paul's mother in the first number, to that of Paul himself in the fifth,
+which, as a writer of genius with hardly exaggeration said, threw a
+whole nation into mourning. But see how eagerly this fine writer takes
+every suggestion, how little of self-esteem and self-sufficiency there
+is, with what a consciousness of the tendency of his humour to
+exuberance he surrenders what is needful to restrain it, and of what
+small account to him is any special piece of work in his care and his
+considerateness for the general design. I think of Ben Jonson's
+experience of the greatest of all writers. "He was indeed honest, and of
+an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions and
+gentle expressions; wherein he flowed with that facility, that sometimes
+it was necessary he should be stopped." Who it was that stopped _him_,
+and the ease of doing it, no one will doubt. Whether he, as well as the
+writer of later time, might not with more advantage have been left
+alone, will be the only question.
+
+Thus ran the letter of the 3rd of October: "Miss Tox's colony I will
+smash. Walter's allusion to Carker (would you take it _all_ out?) shall
+be dele'd. Of course, you understand the man! I turned that speech over
+in my mind; but I thought it natural that a boy should run on, with such
+a subject, under the circumstances: having the matter so presented to
+him. . . . I thought of the possibility of malice on christening points of
+faith, and put the drag on as I wrote. Where would you make the
+insertion, and to what effect? _That_ shall be done too. I want you to
+think the number sufficiently good stoutly to back up the first. It
+occurs to me--might not your doubt about the christening be a reason for
+not making the ceremony the subject of an illustration? Just turn this
+over. Again: if I could do it (I shall have leisure to consider the
+possibility before I begin), do you think it would be advisable to make
+number three a kind of half-way house between Paul's infancy, and his
+being eight or nine years old?--In that case I should probably not kill
+him until the fifth number. Do you think the people so likely to be
+pleased with Florence, and Walter, as to relish another number of them
+at their present age? Otherwise, Walter will be two or three and twenty,
+straightway. I wish you would think of this. . . . I am sure you are right
+about the christening. It shall be artfully and easily amended. . . . Eh?"
+
+Meanwhile, two days before this letter, his first number had been
+launched with a sale that transcended his hopes and brought back
+_Nickleby_ days. The _Dombey_ success "is BRILLIANT!" he wrote to me on
+the 11th. "I had put before me thirty thousand as the limit of the most
+extreme success, saying that if we should reach that, I should be more
+than satisfied and more than happy; you will judge how happy I am! I
+read the second number here last night to the most prodigious and
+uproarious delight of the circle. I never saw or heard people laugh so.
+You will allow me to observe that my reading of the Major has merit."
+What a valley of the shadow he had just been passing, in his journey
+through his Christmas book, has before been told; but always, and with
+only too much eagerness, he sprang up under pressure. "A week of perfect
+idleness," he wrote to me on the 26th, "has brought me round
+again--idleness so rusting and devouring, so complete and unbroken, that
+I am quite glad to write the heading of the first chapter of number
+three to-day. I shall be slow at first, I fear, in consequence of that
+change of the plan. But I allow myself nearly three weeks for the
+number; designing, at present, to start for Paris on the 16th of
+November. Full particulars in future bills. Just going to bed. I think I
+can make a good effect, on the after story, of the feeling created by
+the additional number before Paul's death." . . . Five more days confirmed
+him in this hope. "I am at work at _Dombey_ with good speed, thank God.
+All well here. Country stupendously beautiful. Mountains covered with
+snow. Rich, crisp weather." There was one drawback. The second number
+had gone out to him, and the illustrations he found to be so "dreadfully
+bad" that they made him "curl his legs up." They made him also more than
+usually anxious in regard to a special illustration on which he set much
+store, for the part he had in hand.
+
+The first chapter of it was sent me only four days later (nearly half
+the entire part, so freely his fancy was now flowing and overflowing),
+with intimation for the artist: "The best subject for Browne will be at
+Mrs. Pipchin's; and if he liked to do a quiet odd thing, Paul, Mrs.
+Pipchin, and the Cat, by the fire, would be very good for the story. I
+earnestly hope he will think it worth a little extra care. The second
+subject, in case he shouldn't take a second from that same chapter, I
+will shortly describe as soon as I have it clearly (to-morrow or next
+day), and send it to _you_ by post." The result was not satisfactory;
+but as the artist more than redeemed it in the later course of the tale,
+and the present disappointment was mainly the incentive to that better
+success, the mention of the failure here will be excused for what it
+illustrates of Dickens himself. "I am really _distressed_ by the
+illustration of Mrs. Pipchin and Paul. It is so frightfully and wildly
+wide of the mark. Good Heaven! in the commonest and most literal
+construction of the text, it is all wrong. She is described as an old
+lady, and Paul's 'miniature arm-chair' is mentioned more than once. He
+ought to be sitting in a little arm-chair down in the corner of the
+fireplace, staring up at her. I can't say what pain and vexation it is
+to be so utterly misrepresented. I would cheerfully have given a hundred
+pounds to have kept this illustration out of the book. He never could
+have got that idea of Mrs. Pipchin if he had attended to the text.
+Indeed I think he does better without the text; for then the notion is
+made easy to him in short description, and he can't help taking it in."
+
+He felt the disappointment more keenly, because the conception of the
+grim old boarding-house keeper had taken back his thoughts to the
+miseries of his own child-life, and made her, as her prototype in verity
+was, a part of the terrible reality.[138] I had forgotten, until I again
+read this letter of the 4th of November 1846, that he thus early
+proposed to tell me that story of his boyish sufferings which a question
+from myself, of some months later date, so fully elicited. He was now
+hastening on with the close of his third number, to be ready for
+departure to Paris.
+
+". . . I hope to finish the number by next Tuesday or Wednesday. It is
+hard writing under these bird-of-passage circumstances, but I have no
+reason to complain, God knows, having come to no knot yet. . . . I hope you
+will like Mrs. Pipchin's establishment. It is from the life, and I was
+there--I don't suppose I was eight years old; but I remember it all as
+well, and certainly understood it as well, as I do now. We should be
+devilish sharp in what we do to children. I thought of that passage in
+my small life, at Geneva. _Shall I leave you my life in MS. when I die?
+There are some things in it that would touch you very much, and that
+might go on the same shelf with the first volume of Holcroft's._"
+
+On the Monday week after that was written he left Lausanne for Paris,
+and my first letter to him there was to say that he had overwritten his
+number by three pages. "I have taken out about two pages and a half," he
+wrote by return from the hotel Brighton, "and the rest I must ask you to
+take out with the assurance that you will satisfy me in whatever you do.
+The sale, prodigious indeed! I am very thankful." Next day he wrote as
+to Walter. "I see it will be best as you advise, to give that idea up;
+and indeed I don't feel it would be reasonable to carry it out now. I am
+far from sure it could be wholesomely done, after the interest he has
+acquired. But when I have disposed of Paul (poor boy!) I will consider
+the subject farther." The subject was never resumed. He was at the
+opening of his admirable fourth part, when, on the 6th of December, he
+wrote from the Rue de Courcelles: "Here am I, writing letters, and
+delivering opinions, politico-economical and otherwise, as if there were
+no undone number, and no undone Dick! Well. Cosi va il mondo (God bless
+me! Italian! I beg your pardon)--and one must keep one's spirits up, if
+possible, even under _Dombey_ pressure. Paul, I shall slaughter at the
+end of number five. His school ought to be pretty good, but I haven't
+been able to dash at it freely, yet. However, I have avoided unnecessary
+dialogue so far, to avoid overwriting; and all I _have_ written is
+point."
+
+And so, in "point," it went to the close; the rich humour of its picture
+of Doctor Blimber and his pupils alternating with the quaint pathos of
+its picture of little Paul; the first a good-natured exposure of the
+forcing-system and its fruits, as useful as the sterner revelation in
+_Nickleby_ of the atrocities of Mr. Squeers, and the last even less
+attractive for the sweetness and sadness of its foreshadowing of a
+child's death, than for those strange images of a vague, deep
+thoughtfulness, of a shrewd unconscious intellect, of mysterious small
+philosophies and questionings, by which the young old-fashioned little
+creature has a glamour thrown over him as he is passing away. It was
+wonderfully original, this treatment of the part that thus preceded the
+close of Paul's little life; and of which the first conception, as I
+have shown, was an afterthought. It quite took the death itself out of
+the region of pathetic commonplaces, and gave to it the proper relation
+to the sorrow of the little sister that survives it. It is a fairy
+vision to a piece of actual suffering; a sorrow with heaven's hues upon
+it, to a sorrow with all the bitterness of earth.
+
+The number had been finished, he had made his visit to London, and was
+again in the Rue de Courcelles, when on Christmas day he sent me its
+hearty old wishes, and a letter of Jeffrey's on his new story of which
+the first and second part had reached him. "Many merry Christmases, many
+happy new years, unbroken friendship, great accumulation of cheerful
+recollections, affection on earth, and Heaven at last! . . . Is it not a
+strange example of the hazard of writing in parts, that a man like
+Jeffrey should form his notion of Dombey and Miss Tox on three months'
+knowledge? I have asked him the same question, and advised him to keep
+his eye on both of them as time rolls on.[139] I do not at heart,
+however, lay much real stress on his opinion, though one is naturally
+proud of awakening such sincere interest in the breast of an old man who
+has so long worn the blue and yellow. . . . He certainly did some service
+in his old criticisms, especially to Crabbe. And though I don't think so
+highly of Crabbe as I once did (feeling a dreary want of fancy in his
+poems), I think he deserved the pains-taking and conscientious tracking
+with which Jeffrey followed him". . . . Six days later he described himself
+sitting down to the performance of one of his greatest achievements, his
+number five, "most abominably dull and stupid. I have only written a
+slip, but I hope to get to work in strong earnest to-morrow. It occurred
+to me on special reflection, that the first chapter should be with Paul
+and Florence, and that it should leave a pleasant impression of the
+little fellow being happy, before the reader is called upon to see him
+die. I mean to have a genteel breaking-up at Doctor Blimber's therefore,
+for the Midsummer vacation; and to show him in a little quiet light (now
+dawning through the chinks of my mind), which I hope will create an
+agreeable impression." Then, two days later: ". . . I am working very
+slowly. You will see in the first two or three lines of the enclosed
+first subject, with what idea I am ploughing along. It is difficult; but
+a new way of doing it, it strikes me, and likely to be pretty."
+
+And then, after three days more, came something of a damper to his
+spirits, as he thus toiled along. He saw public allusion made to a
+review that had appeared in the _Times_ of his Christmas book, and it
+momentarily touched what he too truly called his morbid susceptibility
+to exasperation. "I see that the 'good old Times' are again at issue
+with the inimitable B. Another touch of a blunt razor on B.'s nervous
+system.--Friday morning. Inimitable very mouldy and dull. Hardly able to
+work. Dreamed of _Timeses_ all night. Disposed to go to New Zealand and
+start a magazine." But soon he sprang up, as usual, more erect for the
+moment's pressure; and after not many days I heard that the number was
+as good as done. His letter was very brief, and told me that he had
+worked so hard the day before (Tuesday, the 12th of January), and so
+incessantly, night as well as morning, that he had breakfasted and lain
+in bed till midday. "I hope I have been very successful." There was but
+one small chapter more to write, in which he and his little friend were
+to part company for ever; and the greater part of the night of the day
+on which it was written, Thursday the 14th, he was wandering desolate
+and sad about the streets of Paris. I arrived there the following
+morning on my visit; and as I alighted from the malle-poste, a little
+before eight o'clock, found him waiting for me at the gate of the
+post-office bureau.
+
+I left him on the 2nd of February with his writing-table in readiness
+for number six; but on the 4th, enclosing me subjects for illustration,
+he told me he was "not under weigh yet. Can't begin." Then, on the 7th,
+his birthday, he wrote to warn me he should be late. "Could not begin
+before Thursday last, and find it very difficult indeed to fall into the
+new vein of the story. I see no hope of finishing before the 16th at the
+earliest, in which case the steam will have to be put on for this short
+month. But it can't be helped. Perhaps I shall get a rush of
+inspiration. . . . I will send the chapters as I write them, and you
+must not wait, of course, for me to read the end in type. To transfer to
+Florence, instantly, all the previous interest, is what I am aiming at.
+For that, all sorts of other points must be thrown aside in this number.
+. . . We are going to dine again at the Embassy to-day--with a very ill
+will on my part. All well. I hope when I write next I shall report
+myself in better cue. . . . I have had a tremendous outpouring from
+Jeffrey about the last part, which he thinks the best thing past,
+present, or to come."[140] Three more days and I had the MS. of the
+completed chapter, nearly half the number (in which as printed it stands
+second, the small middle chapter having been transposed to its place).
+"I have taken the most prodigious pains with it; the difficulty,
+immediately after Paul's death, being very great. May you like it! My
+head aches over it now (I write at one o'clock in the morning), and I
+am strange to it. . . . I think I shall manage Dombey's second wife
+(introduced by the Major), and the beginning of that business in his
+present state of mind, very naturally and well. . . . Paul's death has
+amazed Paris. All sorts of people are open-mouthed with admiration. . . .
+When I have done, I'll write you _such_ a letter! Don't cut me short
+in your letters just now, because I'm working hard. . . . _I_'ll make
+up. . . . Snow--snow--snow--a foot thick." The day after this, came the
+brief chapter which was printed as the first; and then, on the 16th,
+which he had fixed as his limit for completion, the close reached me;
+but I had meanwhile sent him out so much of the proof as convinced him
+that he had underwritten his number by at least two pages, and
+determined him to come to London. The incident has been told which soon
+after closed his residence abroad, and what remained of his story was
+written in England.
+
+I shall not farther dwell upon it in any detail. It extended over the
+whole of the year; and the interest and passion of it, when to himself
+both became centred in Florence and in Edith Dombey, took stronger hold
+of him, and more powerfully affected him, than had been the case in any
+of his previous writings, I think, excepting only the close of the _Old
+Curiosity Shop_. Jeffrey compared Florence to little Nell, but the
+differences from the outset are very marked, and it is rather in what
+disunites or separates them that we seem to find the purpose aimed at.
+If the one, amid much strange and grotesque violence surrounding her,
+expresses the innocent, unconsciousness of childhood to such rough ways
+of the world, passing unscathed as Una to her home beyond it, the other
+is this character in action and resistance, a brave young resolute heart
+that will _not_ be crushed, and neither sinks nor yields, but from
+earth's roughest trials works out her own redemption even here. Of Edith
+from the first Jeffrey judged more rightly; and, when the story was
+nearly half done, expressed his opinion about her, and about the book
+itself, in language that pleased Dickens for the special reason that at
+the time this part of the book had seemed to many to have fallen greatly
+short of the splendour of its opening. Jeffrey said however quite truly,
+claiming to be heard with authority as his "Critic-laureate," that of
+all his writings it was perhaps the most finished in diction, and that
+it equalled the best in the delicacy and fineness of its touches, "while
+it rises to higher and deeper passions, not resting, like most of the
+former, in sweet thoughtfulness, and thrilling and attractive
+tenderness, but boldly wielding all the lofty and terrible elements of
+tragedy, and bringing before us the appalling struggles of a proud,
+scornful, and repentant spirit." Not that she was exactly this. Edith's
+worst qualities are but the perversion of what should have been her
+best. A false education in her, and a tyrant passion in her husband,
+make them other than Nature meant; and both show how life may run its
+evil course against the higher dispensations.
+
+As the catastrophe came in view, a nice point in the management of her
+character and destiny arose. I quote from a letter of the 19th of
+November, when he was busy with his fourteenth part. "Of course she
+hates Carker in the most deadly degree. I have not elaborated that, now,
+because (as I was explaining to Browne the other day) I have relied on
+it very much for the effect of her death. But I have no question that
+what you suggest will be an improvement. The strongest place to put it
+in, would be the close of the chapter immediately before this last one.
+I want to make the two first chapters as light as I can, but I will try
+to do it, solemnly, in that place." Then came the effect of this
+fourteenth number on Jeffrey; raising the question of whether the end
+might not come by other means than her death, and bringing with it a
+more bitter humiliation for her destroyer. While engaged on the
+fifteenth (21st December) Dickens thus wrote to me: "I am thoroughly
+delighted that you like what I sent. I enclose designs. Shadow-plate,
+poor. But I think Mr. Dombey admirable. One of the prettiest things in
+the book ought to be at the end of the chapter I am writing now. But in
+Florence's marriage, and in her subsequent return to her father, I see a
+brilliant opportunity. . . . Note from Jeffrey this morning, who won't
+believe (positively refuses) that Edith is Carker's mistress. What do
+you think of a kind of inverted Maid's Tragedy, and a tremendous scene
+of her undeceiving Carker, and giving him to know that she never meant
+that?" So it was done; and when he sent me the chapter in which Edith
+says adieu to Florence, I had nothing but praise and pleasure to
+express. "I need not say," he wrote in reply, "I can't, how delighted
+and overjoyed I am by what you say and feel of it. I propose to show
+Dombey _twice_ more; and in the end, leave him exactly as you describe."
+The end came; and, at the last moment when correction was possible, this
+note arrived. "I suddenly remember that I have forgotten Diogenes. Will
+you put him in the last little chapter? After the word 'favourite' in
+reference to Miss Tox, you can add, 'except with Diogenes, who is
+growing old and wilful.' Or, on the last page of all, after 'and with
+them two children: boy and girl' (I quote from memory), you might say
+'and an old dog is generally in their company,' or to that effect. Just
+what you think best."
+
+That was on Saturday the 25th of March, 1848, and may be my last
+reference to _Dombey_ until the book, in its place with the rest, finds
+critical allusion when I close. But as the confidences revealed in this
+chapter have dealt wholly with the leading currents of interest, there
+is yet room for a word on incidental persons in the story, of whom I
+have seen other so-called confidences alleged which it will be only
+right to state have really no authority. And first let me say what
+unquestionable evidence these characters give of the unimpaired
+freshness, richness, variety, and fitness of Dickens's invention at this
+time. Glorious Captain Cuttle, laying his head to the wind and fighting
+through everything; his friend Jack Bunsby,[141] with a head too
+ponderous to lay-to, and so falling victim to the inveterate MacStinger;
+good-hearted, modest, considerate Toots, whose brains rapidly go as his
+whiskers come, but who yet gets back from contact with the world, in his
+shambling way, some fragments of the sense pumped out of him by the
+forcing Blimbers; breathless Susan Nipper, beaming Polly Toodle, the
+plaintive Wickham, and the awful Pipchin, each with her duty in the
+starched Dombey household so nicely appointed as to seem born for only
+that; simple thoughtful old Gills and his hearty young lad of a nephew;
+Mr. Toodle and his children, with the charitable grinder's decline and
+fall; Miss Tox, obsequious flatterer from nothing but good-nature;
+spectacled and analytic, but not unkind Miss Blimber; and the good
+droning dull benevolent Doctor himself, withering even the fruits of his
+well-spread dinner-table with his _It is remarkable, Mr. Feeder, that
+the Romans_--"at the mention of which terrible people, their implacable
+enemies, every young gentleman fastened his gaze upon the Doctor, with
+an assumption of the deepest interest." So vivid and life-like were all
+these people, to the very youngest of the young gentlemen, that it
+became natural eagerly to seek out for them actual prototypes; but I
+think I can say with some confidence of them all, that, whatever single
+traits may have been taken from persons known to him (a practice with
+all writers, and very specially with Dickens), only two had living
+originals. His own experience of Mrs. Pipchin has been related; I had
+myself some knowledge of Miss Blimber; and the Little Wooden Midshipman
+did actually (perhaps does still) occupy his post of observation in
+Leadenhall-street. The names that have been connected, I doubt not in
+perfect good faith, with Sol Gills, Perch the messenger, and Captain
+Cuttle, have certainly not more foundation than the fancy a courteous
+correspondent favours me with, that the redoubtable Captain must have
+sat for his portrait to Charles Lamb's blustering, loud-talking,
+hook-handed Mr. Mingay. As to the amiable and excellent city-merchant
+whose name has been given to Mr. Dombey, he might with the same amount
+of justice or probability be supposed to have originated _Coriolanus_ or
+_Timon of Athens_.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[136] "He had already laid his hand upon the bell-rope to convey his
+usual summons to Richards, when his eye fell upon a writing-desk,
+belonging to his deceased wife, which had been taken, among other
+things, from a cabinet in her chamber. It was not the first time that
+his eye had lighted on it. He carried the key in his pocket; and he
+brought it to his table and opened it now--having previously locked the
+room door--with a well accustomed hand.
+
+"From beneath a heap of torn and cancelled scraps of paper, he took one
+letter that remained entire. Involuntarily holding his breath as he
+opened this document, and 'bating in the stealthy action something of
+his arrogant demeanour, he sat down, resting his head upon one hand, and
+read it through.
+
+"He read it slowly and attentively, and with a nice particularity to
+every syllable. Otherwise than as his great deliberation seemed
+unnatural, and perhaps the result of an effort equally great, he allowed
+no sign of emotion to escape him. When he had read it through, he folded
+and refolded it slowly several times, and tore it carefully into
+fragments. Checking his hand in the act of throwing these away, he put
+them in his pocket, as if unwilling to trust them even to the chances of
+being reunited and deciphered; and instead of ringing, as usual, for
+little Paul, he sat solitary all the evening in his cheerless room."
+From the original MS. of _Dombey and Son_.
+
+[137] "I will now explain that 'Oliver Twist,' the ----, the ----, etc."
+(naming books by another writer), "were produced in an entirely
+different manner from what would be considered as the usual course; _for
+I, the Artist, suggested to the Authors of those works the original
+idea, or subject_, for them to write out--furnishing, at the same time,
+the principal characters and the scenes. And then, as the tale had to be
+produced in monthly parts, the _Writer_, or _Author_, and the Artist,
+had every month to arrange and settle what scenes, or subjects, and
+characters were to be introduced, and the Author had to _weave_ in such
+scenes as I wished to represent."--_The Artist and the Author_, by
+George Cruikshank, p. 15. (Bell & Daldy: 1872.) The italics are Mr.
+Cruikshank's own.
+
+[138] I take, from his paper of notes for the number, the various names,
+beginning with that of her real prototype, out of which the name
+selected came to him at last. "Mrs. Roylance . . . House at the seaside.
+Mrs. Wrychin. Mrs. Tipchin. Mrs. Alchin. Mrs. Somching. Mrs. Pipchin."
+See Vol. I. p. 55.
+
+[139] Some passages may be subjoined from the letter, as it does not
+appear among those printed by Lord Cockburn. "EDINBURGH, _14th
+December_, '46. My dear, dear Dickens!--and dearer every day, as you
+every day give me more pleasure and do me more good! You do not wonder
+at this style? for you know that I have been _in love with you_, ever
+since Nelly! and I do not care now who knows it. . . . The Dombeys, my dear
+D! how can I thank you enough for them! The truth, and the delicacy, and
+the softness and depth of the pathos in that opening death-scene, could
+only come from one hand; and the exquisite taste which spares all
+details, and breaks off just when the effect is at its height, is wholly
+yours. But it is Florence on whom my hopes chiefly repose; and in her I
+see the promise of another Nelly! though reserved, I hope, for a happier
+fate, and destined to let us see what a _grown-up_ female angel is like.
+I expect great things, too, from Walter, who begins charmingly, and will
+be still better I fancy than young Nickleby, to whom as yet he bears
+most resemblance. I have good hopes too of Susan Nipper, who I think has
+great capabilities, and whom I trust you do not mean to drop. Dombey is
+rather too hateful, and strikes me as a mitigated Jonas, without his
+brutal coarseness and ruffian ferocity. I am quite in the dark as to
+what you mean to make of Paul, but shall watch his development with
+interest. About Miss Tox, and her Major, and the Chicks, perhaps I do
+not care enough. But you know I always grudge the exquisite painting you
+waste on such portraits. I love the Captain, tho', and his hook, as much
+as you can wish; and look forward to the future appearances of Carker
+Junior, with expectations which I know will not be disappointed. . . ."
+
+[140] "EDINBURGH, _31st January_, 1847. Oh, my dear, dear Dickens! what
+a No. 5 you have now given us! I have so cried and sobbed over it last
+night, and again this morning; and felt my heart purified by those
+tears, and blessed and loved you for making me shed them; and I never
+can bless and love you enough. Since the divine Nelly was found dead on
+her humble couch, beneath the snow and the ivy, there has been nothing
+like the actual dying of that sweet Paul, in the summer sunshine of that
+lofty room. And the long vista that leads us so gently and sadly, and
+yet so gracefully and winningly, to the plain consummation! Every trait
+so true, and so touching--and yet lightened by the fearless innocence
+which goes _playfully_ to the brink of the grave, and that pure
+affection which bears the unstained spirit, on its soft and lambent
+flash, at once to its source in eternity.". . . In the same letter he told
+him of his having been reading the _Battle of Life_ again, charmed with
+its sweet writing and generous sentiments.
+
+[141] "_Isn't Bunsby good_?" I heard Lord Denman call out, with
+unmistakable glee and enjoyment, over Talfourd's table--I think to Sir
+Edward Ryan; one of the few survivors of that pleasant dinner party of
+May 1847.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+SPLENDID STROLLING.
+
+1847-1852.
+
+ Birth of Fifth Son--Theatrical Benefit for
+ Leigh Hunt--Troubles at Rehearsals--Leigh
+ Hunt's Account--Receipts and Expenses--Anecdote
+ of Macready--At Broadstairs--Appearance of Mrs.
+ Gamp--Fancy for a Jeu-d'esprit--Mrs. Gamp at
+ the Play--Mrs. Gamp with the
+ Strollers--Confidences with Mrs. Harris--Leigh
+ Hunt and Poole--Ticklish Society--Mrs. Gamp's
+ Cabman--George Cruikshank--Mr. Wilson the
+ Hair-dresser--In the Sweedlepipes
+ Line--Fatigues of a Powder Ball--C. D.'s
+ Moustache and Whiskers--John Leech--Mark
+ Lemon--Douglas Jerrold--Dudley Costello--Frank
+ Stone--Augustus Egg--J. F.--Cruikshank's
+ _Bottle_--Profits of _Dombey_--Design for
+ Edition of Old Novelists--Street-music at
+ Broadstairs--Margate Theatre--Public
+ Meetings--Book Friends--Friendly Reception in
+ Glasgow--Scott-monument--Purchase of
+ Shakespeare's House--Amateur
+ Theatricals--Origin of Guild of Literature and
+ Art--Travelling Theatre and Scenes--Success of
+ Comedy and Farce--Troubles of a Manager--Acting
+ under Difficulties--Scenery overturned--Dinner
+ at Manchester.
+
+
+DEVONSHIRE TERRACE remaining still in possession of Sir James Duke, a
+house was taken in Chester-place, Regent's-park, where, on the 18th of
+April, his fifth son, to whom he gave the name of Sydney Smith
+Haldimand, was born.[142] Exactly a month before, we had attended
+together the funeral, at Highgate, of his publisher Mr. William Hall,
+his old regard for whom had survived the recent temporary cloud, and
+with whom he had the association as well of his first success, as of
+much kindly intercourse not forgotten at this sad time. Of the summer
+months that followed, the greater part was passed by him at Brighton or
+Broadstairs; and the chief employment of his leisure, in the intervals
+of _Dombey_, was the management of an enterprise originating in the
+success of our private play, of which the design was to benefit a great
+man of letters.
+
+The purpose and the name had hardly been announced, when, with the
+statesmanlike attention to literature and its followers for which Lord
+John Russell has been eccentric among English politicians, a civil-list
+pension of two hundred a year was granted to Leigh Hunt; but though this
+modified our plan so far as to strike out of it performances meant to be
+given in London, so much was still thought necessary as might clear off
+past liabilities, and enable one of the most genuine of writers better
+to enjoy the easier future that had at last been opened to him.
+Reserving therefore anything realized beyond a certain sum for a
+dramatic author of merit, Mr. John Poole, to whom help had become also
+important, it was proposed to give, on Leigh Hunt's behalf, two
+representations of Ben Jonson's comedy, one at Manchester and the other
+at Liverpool, to be varied by different farces in each place; and with a
+prologue of Talfourd's which Dickens was to deliver in Manchester, while
+a similar address by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton was to be spoken by me in
+Liverpool. Among the artists and writers associated in the scheme were
+Mr. Frank Stone, Mr. Augustus Egg, Mr. John Leech, and Mr. George
+Cruikshank; Mr. Douglas Jerrold, Mr. Mark Lemon, Mr. Dudley Costello,
+and Mr. George Henry Lewes; the general management and supreme control
+being given to Dickens.
+
+Leading men in both cities contributed largely to the design, and my
+friend Mr. Alexander Ireland of Manchester has lately sent me some
+letters not more characteristic of the energy of Dickens in regard to it
+than of the eagerness of every one addressed to give what help they
+could. Making personal mention of his fellow-sharers in the enterprise
+he describes the troop, in one of those letters, as "the most easily
+governable company of actors on earth;" and to this he had doubtless
+brought them, but not very easily. One or two of his managerial troubles
+at rehearsals remain on record in letters to myself, and may give
+amusement still. Comedy and farces are referred to indiscriminately, but
+the farces were the most recurring plague. "Good Heaven! I find that A.
+hasn't twelve words, and I am in hourly expectation of rebellion!"--"You
+were right about the green baize, that it would certainly muffle the
+voices; and some of our actors, by Jove, haven't too much of that
+commodity at the best."--"B. shocked me so much the other night by a
+restless, stupid movement of his hands in his first scene with you, that
+I took a turn of an hour with him yesterday morning, and I hope quieted
+his nerves a little."--"I made a desperate effort to get C. to give up
+his part. Yet in spite of all the trouble he gives me I am sorry for
+him, he is so evidently hurt by his own sense of not doing well. He
+clutched the part, however, tenaciously; and three weary times we
+dragged through it last night."--"That infernal E. forgets
+everything."--"I plainly see that F. when nervous, which he is sure to
+be, loses his memory. Moreover his asides are inaudible, even at Miss
+Kelly's; and as regularly as I stop him to say them again, he exclaims
+(with a face of agony) that 'he'll speak loud on the night,' as if
+anybody ever did without doing it always!"--"G. not born for it at all,
+and too innately conceited, I much fear, to do anything well. I thought
+him better last night, but I would as soon laugh at a kitchen
+poker."--"Fancy H. ten days after the casting of that farce, wanting
+F.'s part therein! Having himself an excellent old man in it already,
+and a quite admirable part in the other farce." From which it will
+appear that my friend's office was not a sinecure, and that he was not,
+as few amateur-managers have ever been, without the experiences of Peter
+Quince. Fewer still, I suspect, have fought through them with such
+perfect success, for the company turned out at last would have done
+credit to any enterprise. They deserved the term applied to them by
+Maclise, who had invented it first for Macready, on his being driven to
+"star" in the provinces when his managements in London closed. They were
+"splendid strollers."[143]
+
+On Monday the 26th July we played at Manchester, and on Wednesday the
+28th at Liverpool; the comedy being followed on the first night by _A
+Good Night's Rest_ and _Turning the Tables_, and on the second by
+_Comfortable Lodgings, or Paris in 1750_; and the receipts being, on the
+first night L440 12_s._, and on the second, L463 8_s._ 6_d._ But though
+the married members of the company who took their wives defrayed that
+part of the cost, and every one who acted paid three pounds ten to the
+benefit-fund for his hotel charges, the expenses were necessarily so
+great that the profit was reduced to four hundred guineas, and,
+handsomely as this realised the design, expectations had been raised to
+five hundred. There was just that shade of disappointment, therefore,
+when, shortly after we came back and Dickens had returned to
+Broadstairs, I was startled by a letter from him. On the 3rd of August
+he had written: "All well. Children" (who had been going through
+whooping cough) "immensely improved. Business arising out of the late
+blaze of triumph, worse than ever." Then came what startled me, the very
+next day. As if his business were not enough, it had occurred to him
+that he might add the much longed-for hundred pounds to the benefit-fund
+by a little jeu d'esprit in form of a history of the trip, to be
+published with illustrations from the artists; and his notion was to
+write it in the character of Mrs. Gamp. It was to be, in the phraseology
+of that notorious woman, a new "Piljians Projiss;" and was to bear upon
+the title page its description as an Account of a late Expedition into
+the North, for an Amateur Theatrical Benefit, written by Mrs. Gamp (who
+was an eye-witness), Inscribed to Mrs. Harris, Edited by Charles
+Dickens, and published, with illustrations on wood by so and so, in aid
+of the Benefit-fund. "What do you think of this idea for it? The
+argument would be, that Mrs. Gamp, being on the eve of an excursion to
+Margate as a relief from her professional fatigues, comes to the
+knowledge of the intended excursion of our party; hears that several of
+the ladies concerned are in an interesting situation; and decides to
+accompany the party unbeknown, in a second-class carriage--'in case.'
+There, she finds a gentleman from the Strand in a checked suit, who is
+going down with the wigs"--the theatrical hair-dresser employed on these
+occasions, Mr. Wilson, had eccentric points of character that were a
+fund of infinite mirth to Dickens--"and to his politeness Mrs. Gamp is
+indebted for much support and countenance during the excursion. She will
+describe the whole thing in her own manner: sitting, in each place of
+performance, in the orchestra, next the gentleman who plays the
+kettle-drums. She gives her critical opinion of Ben Jonson as a literary
+character, and refers to the different members of the party, in the
+course of her description of the trip: having always an invincible
+animosity towards Jerrold, for Caudle reasons. She addresses herself,
+generally, to Mrs. Harris, to whom the book is dedicated,--but is
+discursive. Amount of matter, half a sheet of _Dombey_: may be a page or
+so more, but not less." Alas! it never arrived at even that small size,
+but perished prematurely, as I feared it would, from failure of the
+artists to furnish needful nourishment. Of course it could not live
+alone. Without suitable illustration it must have lost its point and
+pleasantry. "Mac will make a little garland of the ladies for the
+title-page. Egg and Stone will themselves originate something fanciful,
+and I will settle with Cruikshank and Leech. I have no doubt the little
+thing will be droll and attractive." So it certainly would have been, if
+the Thanes of art had not fallen from him; but on their desertion it had
+to be abandoned after the first few pages were written. They were placed
+at my disposal then; and, though the little jest has lost much of its
+flavour now, I cannot find it in my heart to omit them here. There are
+so many friends of Mrs. Gamp who will rejoice at this unexpected visit
+from her!
+
+
+"I. MRS. GAMP'S ACCOUNT OF HER CONNEXION WITH THIS AFFAIR.
+
+"Which Mrs. Harris's own words to me, was these: 'Sairey Gamp,' she
+says, 'why not go to Margate? Srimps,' says that dear creetur, 'is to
+your liking, Sairey; why not go to Margate for a week, bring your
+constitootion up with srimps, and come back to them loving arts as knows
+and wallies of you, blooming? Sairey,' Mrs. Harris says, 'you are but
+poorly. Don't denige it, Mrs. Gamp, for books is in your looks. You must
+have rest. Your mind,' she says, 'is too strong for you; it gets you
+down and treads upon you, Sairey. It is useless to disguige the
+fact--the blade is a wearing out the sheets.' 'Mrs. Harris,' I says to
+her, 'I could not undertake to say, and I will not deceive you ma'am,
+that I am the woman I could wish to be. The time of worrit as I had with
+Mrs. Colliber, the baker's lady, which was so bad in her mind with her
+first, that she would not so much as look at bottled stout, and kept to
+gruel through the month, has agued me, Mrs. Harris. But ma'am,' I says
+to her, 'talk not of Margate, for if I do go anywheres, it is elsewheres
+and not there.' 'Sairey,' says Mrs. Harris, solemn, 'whence this
+mystery? If I have ever deceived the hardest-working, soberest, and best
+of women, which her name is well beknown is S. Gamp Midwife Kingsgate
+Street High Holborn, mention it. If not,' says Mrs. Harris, with the
+tears a standing in her eyes, 'reweal your intentions.' 'Yes, Mrs.
+Harris,' I says, 'I will. Well I knows you Mrs. Harris; well you knows
+me; well we both knows wot the characters of one another is. Mrs.
+Harris then,' I says, 'I _have_ heerd as there _is_ a expedition going
+down to Manjestir and Liverspool, a play-acting. If I goes anywheres for
+change, it is along with that.' Mrs. Harris clasps her hands, and drops
+into a chair, as if her time was come--which I know'd it couldn't be, by
+rights, for six weeks odd. 'And have I lived to hear,' she says, 'of
+Sairey Gamp, as always kept hersef respectable, in company with
+play-actors!' 'Mrs. Harris,' I says to her, 'be not alarmed--not reg'lar
+play-actors--hammertoors.' 'Thank Evans!' says Mrs. Harris, and bustiges
+into a flood of tears.
+
+"When the sweet creetur had compoged hersef (which a sip of brandy and
+water warm, and sugared pleasant, with a little nutmeg did it), I
+proceeds in these words. 'Mrs. Harris, I am told as these hammertoors
+are litter'ry and artistickle.' 'Sairey,' says that best of wimmin, with
+a shiver and a slight relasp, 'go on, it might be worse.' 'I likewise
+hears,' I says to her, 'that they're agoin play-acting, for the benefit
+of two litter'ry men; one as has had his wrongs a long time ago, and has
+got his rights at last, and one as has made a many people merry in his
+time, but is very dull and sick and lonely his own sef, indeed.'
+'Sairey,' says Mrs. Harris, 'you're an Inglish woman, and that's no
+business of you'rn.'
+
+"'No, Mrs. Harris,' I says, 'that's very true; I hope I knows my dooty
+and my country. But,' I says, 'I am informed as there is Ladies in this
+party, and that half a dozen of 'em, if not more, is in various stages
+of a interesting state. Mrs. Harris, you and me well knows what Ingeins
+often does. If I accompanies this expedition, unbeknown and second
+cladge, may I not combine my calling with change of air, and prove a
+service to my feller creeturs?' 'Sairey,' was Mrs. Harris's reply, 'you
+was born to be a blessing to your sex, and bring 'em through it. Good go
+with you! But keep your distance till called in, Lord bless you Mrs.
+Gamp; for people is known by the company they keeps, and litterary and
+artistickle society might be the ruin of you before you was aware, with
+your best customers, both sick and monthly, if they took a pride in
+themselves.'
+
+
+"II. MRS. GAMP IS DESCRIPTIVE.
+
+"The number of the cab had a seven in it I think, and a ought I
+know--and if this should meet his eye (which it was a black 'un, new
+done, that he saw with; the other was tied up), I give him warning that
+he'd better take that umbereller and patten to the Hackney-coach Office
+before he repents it. He was a young man in a weskit with sleeves to it
+and strings behind, and needn't flatter himsef with a suppogition of
+escape, as I gave this description of him to the Police the moment I
+found he had drove off with my property; and if he thinks there an't
+laws enough he's much mistook--I tell him that:
+
+"I do assure you, Mrs. Harris, when I stood in the railways office that
+morning with my bundle on my arm and one patten in my hand, you might
+have knocked me down with a feather, far less porkmangers which was a
+lumping against me, continual and sewere all round. I was drove about
+like a brute animal and almost worritted into fits, when a gentleman
+with a large shirt-collar and a hook nose, and a eye like one of Mr.
+Sweedlepipes's hawks, and long locks of hair, and wiskers that I
+wouldn't have no lady as I was engaged to meet suddenly a turning round
+a corner, for any sum of money you could offer me, says, laughing,
+'Halloa, Mrs. Gamp, what are _you_ up to!' I didn't know him from a man
+(except by his clothes); but I says faintly, 'If you're a Christian man,
+show me where to get a second-cladge ticket for Manjester, and have me
+put in a carriage, or I shall drop!' Which he kindly did, in a cheerful
+kind of a way, skipping about in the strangest manner as ever I see,
+making all kinds of actions, and looking and vinking at me from under
+the brim of his hat (which was a good deal turned up), to that extent,
+that I should have thought he meant something but for being so flurried
+as not to have no thoughts at all until I was put in a carriage along
+with a individgle--the politest as ever I see--in a shepherd's plaid
+suit with a long gold watch-guard hanging round his neck, and his hand a
+trembling through nervousness worse than a aspian leaf.
+
+"'I'm wery appy, ma'am,' he says--the politest vice as ever I
+heerd!--'to go down with a lady belonging to our party.'
+
+"'Our party, sir!' I says.
+
+"'Yes, m'am,' he says, 'I'm Mr. Wilson. I'm going down with the wigs.'
+
+"Mrs. Harris, wen he said he was agoing down with the wigs, such was my
+state of confugion and worrit that I thought he must be connected with
+the Government in some ways or another, but directly moment he explains
+himsef, for he says:
+
+"'There's not a theatre in London worth mentioning that I don't attend
+punctually. There's five-and-twenty wigs in these boxes, ma'am,' he
+says, a pinting towards a heap of luggage, 'as was worn at the Queen's
+Fancy Ball. There's a black wig, ma'am,' he says, 'as was worn by
+Garrick; there's a red one, ma'am,' he says, 'as was worn by Kean;
+there's a brown one, ma'am,' he says, 'as was worn by Kemble; there's a
+yellow one, ma'am,' he says, 'as was made for Cooke; there's a grey one,
+ma'am,' he says, 'as I measured Mr. Young for, mysef; and there's a
+white one, ma'am, that Mr. Macready went mad in. There's a flaxen one as
+was got up express for Jenny Lind the night she came out at the Italian
+Opera. It was very much applauded was that wig, ma'am, through the
+evening. It had a great reception. The audience broke out, the moment
+they see it.'
+
+"'Are you in Mr. Sweedlepipes's line, sir?' I says.
+
+"'Which is that, ma'am?' he says--the softest and genteelest vice I ever
+heerd, I do declare, Mrs. Harris!
+
+"'Hair-dressing,' I says.
+
+"'Yes, ma'am,' he replies, 'I have that honour. Do you see this, ma'am?'
+he says, holding up his right hand.
+
+"'I never see such a trembling,' I says to him. And I never did!
+
+"'All along of Her Majesty's Costume Ball, ma'am,' he says. 'The
+excitement did it. Two hundred and fifty-seven ladies of the first rank
+and fashion had their heads got up on that occasion by this hand, and my
+t'other one. I was at it eight-and-forty hours on my feet, ma'am,
+without rest. It was a Powder ball, ma'am. We have a Powder piece at
+Liverpool. Have I not the pleasure,' he says, looking at me curious,
+'of addressing Mrs. Gamp?'
+
+"'Gamp I am, sir,' I replies. 'Both by name and natur.'
+
+"'Would you like to see your beeograffer's moustache and wiskers,
+ma'am?' he says. 'I've got 'em in this box.'
+
+"'Drat my beeograffer, sir,' I says, 'he has given me no region to wish
+to know anythink about him.'
+
+"'Oh, Missus Gamp, I ask your parden'--I never see such a polite man,
+Mrs. Harris! 'P'raps,' he says, 'if you're not of the party, you don't
+know who it was that assisted you into this carriage!'
+
+"'No, Sir,' I says, 'I don't, indeed.'
+
+"'Why, ma'am,' he says, a wisperin', 'that was George, ma'am.'
+
+"'What George, sir? I don't know no George,' says I.
+
+"'The great George, ma'am,' says he. 'The Crookshanks.'
+
+"If you'll believe me, Mrs. Harris, I turns my head, and see the wery
+man a making picturs of me on his thumb nail, at the winder! while
+another of 'em--a tall, slim, melancolly gent, with dark hair and a bage
+vice--looks over his shoulder, with his head o' one side as if he
+understood the subject, and cooly says, '_I_'ve draw'd her several
+times--in Punch,' he says too! The owdacious wretch!
+
+"'Which I never touches, Mr. Wilson,' I remarks out loud--I couldn't
+have helped it, Mrs. Harris, if you had took my life for it!--'which I
+never touches, Mr. Wilson, on account of the lemon!'
+
+"'Hush!' says Mr. Wilson. 'There he is!'
+
+"I only see a fat gentleman with curly black hair and a merry face, a
+standing on the platform rubbing his two hands over one another, as if
+he was washing of 'em, and shaking his head and shoulders wery much; and
+I was a wondering wot Mr. Wilson meant, wen he says, 'There's Dougladge,
+Mrs. Gamp!' he says. 'There's him as wrote the life of Mrs. Caudle!'
+
+"Mrs. Harris, wen I see that little willain bodily before me, it give me
+such a turn that I was all in a tremble. If I hadn't lost my umbereller
+in the cab, I must have done him a injury with it! Oh the bragian little
+traitor! right among the ladies, Mrs. Harris; looking his wickedest and
+deceitfullest of eyes while he was a talking to 'em; laughing at his own
+jokes as loud as you please; holding his hat in one hand to cool
+his-sef, and tossing back his iron-grey mop of a head of hair with the
+other, as if it was so much shavings--there, Mrs. Harris, I see him,
+getting encouragement from the pretty delooded creeturs, which never
+know'd that sweet saint, Mrs. C, as I did, and being treated with as
+much confidence as if he'd never wiolated none of the domestic ties, and
+never showed up nothing! Oh the aggrawation of that Dougladge! Mrs.
+Harris, if I hadn't apologiged to Mr. Wilson, and put a little bottle to
+my lips which was in my pocket for the journey, and which it is very
+rare indeed I have about me, I could not have abared the sight of
+him--there, Mrs. Harris! I could not!--I must have tore him, or have
+give way and fainted.
+
+"While the bell was a ringing, and the luggage of the hammertoors in
+great confugion--all a litter'ry indeed--was handled up, Mr. Wilson
+demeens his-sef politer than ever. 'That,' he says, 'Mrs. Gamp,' a
+pinting to a officer-looking gentleman, that a lady with a little basket
+was a taking care on, 'is another of our party. He's a author
+too--continivally going up the walley of the Muses, Mrs. Gamp. There,'
+he says, alluding to a fine looking, portly gentleman, with a face like
+a amiable full moon, and a short mild gent, with a pleasant smile, 'is
+two more of our artists, Mrs G, well beknowed at the Royal Academy, as
+sure as stones is stones, and eggs is eggs. This resolute gent,' he
+says, 'a coming along here as is aperrently going to take the railways
+by storm--him with the tight legs, and his weskit very much buttoned,
+and his mouth very much shut, and his coat a flying open, and his heels
+a giving it to the platform, is a cricket and beeograffer, and our
+principal tragegian.' 'But who,' says I, when the bell had left off, and
+the train had begun to move, 'who, Mr. Wilson, is the wild gent in the
+prespiration, that's been a tearing up and down all this time with a
+great box of papers under his arm, a talking to everybody wery
+indistinct, and exciting of himself dreadful?' 'Why?' says Mr. Wilson,
+with a smile. 'Because, sir,' I says, 'he's being left behind.' 'Good
+God!' cries Mr. Wilson, turning pale and putting out his head, 'it's
+_your_ beeograffer--the Manager--and he has got the money, Mrs. Gamp!'
+Hous'ever, some one chucked him into the train and we went off. At the
+first shreek of the whistle, Mrs. Harris, I turned white, for I had took
+notice of some of them dear creeturs as was the cause of my being in
+company, and I know'd the danger that--but Mr. Wilson, which is a
+married man, puts his hand on mine, and says, 'Mrs. Gamp, calm yourself;
+it's only the Ingein.'"
+
+Of those of the party with whom these humorous liberties were taken
+there are only two now living to complain of their friendly
+caricaturist, and Mr. Cruikshank will perhaps join me in a frank
+forgiveness not the less heartily for the kind words about himself that
+reached me from Broadstairs not many days after Mrs. Gamp. "At
+Canterbury yesterday" (2nd of September) "I bought George Cruikshank's
+_Bottle_. I think it very powerful indeed: the two last plates most
+admirable, except that the boy and girl in the very last are too young,
+and the girl more like a circus-phenomenon than that no-phenomenon she
+is intended to represent. I question, however, whether anybody else
+living could have done it so well. There is a woman in the last plate
+but one, garrulous about the murder, with a child in her arms, that is
+as good as Hogarth. Also, the man who is stooping down, looking at the
+body. The philosophy of the thing, as a great lesson, I think all wrong;
+because to be striking, and original too, the drinking should have begun
+in sorrow, or poverty, or ignorance--the three things in which, in its
+awful aspect, it _does_ begin. The design would then have been a
+double-handed sword--but too 'radical' for good old George, I suppose."
+
+The same letter made mention of other matters of interest. His accounts
+for the first half-year of _Dombey_ were so much in excess of what had
+been expected from the new publishing arrangements, that from this date
+all embarrassments connected with money were brought to a close. His
+future profits varied of course with his varying sales, but there was
+always enough, and savings were now to begin. "The profits of the
+half-year are brilliant. Deducting the hundred pounds a month paid six
+times, I have still to receive two thousand two hundred and twenty
+pounds, which I think is tidy. Don't you? . . . Stone is still here, and I
+lamed his foot by walking him seventeen miles the day before yesterday;
+but otherwise he flourisheth. . . . Why don't you bring down a
+carpet-bag-full of books, and take possession of the drawing-room all
+the morning? My opinion is that Goldsmith would die more easy by the
+seaside. Charley and Walley have been taken to school this morning in
+high spirits, and at London Bridge will be folded in the arms of
+Blimber. The Government is about to issue a Sanitary commission, and
+Lord John, I am right well pleased to say, has appointed Henry Austin
+secretary." Mr. Austin, who afterwards held the same office under the
+Sanitary act, had married his youngest sister Letitia; and of his two
+youngest brothers I may add that Alfred, also a civil-engineer, became
+one of the sanitary inspectors, and that Augustus was now placed in a
+city employment by Mr. Thomas Chapman, which after a little time he
+surrendered, and then found his way to America.
+
+The next Broadstairs letter (5th of September) resumed the subject of
+Goldsmith, whose life I was then bringing nearly to completion.
+"Supposing your _Goldsmith_ made a general sensation, what should you
+think of doing a cheap edition of his works? I have an idea that we
+might do some things of that sort with considerable effect. There is
+really no edition of the great British novelists in a handy nice form,
+and would it not be a likely move to do it with some attractive feature
+that could not be given to it by the Teggs and such people? Supposing
+one wrote an essay on Fielding for instance, and another on Smollett,
+and another on Sterne, recalling how one read them as a child (no one
+read them younger than I, I think;) and how one gradually grew up into a
+different knowledge of them, and so forth--would it not be interesting
+to many people? I should like to know if you descry anything in this. It
+is one of the dim notions fluctuating within me.[144]. . . The profits,
+brave indeed, are four hundred pounds more than the utmost I
+expected. . . . The same yearnings have been mine, in reference to the
+Praslin business. It is pretty clear to me, for one thing, that the
+Duchess was one of the most uncomfortable women in the world, and that
+it would have been hard work for anybody to have got on with her. It is
+strange to see a bloody reflection of our friends Eugene Sue and Dumas
+in the whole melodrama. Don't you think so . . . remembering what we often
+said of the canker at the root of all that Paris life? I dreamed of you,
+in a wild manner, all last night. . . . A sea fog here, which prevents
+one's seeing the low-water mark. A circus on the cliff to the right, and
+of course I have a box to-night! Deep slowness in the inimitable's
+brain. A shipwreck on the Goodwin sands last Sunday, which WALLY, with
+a hawk's eye, SAW GO DOWN: for which assertion, subsequently confirmed
+and proved, he was horribly maltreated at the time."
+
+Devonshire-terrace meanwhile had been left by his tenant; and coming up
+joyfully himself to take possession, he brought for completion in his
+old home an important chapter of _Dombey_. On the way he lost his
+portmanteau, but "Thank God! the MS. of the chapter wasn't in it.
+Whenever I travel, and have anything of that valuable article, I always
+carry it in my pocket."[145] He had begun at this time to find
+difficulties in writing at Broadstairs, of which he told me on his
+return. "Vagrant music is getting to that height here, and is so
+impossible to be escaped from, that I fear Broadstairs and I must part
+company in time to come. Unless it pours of rain, I cannot write
+half-an-hour without the most excruciating organs, fiddles, bells, or
+glee-singers. There is a violin of the most torturing kind under the
+window now (time, ten in the morning) and an Italian box of music on the
+steps--both in full blast." He closed with a mention of improvements in
+the Margate theatre since his memorable last visit. In the past two
+years it had been managed by a son of the great comedian, Dowton, with
+whose name it is pleasant to connect this note. "We went to the
+manager's benefit on Wednesday" (10th of September): "_As You Like It_
+really very well done, and a most excellent house. Mr. Dowton delivered
+a sensible and modest kind of speech on the occasion, setting forth his
+conviction that a means of instruction and entertainment possessing such
+a literature as the stage in England, could not pass away; and, that
+what inspired great minds, and delighted great men, two thousand years
+ago, and did the same in Shakespeare's day, must have within itself a
+principle of life superior to the whim and fashion of the hour. And with
+that, and with cheers, he retired. He really seems a most respectable
+man, and he has cleared out this dust-hole of a theatre into something
+like decency."
+
+He was to be in London at the end of the month: but I had from him
+meanwhile his preface[146] for his first completed book in the popular
+edition (_Pickwick_ being now issued in that form, with an illustration
+by Leslie); and sending me shortly after (12th of Sept.) the first few
+slips of the story of the _Haunted Man_ proposed for his next Christmas
+book, he told me he must finish it in less than a month if it was to be
+done at all, _Dombey_ having now become very importunate. This prepared
+me for his letter of a week's later date. "Have been at work all day,
+and am seedy in consequence. _Dombey_ takes so much time, and requires
+to be so carefully done, that I really begin to have serious doubts
+whether it is wise to go on with the Christmas book. Your kind help is
+invoked. What do you think? Would there be any distinctly bad effect in
+holding this idea over for another twelvemonth? saying nothing whatever
+till November; and then announcing in the _Dombey_ that its occupation
+of my entire time prevents the continuance of the Christmas series until
+next year, when it is proposed to be renewed. There might not be
+anything in that but a possibility of an extra lift for the little book
+when it did come--eh? On the other hand, I am very loath to lose the
+money. And still more so to leave any gap at Christmas firesides which I
+ought to fill. In short I am (forgive the expression) BLOWED if I know
+what to do. I am a literary Kitely--and you ought to sympathize and
+help. If I had no _Dombey_, I could write and finish the story with the
+bloom on--but there's the rub. . . . Which unfamiliar quotation reminds me
+of a Shakspearian (put an e before the s; I like it much better)
+speculation of mine. What do you say to 'take arms against a sea of
+troubles' having been originally written 'make arms,' which is the
+action of swimming. It would get rid of a horrible grievance in the
+figure, and make it plain and apt. I think of setting up a claim to live
+in The House at Stratford, rent-free, on the strength of this
+suggestion. You are not to suppose that I am anything but disconcerted
+to-day, in the agitation of my soul concerning Christmas; but I have
+been brooding, like Dombey himself, over _Dombey_ these two days, until
+I really can't afford to be depressed." To his Shakespearian suggestion
+I replied that it would hardly give him the claim he thought of setting
+up, for that swimming through your troubles would not be "opposing"
+them. And upon the other point I had no doubt of the wisdom of delay.
+The result was that the Christmas story was laid aside until the
+following year.
+
+The year's closing incidents were his chairmanship at a meeting of the
+Leeds Mechanics' Society on the 1st of December, and his opening of the
+Glasgow Athenaeum on the 28th; where, to immense assemblages in
+both,[147] he contrasted the obstinacy and cruelty of the Power of
+ignorance with the docility and gentleness of the Power of knowledge;
+pointed the use of popular institutes in supplementing what is learnt
+first in life, by the later education for its employments and equipment
+for its domesticities and virtues, which the grown person needs from day
+to day as much as the child its reading and writing; and he closed at
+Glasgow with allusion to a bazaar set on foot by the ladies of the city,
+under patronage of the Queen, for adding books to its Athenaeum library.
+"We never tire of the friendships we form with books," he said, "and
+here they will possess the added charm of association with their
+donors. Some neighbouring Glasgow widow will be mistaken for that
+remoter one whom Sir Roger de Coverley could not forget; Sophia's muff
+will be seen and loved, by another than Tom Jones, going down the
+High-street some winter day; and the grateful students of a library thus
+filled will be apt, as to the fair ones who have helped to people it, to
+couple them in their thoughts with Principles of the Population and
+Additions to the History of Europe, by an author of older date than
+Sheriff Alison." At which no one laughed so loudly as the Sheriff
+himself, who had cordially received Dickens as his guest, and stood with
+him on the platform.
+
+On the last day but one of the old year he wrote to me from Edinburgh.
+"We came over this afternoon, leaving Glasgow at one o'clock. Alison
+lives in style in a handsome country house out of Glasgow, and is a
+capital fellow, with an agreeable wife, nice little daughter, cheerful
+niece, all things pleasant in his household. I went over the prison and
+lunatic asylum with him yesterday;[148] at the Lord Provost's had
+gorgeous state-lunch with the Town Council; and was entertained at a
+great dinner-party at night. Unbounded hospitality and enthoozymoozy the
+order of the day, and I have never been more heartily received anywhere,
+or enjoyed myself more completely. The great chemist, Gregory, who spoke
+at the meeting, returned with us to Edinburgh to-day, and gave me many
+new lights on the road regarding the extraordinary pains Macaulay seems
+for years to have taken to make himself disagreeable and disliked here.
+No one else, on that side, would have had the remotest chance of being
+unseated at the last election; and, though Gregory voted for him, I
+thought he seemed quite as well pleased as anybody else that he didn't
+come in. . . . I am sorry to report the Scott Monument a failure. It is
+like the spire of a Gothic church taken off and stuck in the ground." On
+the first day of 1848, still in Edinburgh, he wrote again: "Jeffrey, who
+is obliged to hold a kind of morning court in his own study during the
+holidays, came up yesterday in great consternation, to tell me that a
+person had just been to make and sign a declaration of bankruptcy; and
+that on looking at the signature he saw it was James Sheridan Knowles.
+He immediately sent after, and spoke with him; and of what passed I am
+eager to talk with you." The talk will bring back the main subject of
+this chapter, from which another kind of strolling has led me away; for
+its results were other amateur performances, of which the object was to
+benefit Knowles.
+
+This was the year when a committee had been formed for the purchase and
+preservation of Shakespeare's house at Stratford, and the performances
+in question took the form of contributions to the endowment of a
+curatorship to be held by the author of _Virginius_ and the _Hunchback_.
+The endowment was abandoned upon the town and council of Stratford
+finally (and very properly) taking charge of the house; but the sum
+realised was not withdrawn from the object really desired, and one of
+the finest of dramatists profited yet more largely by it than Leigh Hunt
+did by the former enterprise. It may be proper to remark also, that,
+like Leigh Hunt, Knowles received soon after, through Lord John Russell,
+the same liberal pension; and that smaller claims to which attention had
+been similarly drawn were not forgotten, Mr. Poole, after much kind help
+from the Bounty Fund, being in 1850 placed on the Civil List for half
+the amount by the same minister and friend of letters.
+
+Dickens threw himself into the new scheme with all his old energy;[149]
+and prefatory mention may be made of our difficulty in selection of a
+suitable play to alternate with our old Ben Jonson. The _Alchemist_ had
+been such a favourite with some of us, that, before finally laying it
+aside, we went through two or three rehearsals, in which I recollect
+thinking Dickens's Sir Epicure Mammon as good as anything he had done;
+and now the same trouble, with the same result, arising from a vain
+desire to please everybody, was taken successively with Beaumont and
+Fletcher's _Beggar's Bush_, and Goldsmith's _Good Natured Man_, with
+Jerrold's characteristic drama of the _Rent Day_, and Bulwer's masterly
+comedy of _Money_. Choice was at last made of Shakespeare's _Merry
+Wives_, in which Lemon played Falstaff, I took again the jealous husband
+as in Jonson's play, and Dickens was Justice Shallow; to which was added
+a farce, _Love, Law, and Physick_, in which Dickens took the part he had
+acted long ago, before his days of authorship; and, besides the
+professional actresses engaged, we had for our Dame Quickly the lady to
+whom the world owes incomparably the best _Concordance_ to Shakespeare
+that has ever been published, Mrs. Cowden Clarke. The success was
+undoubtedly very great. At Manchester, Liverpool, and Edinburgh there
+were single representations; but Birmingham and Glasgow had each two
+nights, and two were given at the Haymarket, on one of which the Queen
+and Prince were present. The gross receipts from the nine performances,
+before the necessary large deductions for London and local charges, were
+two thousand five hundred and fifty-one pounds and eightpence.[150] The
+first representation was in London on the 15th of April, the last in
+Glasgow on the 20th of July, and everywhere Dickens was the leading
+figure. In the enjoyment as in the labour he was first. His animal
+spirits, unresting and supreme, were the attraction of rehearsal at
+morning, and of the stage at night. At the quiet early dinner, and the
+more jovial unrestrained supper, where all engaged were assembled daily,
+his was the brightest face, the lightest step, the pleasantest word.
+There seemed to be no rest needed for that wonderful vitality.
+
+My allusion to the last of these splendid strollings in aid of what we
+believed to be the interests of men of letters, shall be as brief as I
+can make it. Two winters after the present, at the close of November
+1850, in the great hall of Lord Lytton's old family mansion in
+Knebworth-park, there were three private performances by the original
+actors in Ben Jonson's _Every Man in His Humour_. All the circumstances
+and surroundings were very brilliant; some of the gentlemen of the
+county played both in the comedy and farces; our generous host was
+profuse of all noble encouragement; and amid the general pleasure and
+excitement hopes rose high. Recent experience had shown what the public
+interest in this kind of amusement might place within reach of its
+providers; and there came to be discussed the possibility of making
+permanent such help as had been afforded to fellow writers, by means of
+an endowment that should not be mere charity, but should combine indeed
+something of both pension-list and college-lectureship, without the
+drawbacks of either. It was not enough considered that schemes for
+self-help, to be successful, require from those they are meant to
+benefit, not only a general assent to their desirability, but zealous
+and active co-operation. Without discussing now, however, what will have
+to be stated hereafter, it suffices to say that the enterprise was set
+on foot, and the "Guild of Literature and Art" originated at Knebworth.
+A five-act comedy was to be written by Sir Edward Lytton, and, when a
+certain sum of money had been obtained by public representations of it,
+the details of the scheme were to be drawn up, and appeal made to those
+whom it addressed more especially. In a very few months everything was
+ready, except a farce which Dickens was to have written to follow the
+comedy, and which unexpected cares of management and preparation were
+held to absolve him from. There were other reasons. "I have written the
+first scene," he told me (23rd March, 1851), "and it has droll points in
+it, more farcical points than you commonly find in farces,[151] really
+better. Yet I am constantly striving, for my reputation's sake, to get
+into it a meaning that is impossible in a farce; constantly thinking of
+it, therefore, against the grain; and constantly impressed with a
+conviction that I could never act in it myself with that wild
+abandonment which can alone carry a farce off. Wherefore I have
+confessed to Bulwer Lytton and asked for absolution." There was
+substituted a new farce of Lemon's, to which, however, Dickens soon
+contributed so many jokes and so much Gampish and other fun of his own,
+that it came to be in effect a joint piece of authorship; and Gabblewig,
+which the manager took to himself, was one of those personation parts
+requiring five or six changes of face, voice, and gait in the course of
+it, from which, as we have seen, he derived all the early theatrical
+ambition that the elder Mathews had awakened in him. "You have no idea,"
+he continued, "of the immensity of the work as the time advances, for
+the Duke even throws the whole of the audience on us, or he would get
+(he says) into all manner of scrapes." The Duke of Devonshire had
+offered his house in Piccadilly for the first representations, and in
+his princely way discharged all the expenses attending them. A moveable
+theatre was built and set up in the great drawing-room, and the library
+was turned into a green-room.
+
+_Not so Bad as We Seem_ was played for the first time at
+Devonshire-house on the 27th of May, 1851, before the Queen and Prince
+and as large an audience as places could be found for; _Mr.
+Nightingale's Diary_ being the name given to the farce. The success
+abundantly realised the expectations formed; and, after many
+representations at the Hanover-square Rooms in London, strolling began
+in the country, and was continued at intervals for considerable portions
+of this and the following year. From much of it, illness and occupation
+disabled me, and substitutes had to be found; but to this I owe the
+opportunity now of closing with a characteristic picture of the course
+of the play, and of Dickens amid the incidents and accidents to which
+his theatrical career exposed him. The company carried with them, it
+should be said, the theatre constructed for Devonshire-house, as well as
+the admirable scenes which Stanfield, David Roberts, Thomas Grieve,
+Telbin, Absolon, and Louis Haghe had painted as their generous
+free-offerings to the comedy; of which the representations were thus
+rendered irrespective of theatres or their managers, and took place in
+the large halls or concert-rooms of the various towns and cities.
+
+"The enclosure forgotten in my last" (Dickens writes from Sunderland on
+the 29th of August 1852), "was a little printed announcement which I
+have had distributed at the doors wherever we go, knocking _Two o' Clock
+in the Morning_ bang out of the bills. Funny as it used to be, it is
+become impossible to get anything out of it after the scream of _Mr.
+Nightingale's Diary_. The comedy is so far improved by the reductions
+which your absence and other causes have imposed on us, that it acts now
+only two hours and twenty-five minutes, all waits included, and goes
+'like wildfire,' as Mr. Tonson[152] says. We have had prodigious houses,
+though smaller rooms (as to their actual size) than I had hoped for. The
+Duke was at Derby, and no end of minor radiances. Into the room at
+Newcastle (where Lord Carlisle was by the bye) they squeezed six
+hundred people, at twelve and sixpence, into a space reasonably capable
+of holding three hundred. Last night, in a hall built like a theatre,
+with pit, boxes, and gallery, we had about twelve hundred--I dare say
+more. They began with a round of applause when Coote's white waistcoat
+appeared in the orchestra, and wound up the farce with three deafening
+cheers. I never saw such good fellows. Stanny is their fellow-townsman;
+was born here; and they applauded his scene as if it were himself. But
+what I suffered from a dreadful anxiety that hung over me all the time,
+I can never describe. When we got here at noon, it appeared that the
+hall was a perfectly new one, and had only had the slates put upon the
+roof by torchlight over night. Farther, that the proprietors of some
+opposition rooms had declared the building to be unsafe, and that there
+was a panic in the town about it; people having had their money back,
+and being undecided whether to come or not, and all kinds of such
+horrors. I didn't know what to do. The horrible responsibility of
+risking an accident of that awful nature seemed to rest wholly upon me;
+for I had only to say we wouldn't act, and there would be no chance of
+danger. I was afraid to take Sloman into council lest the panic should
+infect our men. I asked W. what he thought, and he consolingly observed
+that his digestion was so bad that death had no terrors for him! I went
+and looked at the place; at the rafters, walls, pillars, and so forth;
+and fretted myself into a belief that they really were slight! To crown
+all, there was an arched iron roof without any brackets or pillars, on a
+new principle! The only comfort I had was in stumbling at length on the
+builder, and finding him a plain practical north-countryman with a foot
+rule in his pocket. I took him aside, and asked him should we, or could
+we, prop up any weak part of the place: especially the dressing-rooms,
+which were under our stage, the weight of which must be heavy on a new
+floor, and dripping wet walls. He told me there wasn't a stronger
+building in the world; and that, to allay the apprehension, they had
+opened it, on Thursday night, to thousands of the working people, and
+induced them to sing, and beat with their feet, and make every possible
+trial of the vibration. Accordingly there was nothing for it but to go
+on. I was in such dread, however, lest a false alarm should spring up
+among the audience and occasion a rush, that I kept Catherine and
+Georgina out of the front. When the curtain went up and I saw the great
+sea of faces rolling up to the roof, I looked here and looked there, and
+thought I saw the gallery out of the perpendicular, and fancied the
+lights in the ceiling were not straight. Rounds of applause were perfect
+agony to me, I was so afraid of their effect upon the building. I was
+ready all night to rush on in case of an alarm--a false alarm was my
+main dread--and implore the people for God's sake to sit still. I had
+our great farce-bell rung to startle Sir Geoffrey instead of throwing
+down a piece of wood, which might have raised a sudden-apprehension. I
+had a palpitation of the heart, if any of our people stumbled up or down
+a stair. I am sure I never acted better, but the anxiety of my mind was
+so intense, and the relief at last so great, that I am half-dead to-day,
+and have not yet been able to eat or drink anything or to stir out of
+my room. I shall never forget it. As to the short time we had for
+getting the theatre up; as to the upsetting, by a runaway pair of
+horses, of one of the vans at the Newcastle railway station, _with all
+the scenery in it, every atom of which was turned over_; as to the
+fatigue of our carpenters, who have now been up four nights, and who
+were lying dead asleep in the entrances last night; I say nothing, after
+the other gigantic nightmare, except that Sloman's splendid knowledge of
+his business, and the good temper and cheerfulness of all the workmen,
+are capital. I mean to give them a supper at Liverpool, and address them
+in a neat and appropriate speech. We dine at two to-day (it is now one)
+and go to Sheffield at four, arriving there at about ten. I had been as
+fresh as a daisy; walked from Nottingham to Derby, and from Newcastle
+here; but seem to have had my nerves crumpled up last night, and have an
+excruciating headache. That's all at present. I shall never be able to
+bear the smell of new deal and fresh mortar again as long as I live."
+
+Manchester and Liverpool closed the trip with enormous success at both
+places; and Sir Edward Lytton was present at a public dinner which was
+given in the former city, Dickens's brief word about it being written as
+he was setting foot in the train that was to bring him to London.
+"Bulwer spoke brilliantly at the Manchester dinner, and his earnestness
+and determination about the Guild was most impressive. It carried
+everything before it. They are now getting up annual subscriptions, and
+will give us a revenue to begin with. I swear I believe that people to
+be the greatest in the world. At Liverpool I had a Round Robin on the
+stage after the play was over, a place being left for your signature,
+and as I am going to have it framed, I'll tell Green to send it to
+Lincoln's-inn-fields. You have no idea how good Tenniel, Topham, and
+Collins have been in what they had to do."
+
+These names, distinguished in art and letters, represent additions to
+the company who had joined the enterprise; and the last of them, Mr.
+Wilkie Collins, became, for all the rest of the life of Dickens, one of
+his dearest and most valued friends.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[142] He entered the Royal Navy, and survived his father only a year and
+eleven months. He was a Lieutenant, at the time of his death from a
+sharp attack of bronchitis; being then on board the P. and O. steamer
+"Malta," invalided from his ship the Topaze, and on his way home. He was
+buried at sea on the 2nd of May, 1872. Poor fellow! He was the smallest
+in size of all the children, in his manhood reaching only to a little
+over five feet; and throughout his childhood was never called by any
+other name than the "Ocean Spectre," from a strange little weird yet
+most attractive look in his large wondering eyes, very happily caught in
+a sketch in oils by the good Frank Stone, done at Bonchurch in September
+1849 and remaining in his aunt's possession. "Stone has painted,"
+Dickens then wrote to me, "the Ocean Spectre, and made a very pretty
+little picture of him." It was a strange chance that led his father to
+invent this playful name for one whom the ocean did indeed take to
+itself at last.
+
+[143] I think it right to place on record here Leigh Hunt's own allusion
+to the incident (_Autobiography_, p. 432), though it will be thought to
+have too favourable a tone, and I could have wished that other names had
+also found mention in it. But I have already (p. 211) stated quite
+unaffectedly my own opinion of the very modest pretensions of the whole
+affair, and these kind words of Hunt may stand _valeant quantum_.
+"Simultaneous with the latest movement about the pension was one on the
+part of my admirable friend Dickens and other distinguished men,
+Forsters and Jerrolds, who, combining kindly purpose with an amateur
+inclination for the stage, had condescended to show to the public what
+excellent actors they could have been, had they so pleased,--what
+excellent actors, indeed, some of them were. . . . They proposed . . . a
+benefit for myself, . . . and the piece performed on the occasion was Ben
+Jonson's _Every Man in his Humour_. . . . If anything had been needed to
+show how men of letters include actors, on the common principle of the
+greater including the less, these gentlemen would have furnished it. Mr.
+Dickens's Bobadil had a spirit in it of intellectual apprehension beyond
+anything the existing stage has shown . . . and Mr. Forster delivered the
+verses of Ben Jonson with a musical flow and a sense of their grace and
+beauty unknown, I believe, to the recitation of actors at present. At
+least I have never heard anything like it since Edmund Kean's.". . . To
+this may be added some lines from Lord Lytton's prologue spoken at
+Liverpool, of which I have not been able to find a copy, if indeed it
+was printed at the time; but the verses come so suddenly and completely
+back to me, as I am writing after twenty-five years, that in a small way
+they recall a more interesting effort of memory told me once by
+Macready. On a Christmas night at Drury Lane there came a necessity to
+put up the _Gamester_, which he had not played since he was a youth in
+his father's theatre thirty years before. He went to rehearsal shrinking
+from the long and heavy study he should have to undergo, when, with the
+utterance of the opening sentence, the entire words of the part came
+back, including even a letter which Beverly has to read, and which it is
+the property-man's business to supply. My lines come back as
+unexpectedly; but with pleasanter music than any in Mr. Moore's dreary
+tragedy, as a few will show.
+
+ "Mild amid foes, within a prison free,
+ He comes . . . our grey-hair'd bard of Rimini!
+ Comes with the pomp of memories in his train,
+ Pathos and wit, sweet pleasure and sweet pain!
+ Comes with familiar smile and cordial tone,
+ Our hearths' wise cheerer!--Let us cheer his own!
+ Song links her children with a golden thread,
+ To aid the living bard strides forth the dead.
+ Hark the frank music of the elder age--
+ Ben Jonson's giant tread sounds ringing up the stage!
+ Hail! the large shapes our fathers loved! again
+ Wellbred's light ease, and Kitely's jealous pain.
+ Cob shall have sense, and Stephen be polite,
+ Brainworm shall preach, and Bobadil shall fight--
+ Each, here, a merit not his own shall find,
+ And _Every Man_ the _Humour_ to be kind."
+
+[144] Another, which for many reasons we may regret went also into the
+limbo of unrealized designs, is sketched in the subjoined (7th of
+January, 1848). "Mac and I think of going to Ireland for six weeks in
+the spring, and seeing whether anything is to be done there, in the way
+of a book? I fancy it might turn out well." The Mac of course is
+Maclise.
+
+[145] "Here we are" (23rd of August) "in the noble old premises; and
+very nice they look, all things considered. . . . Trifles happen to me
+which occur to nobody else. My portmanteau 'fell off' a cab last night
+somewhere between London-bridge and here. It contained on a moderate
+calculation L70 worth of clothes. I have no shirt to put on, and am
+obliged to send out to a barber to come and shave me."
+
+[146] "Do you see anything to object to in it? I have never had so much
+difficulty, I think, in setting about any slight thing; for I really
+didn't know that I had a word to say, and nothing seems to live 'twixt
+what I _have_ said and silence. The advantage of it is, that the latter
+part opens an idea for future prefaces all through the series, and may
+serve perhaps to make a feature of them." (7th of September, 1847.)
+
+[147] From his notes on these matters I may quote. "The Leeds appears to
+be a very important institution, and I am glad to see that George
+Stephenson will be there, besides the local lights, inclusive of all the
+Baineses. They talk at Glasgow of 6,000 people." (26th of November.)
+"You have got Southey's _Holly Tree_. I have not. Put it in your pocket
+to-day. It occurs to me (up to the eyes in a mass of Glasgow Athenaeum
+papers) that I could quote it with good effect in the North." (24th of
+December.) "A most brilliant demonstration last night, and I think I
+never did better. Newspaper reports bad." (29th of December.)
+
+[148] "Tremendous distress at Glasgow, and a truly damnable jail,
+exhibiting the separate system in a most absurd and hideous form.
+Governor practical and intelligent; very anxious for the associated
+silent system; and much comforted by my fault-finding." (30th of
+December.)
+
+[149] It would amuse the reader, but occupy too much space, to add to my
+former illustrations of his managerial troubles; but from an elaborate
+paper of rules for rehearsals, which I have found in his handwriting, I
+quote the opening and the close. "Remembering the very imperfect
+condition of all our plays at present, the general expectation in
+reference to them, the kind of audience before which they will be
+presented, and the near approach of the nights of performance, I hope
+everybody concerned will abide by the following regulations, and will
+aid in strictly carrying them out." Elaborate are the regulations set
+forth, but I take only the three last. "Silence, on the stage and in the
+theatre, to be faithfully observed; the lobbies &c. being always
+available for conversation. No book to be referred to on the stage; but
+those who are imperfect to take their words from the prompter. Everyone
+to act, as nearly as possible, as on the night of performance; everyone
+to speak out, so as to be audible through the house. And every mistake
+of exit, entrance, or situation, to be corrected _three times_
+successively." He closes thus. "All who were concerned in the first
+getting up of _Every Man in his Humour_, and remember how carefully the
+stage was always kept then, and who have been engaged in the late
+rehearsals of the _Merry Wives_, and have experienced the difficulty of
+getting on, or off: of being heard, or of hearing anybody else: will, I
+am sure, acknowledge the indispensable necessity of these regulations."
+
+[150] I give the sums taken at the several theatres. Haymarket, L319
+14_s._; Manchester, L266 12_s._ 6_d._; Liverpool, L467 6_s._ 6_d._;
+Birmingham, L327 10_s._, and L262 18_s._ 6_d._; Edinburgh, L325 1_s._
+6_d._; Glasgow, L471 7_s._ 8_d._, and (at half the prices of the first
+night) L210 10_s._
+
+[151] "Those Rabbits have more nature in them than you commonly find in
+Rabbits"--the self-commendatory remark of an aspiring animal-painter
+showing his piece to the most distinguished master in that line--was
+here in my friend's mind.
+
+[152] Mr. Tonson was a small part in the comedy entrusted with much
+appropriateness to Mr. Charles Knight, whose _Autobiography_ has this
+allusion to the first performance, which, as Mr. Pepys says, is "pretty
+to observe." "The actors and the audience were so close together that as
+Mr. Jacob Tonson sat in Wills's Coffee-house he could have touched with
+his clouded cane the Duke of Wellington." (iii. 116.)
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+SEASIDE HOLIDAYS.
+
+1848-1851.
+
+ Louis Philippe dethroned--French Missive from
+ C. D.--At Broadstairs--A Chinese Junk--What it
+ was like--Perplexing Questions--A Type of
+ Finality--A Contrast--Dickens's View of
+ Temperance Agitation--Cruikshank's _Bottle_:
+ and _Drunkard's Children_--Realities of
+ Cruikshank's Pencil--Dickens on Hogarth--Exit
+ of Gin-lane--Wisdom of the Great
+ Painter--Originality of Leech--Superiority of
+ his Method--Excuses for the Rising
+ Generation--What Leech will be remembered
+ for--Pony-chaise Accident--Fortunate
+ Escape--Strenuous Idleness--Hint for Mr.
+ Taine--At Brighton--A Name for his New Book--At
+ Broadstairs--Summoned as Special Juror--A Male
+ Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Harris--At Bonchurch--Rev.
+ James White--First Impressions of the
+ Undercliff--Talfourd made a Judge--Touching
+ Letter from Jeffrey--The Comedian
+ Regnier--Progress in Writing--A Startling
+ Revelation--Effects of Bonchurch Climate--Mr.
+ Browne's Sketch for Micawber--Accident to
+ Leech--Its Consequences--At Broadstairs--A
+ _Copperfield_ Banquet--Thoughts of a New Book.
+
+
+THE portion of Dickens's life over which his adventures of strolling
+extended was in other respects not without interest; and this chapter
+will deal with some of his seaside holidays before I pass to the
+publication in 1848 of the story of _The Haunted Man_, and to the
+establishment in 1850 of the Periodical which had been in his thoughts
+for half a dozen years before, and has had foreshadowings nearly as
+frequent in my pages.
+
+Among the incidents of 1848 before the holiday season came, were the
+dethronement of Louis Philippe, and birth of the second French
+republic: on which I ventured to predict that a Gore-house friend of
+ours, and _his_ friend, would in three days be on the scene of action.
+The three days passed, and I had this letter. "Mardi, Fevrier 29, 1848.
+MON CHER. Vous etes homme de la plus grande penetration! Ah, mon Dieu,
+que vous etes absolument magnifique! Vous prevoyez presque toutes les
+choses qui vont arriver; et aux choses qui viennent d'arriver vous etes
+merveilleusement au-fait. Ah, cher enfant, quelle idee sublime vous vous
+aviez a la tete quand vous prevites si clairement que M. le Comte Alfred
+d'Orsay se rendrait au pays de sa naissance! Quel magicien! Mais--c'est
+tout egal, mais--il n'est pas parti. Il reste a Gore-house, ou,
+avant-hier, il y avait un grand diner a tout le monde. Mais quel homme,
+quel ange, neanmoins! MON AMI, je trouve que j'aime tant la Republique,
+qu'il me faut renoncer ma langue et ecrire seulement le langage de la
+Republique de France--langage des Dieux et des Anges--langage, en un
+mot, des Francais! Hier au soir je rencontrai a l'Athenaeum Monsieur Mack
+Leese, qui me dit que MM. les Commissionnaires des Beaux Arts lui
+avaient ecrit, par leur secretaire, un billet de remerciements a propos
+de son tableau dans la Chambre des Deputes, et qu'ils lui avaient prie
+de faire l'autre tableau en fresque, dont on y a besoin. Ce qu'il a
+promis. Voici des nouvelles pour les champs de Lincoln's Inn! Vive la
+gloire de France! Vive la Republique! Vive le Peuple! Plus de Royaute!
+Plus des Bourbons! Plus de Guizot! Mort aux traitres! Faisons couler le
+sang pour la liberte, la justice, la cause populaire! Jusqu'a cinq
+heures et demie, adieu, mon brave! Recevez l'assurance de ma
+consideration distinguee, et croyez-moi, CONCITOYEN! votre tout devoue,
+CITOYEN CHARLES DICKENS." I proved to be not quite so wrong,
+nevertheless, as my friend supposed.
+
+Somewhat earlier than usual this summer, on the close of the
+Shakespeare-house performances, he tried Broadstairs once more, having
+no important writing in hand: but in the brief interval before leaving
+he saw a thing of celebrity in those days, the Chinese Junk; and I had
+all the details in so good a description that I could not resist the
+temptation of using some parts of it at the time. "Drive down to the
+Blackwall railway," he wrote to me, "and for a matter of eighteen-pence
+you are at the Chinese Empire in no time. In half a score of minutes,
+the tiles and chimney-pots, backs of squalid houses, frowsy pieces of
+waste ground, narrow courts and streets, swamps, ditches, masts of
+ships, gardens of dockweed, and unwholesome little bowers of scarlet
+beans, whirl away in a flying dream, and nothing is left but China. How
+the flowery region ever came into this latitude and longitude is the
+first thing one asks; and it is not certainly the least of the marvel.
+As Aladdin's palace was transported hither and thither by the rubbing of
+a lamp, so the crew of Chinamen aboard the Keying devoutly believed that
+their good ship would turn up, quite safe, at the desired port, if they
+only tied red rags enough upon the mast, rudder, and cable. Somehow they
+did not succeed. Perhaps they ran short of rag; at any rate they hadn't
+enough on board to keep them above water; and to the bottom they would
+undoubtedly have gone but for the skill and coolness of a dozen English
+sailors, who brought them over the ocean in safety. Well, if there be
+any one thing in the world that this extraordinary craft is not at all
+like, that thing is a ship of any kind. So narrow, so long, so
+grotesque; so low in the middle, so high at each end, like a China
+pen-tray; with no rigging, with nowhere to go to aloft; with mats for
+sails, great warped cigars for masts, gaudy dragons and sea-monsters
+disporting themselves from stem to stern, and _on_ the stern a gigantic
+cock of impossible aspect, defying the world (as well he may) to produce
+his equal,--it would look more at home at the top of a public building,
+or at the top of a mountain, or in an avenue of trees, or down in a
+mine, than afloat on the water. As for the Chinese lounging on the deck,
+the most extravagant imagination would never dare to suppose them to be
+mariners. Imagine a ship's crew, without a profile among them, in gauze
+pinafores and plaited hair; wearing stiff clogs a quarter of a foot
+thick in the sole; and lying at night in little scented boxes, like
+backgammon men or chess-pieces, or mother-of-pearl counters! But by
+Jove! even this is nothing to your surprise when you go down into the
+cabin. There you get into a torture of perplexity. As, what became of
+all those lanterns hanging to the roof when the Junk was out at sea?
+Whether they dangled there, banging and beating against each other, like
+so many jesters' baubles? Whether the idol Chin Tee, of the eighteen
+arms, enshrined in a celestial Punch's Show, in the place of honour,
+ever tumbled out in heavy weather? Whether the incense and the
+joss-stick still burnt before her, with a faint perfume and a little
+thread of smoke, while the mighty waves were roaring all around? Whether
+that preposterous tissue-paper umbrella in the corner was always spread,
+as being a convenient maritime instrument for walking about the decks
+with in a storm? Whether all the cool and shiny little chairs and tables
+were continually sliding about and bruising each other, and if not why
+not? Whether anybody on the voyage ever read those two books printed in
+characters like bird-cages and fly-traps? Whether the Mandarin
+passenger, He Sing, who had never been ten miles from home in his life
+before, lying sick on a bamboo couch in a private china closet of his
+own (where he is now perpetually writing autographs for inquisitive
+barbarians), ever began to doubt the potency of the Goddess of the Sea,
+whose counterfeit presentment, like a flowery monthly nurse, occupies
+the sailors' joss-house in the second gallery? Whether it is possible
+that the said Mandarin, or the artist of the ship, Sam Sing, Esquire,
+R.A. of Canton, _can_ ever go ashore without a walking-staff of
+cinnamon, agreeably to the usage of their likenesses in British
+tea-shops? Above all, whether the hoarse old ocean could ever have been
+seriously in earnest with this floating toy-shop; or had merely played
+with it in lightness of spirit--roughly, but meaning no harm--as the
+bull did with another kind of china-shop on St. Patrick's day in the
+morning."
+
+The reply made on this brought back comment and sequel not less amusing.
+"Yes, there can be no question that this is Finality in perfection; and
+it is a great advantage to have the doctrine so beautifully worked out,
+and shut up in a corner of a dock near a fashionable white-bait house
+for the edification of man. Thousands of years have passed away since
+the first junk was built on this model, and the last junk ever launched
+was no better for that waste and desert of time. The mimic eye painted
+on their prows to assist them in finding their way, has opened as wide
+and seen as far as any actual organ of sight in all the interval through
+the whole immense extent of that strange country. It has been set in the
+flowery head to as little purpose for thousands of years. With all their
+patient and ingenious but never advancing art, and with all their rich
+and diligent agricultural cultivation, not a new twist or curve has been
+given to a ball of ivory, and not a blade of experience has been grown.
+There is a genuine finality in that; and when one comes from behind the
+wooden screen that encloses the curious sight, to look again upon the
+river and the mighty signs on its banks of life, enterprise, and
+progress, the question that comes nearest is beyond doubt a home one.
+Whether _we_ ever by any chance, in storms, trust to red flags; or burn
+joss-sticks before idols; or grope our way by the help of conventional
+eyes that have no sight in them; or sacrifice substantial facts for
+absurd forms? The ignorant crew of the Keying refused to enter on the
+ships' books, until 'a considerable amount of silvered-paper, tin-foil,
+and joss-stick' had been laid in by the owners for the purposes of their
+worship. And I wonder whether _our_ seamen, let alone our bishops and
+deacons, ever stand out upon points of silvered-paper and tin-foil and
+joss-sticks. To be sure Christianity is not Chin-Teeism, and that I
+suppose is why we never lose sight of the end in contemptible and
+insignificant quarrels about the means. There is enough matter for
+reflection aboard the Keying at any rate to last one's voyage home to
+England again."
+
+Other letters of the summer from Broadstairs will complete what he wrote
+from the same place last year on Mr. Cruikshank's efforts in the cause
+of temperance, and will enable me to say, what I know he wished to be
+remembered in his story, that there was no subject on which through his
+whole life he felt more strongly than this. No man advocated temperance,
+even as far as possible its legislative enforcement, with greater
+earnestness; but he made important reservations. Not thinking
+drunkenness to be a vice inborn, or incident to the poor more than to
+other people, he never would agree that the existence of a gin-shop was
+the alpha and omega of it. Believing it to be, _the_ "national horror,"
+he also believed that many operative causes had to do with having made
+it so; and his objection to the temperance agitation was that these were
+left out of account altogether. He thought the gin-shop not fairly to be
+rendered the exclusive object of attack, until, in connection with the
+classes who mostly made it their resort, the temptations that led to it,
+physical and moral, should have been more bravely dealt with. Among the
+former he counted foul smells, disgusting habitations, bad workshops and
+workshop-customs, scarcity of light, air, and water, in short the
+absence of all easy means of decency and health; and among the latter,
+the mental weariness and languor so induced, the desire of wholesome
+relaxation, the craving for _some_ stimulus and excitement, not less
+needful than the sun itself to lives so passed, and last, and inclusive
+of all the rest, ignorance, and the want of rational mental training,
+generally applied. This was consistently Dickens's "platform" throughout
+the years he was known to me; and holding it to be within the reach as
+well as the scope of legislation, which even our political magnates have
+been discovering lately, he thought intemperance to be but the one
+result that, out of all those arising from the absence of legislation,
+was the most wretched. For him, drunkenness had a teeming and
+reproachful history anterior to the drunken stage; and he thought it the
+first duty of the moralist bent upon annihilating the gin-shop, to
+"strike deep and spare not" at those previous remediable evils.
+Certainly this was not the way of Mr. Cruikshank, any more than it is
+that of the many excellent people who take part in temperance
+agitations. His former tale of the _Bottle_, as told by his admirable
+pencil, was that of a decent working man, father of a boy and a girl,
+living in comfort and good esteem until near the middle age, when,
+happening unluckily to have a goose for dinner one day in the bosom of
+his thriving family, he jocularly sends out for a bottle of gin,
+persuades his wife, until then a picture of neatness and good
+housewifery, to take a little drop after the stuffing, and the whole
+family from that moment drink themselves to destruction. The sequel, of
+which Dickens now wrote to me, traced the lives of the boy and girl
+after the wretched deaths of their drunken parents, through gin-shop,
+beer-shop, and dancing-rooms, up to their trial for robbery, when the
+boy is convicted, dying aboard the hulks; and the girl, desolate and
+mad after her acquittal, flings herself from London-bridge into the
+night-darkened river.
+
+"I think," said Dickens, "the power of that closing scene quite
+extraordinary. It haunts the remembrance like an awful reality. It is
+full of passion and terror, and I doubt very much whether any hand but
+his could so have rendered it. There are other fine things too. The
+death-bed scene on board the hulks; the convict who is composing the
+face, and the other who is drawing the screen round the bed's head; seem
+to me masterpieces worthy of the greatest painter. The reality of the
+place, and the fidelity with which every minute object illustrative of
+it is presented, are surprising. I think myself no bad judge of this
+feature, and it is remarkable throughout. In the trial scene at the Old
+Bailey, the eye may wander round the Court, and observe everything that
+is a part of the place. The very light and atmosphere are faithfully
+reproduced. So, in the gin-shop and the beer-shop. An inferior hand
+would indicate a fragment of the fact, and slur it over; but here every
+shred is honestly made out. The man behind the bar in the gin-shop, is
+as real as the convicts at the hulks, or the barristers round the table
+in the Old Bailey. I found it quite curious, as I closed the book, to
+recall the number of faces I had seen of individual identity, and to
+think what a chance they have of living, as the Spanish friar said to
+Wilkie, when the living have passed away. But it only makes more
+exasperating to me the obstinate one-sidedness of the thing. When a man
+shows so forcibly the side of the medal on which the people in their
+faults and crimes are stamped, he is the more bound to help us to a
+glance at that other side on which the faults and vices of the
+governments placed over the people are not less gravely impressed."
+
+This led to some remark on Hogarth's method in such matters, and I am
+glad to be able to preserve this fine criticism of that great
+Englishman, by a writer who closely resembled him in genius; as another
+generation will be probably more apt than our own to discover. "Hogarth
+avoided the Drunkard's Progress, I conceive, precisely because the
+causes of drunkenness among the poor were so numerous and widely spread,
+and lurked so sorrowfully deep and far down in all human misery,
+neglect, and despair, that even _his_ pencil could not bring them fairly
+and justly into the light. It was never his plan to be content with only
+showing the effect. In the death of the miser-father, his shoe new-soled
+with the binding of his bible, before the young Rake begins his career;
+in the worldly father, listless daughter, impoverished young lord, and
+crafty lawyer, of the first plate of Marriage-a-la mode; in the
+detestable advances through the stages of Cruelty; and in the progress
+downward of Thomas Idle; you see the effects indeed, but also the
+causes. He was never disposed to spare the kind of drunkenness that was
+of more 'respectable' engenderment, as one sees in his midnight modern
+conversation, the election plates, and crowds of stupid aldermen and
+other guzzlers. But after one immortal journey down Gin-lane, he turned
+away in pity and sorrow--perhaps in hope of better things, one day, from
+better laws and schools and poor men's homes--and went back no more. The
+scene of Gin-lane, you know, is that just cleared away for the
+extension of Oxford-street, which we were looking at the other day; and
+I think it a remarkable trait of Hogarth's picture, that while it
+exhibits drunkenness in the most appalling forms, it also forces on
+attention a most neglected wretched neighbourhood, and an unwholesome,
+indecent, abject condition of life that might be put as frontispiece to
+our sanitary report of a hundred years later date. I have always myself
+thought the purpose of this fine piece to be not adequately stated even
+by CHARLES LAMB. 'The very houses seem absolutely reeling' it is true;
+but beside that wonderful picture of what follows intoxication, we have
+indication quite as powerful of what leads to it among the neglected
+classes. There is no evidence that any of the actors in the dreary scene
+have ever been much better than we see them there. The best are pawning
+the commonest necessaries, and tools of their trades; and the worst are
+homeless vagrants who give us no clue to their having been otherwise in
+bygone days. All are living and dying miserably. Nobody is interfering
+for prevention or for cure, in the generation going out before us, or
+the generation coming in. The beadle is the only sober man in the
+composition except the pawnbroker, and he is mightily indifferent to the
+orphan-child crying beside its parent's coffin. The little charity-girls
+are not so well taught or looked after, but that they can take to
+dram-drinking already. The church indeed is very prominent and handsome;
+but as, quite passive in the picture, it coldly surveys these things in
+progress under shadow of its tower, I cannot but bethink me that it was
+not until this year of grace 1848 that a Bishop of London first came out
+respecting something wrong in poor men's social accommodations, and I
+am confirmed in my suspicion that Hogarth had many meanings which have
+not grown obsolete in a century."
+
+Another art-criticism by Dickens should be added. Upon a separate
+publication by Leech of some drawings on stone called the Rising
+Generation, from designs done for Mr. Punch's gallery, he wrote at my
+request a little essay of which a few sentences will find appropriate
+place with his letter on the other great caricaturist of his time. I use
+that word, as he did, only for want of a better. Dickens was of opinion
+that, in this particular line of illustration, while he conceded all his
+fame to the elder and stronger contemporary, Mr. Leech was the very
+first Englishman who had made Beauty a part of his art; and he held,
+that, by striking out this course, and setting the successful example of
+introducing always into his most whimsical pieces some beautiful faces
+or agreeable forms, he had done more than any other man of his
+generation to refine a branch of art to which the facilities of
+steam-printing and wood-engraving were giving almost unrivalled
+diffusion and popularity. His opinion of Leech in a word was that he
+turned caricature into character; and would leave behind him not a
+little of the history of his time and its follies, sketched with
+inimitable grace.
+
+"If we turn back to a collection of the works of Rowlandson or Gilray,
+we shall find, in spite of the great humour displayed in many of them,
+that they are rendered wearisome and unpleasant by a vast amount of
+personal ugliness. Now, besides that it is a poor device to represent
+what is satirized as being necessarily ugly, which is but the resource
+of an angry child or a jealous woman, it serves no purpose but to
+produce a disagreeable result. There is no reason why the farmer's
+daughter in the old caricature who is squalling at the harpsichord (to
+the intense delight, by the bye, of her worthy father, whom it is her
+duty to please) should be squab and hideous. The satire on the manner of
+her education, if there be any in the thing at all, would be just as
+good, if she were pretty. Mr. Leech would have made her so. The average
+of farmers' daughters in England are not impossible lumps of fat. One is
+quite as likely to find a pretty girl in a farm-house, as to find an
+ugly one; and we think, with Mr. Leech, that the business of this Style
+of art is with the pretty one. She is not only a pleasanter object, but
+we have more interest in her. We care more about what does become her,
+and does not become her. Mr. Leech represented the other day certain
+delicate creatures with bewitching countenances encased in several
+varieties of that amazing garment, the ladies' paletot. Formerly those
+fair creatures would have been made as ugly and ungainly as possible,
+and then the point would have been lost. The spectator, with a laugh at
+the absurdity of the whole group, would not have cared how such uncouth
+creatures disguised themselves, or how ridiculous they became. . . . But to
+represent female beauty as Mr. Leech represents it, an artist must have,
+a most delicate perception of it; and the gift of being able to realise
+it to us with two or three slight, sure touches of his pencil. This
+power Mr. Leech possesses, in an extraordinary degree. . . . For this
+reason, we enter our protest against those of the Rising Generation who
+are precociously in love being made the subject of merriment by a
+pitiless and unsympathizing world. We never saw a boy more distinctly in
+the right than the young gentleman kneeling on the chair to beg a lock
+of hair from his pretty cousin, to take back to school. Madness is in
+her apron, and Virgil dog's-eared and defaced is in her ringlets. Doubts
+may suggest themselves of the perfect disinterestedness of the other
+young gentleman contemplating the fair girl at the piano--doubts
+engendered by his worldly allusion to 'tin'; though even that may have
+arisen in his modest consciousness of his own inability to support an
+establishment--but that he should be 'deucedly inclined to go and cut
+that fellow out,' appears to us one of the most natural emotions of the
+human breast. The young gentleman with the dishevelled hair and clasped
+hands who loves the transcendant beauty with the bouquet, and can't be
+happy without her, is to us a withering and desolate spectacle. Who
+_could_ be happy without her? . . . The growing youths are not less happily
+observed and agreeably depicted than the grown women. The languid little
+creature who 'hasn't danced since he was quite a boy,' is perfect; and
+the eagerness of the small dancer whom he declines to receive for a
+partner at the hands of the glorious old lady of the house (the little
+feet quite ready for the first position, the whole heart projected into
+the quadrille, and the glance peeping timidly at the desired one out of
+a flutter of hope and doubt) is quite delightful to look at. The
+intellectual juvenile who awakens the tremendous wrath of a Norma of
+private life by considering woman an inferior animal, is lecturing at
+the present moment, we understand, on the Concrete in connexion with the
+Will. The legs of the young philosopher who considers Shakespeare an
+over-rated man, were seen by us dangling over the side of an omnibus
+last Tuesday. We have no acquaintance with the scowling young gentleman
+who is clear that 'if his Governor don't like the way he goes on in, why
+he must have chambers and so much a week;' but if he is not by this time
+in Van Diemen's land, he will certainly go to it through Newgate. We
+should exceedingly dislike to have personal property in a strong box, to
+live in the suburb of Camberwell, and to be in the relation of
+bachelor-uncle to that youth. . . . In all his designs, whatever Mr. Leech
+desires to do, he does. His drawing seems to us charming; and the
+expression indicated, though by the simplest means, is exactly the
+natural expression, and is recognised as such immediately. Some forms of
+our existing life will never have a better chronicler. His wit is
+good-natured, and always the wit of a gentleman. He has a becoming sense
+of responsibility and self-restraint; he delights in agreeable things;
+he imparts some pleasant air of his own to things not pleasant in
+themselves; he is suggestive and full of matter; and he is always
+improving. Into the tone as well as into the execution of what he does,
+he has brought a certain elegance which is altogether new, without
+involving any compromise of what is true. Popular art in England has not
+had so rich an acquisition." Dickens's closing allusion was to a remark
+made by Mr. Ford in a review of _Oliver Twist_ formerly referred to. "It
+is eight or ten years since a writer in the _Quarterly Review_, making
+mention of MR. GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, commented on the absurdity of
+excluding such a man from the Royal Academy, because his works were not
+produced in certain materials, and did not occupy a certain space in its
+annual shows. Will no Associates be found upon its books one of these
+days, the labours of whose oil and brushes will have sunk into the
+profoundest obscurity, when many pencil-marks of MR. CRUIKSHANK and of
+MR. LEECH will be still fresh in half the houses in the land?"
+
+Of what otherwise occupied him at Broadstairs in 1848 there is not much
+to mention until the close of his holiday. He used to say that he never
+went for more than a couple of days from his own home without something
+befalling him that never happened to anyone else, and his Broadstairs
+adventure of the present summer verged closer on tragedy than comedy.
+Returning there one day in August after bringing up his boys to school,
+it had been arranged that his wife should meet him at Margate; but he
+had walked impatiently far beyond the place for meeting when at last he
+caught sight of her, not in the small chaise but in a large carriage and
+pair followed by an excited crowd, and with the youth that should have
+been driving the little pony bruised and bandaged on the box behind the
+two prancing horses. "You may faintly imagine my amazement at
+encountering this carriage, and the strange people, and Kate, and the
+crowd, and the bandaged one, and all the rest of it." And then in a line
+or two I had the story. "At the top of a steep hill on the road, with a
+ditch on each side, the pony bolted, upon which what does John do but
+jump out! He says he was thrown out, but it cannot be. The reins
+immediately became entangled in the wheels, and away went the pony down
+the hill madly, with Kate inside rending the Isle of Thanet with her
+screams. The accident might have been a fearful one, if the pony had
+not, thank Heaven, on getting to the bottom, pitched over the side;
+breaking the shaft and cutting her hind legs, but in the most
+extraordinary manner smashing her own way apart. She tumbled down, a
+bundle of legs with her head tucked underneath, and left the chaise
+standing on the bank! A Captain Devaynes and his wife were passing in
+their carriage at the moment, saw the accident with no power of
+preventing it, got Kate out, laid her on the grass, and behaved with
+infinite kindness. All's well that ends well, and I think she's really
+none the worse for the fright. John is in bed a good deal bruised, but
+without any broken bone, and likely soon to come right; though for the
+present plastered all over, and, like Squeers, a brown-paper parcel
+chock-full of nothing but groans. The women generally have no sympathy
+for him whatever; and the nurse says, with indignation, how could he go
+and leave an unprotected female in the shay!"
+
+Holiday incidents there were many, but none that need detain us. This
+was really a summer idleness: for it was the interval between two of his
+important undertakings, there was no periodical yet to make demands on
+him, and only the task of finishing his _Haunted Man_ for Christmas lay
+ahead. But he did even his nothings in a strenuous way, and on occasion
+could make gallant fight against the elements themselves. He reported
+himself, to my horror, thrice wet through on a single day, "dressed
+four times," and finding all sorts of great things, brought out by the
+rains, among the rocks on the sea-beach. He also sketched now and then
+morsels of character for me, of which I will preserve one. "F is
+philosophical, from sunrise to bedtime: chiefly in the French line,
+about French women going mad, and in that state coming to their
+husbands, and saying, 'Mon ami, je vous ai trompe. Voici les lettres de
+mon amant!' Whereupon the husbands take the letters and think them waste
+paper, and become extra-philosophical at finding that they really _were_
+the lover's effusions: though what there is of philosophy in it all, or
+anything but unwholesomeness, it is not easy to see." (A remark that it
+might not be out of place to offer to Mr. Taine's notice.) "Likewise
+about dark shades coming over our wedded Emmeline's face at parties; and
+about F handing her to her carriage, and saying, 'May I come in, for a
+lift homeward?' and she bending over him out of window, and saying in a
+low voice, I DARE NOT! And then of the carriage driving away like
+lightning, leaving F more philosophical than ever on the pavement." Not
+till the close of September I heard of work intruding itself, in a
+letter twitting me for a broken promise in not joining him: "We are
+reasonably jolly, but rurally so; going to bed o' nights at ten, and
+bathing o' mornings at half-past seven; and not drugging ourselves with
+those dirty and spoiled waters of Lethe that flow round the base of the
+great pyramid." Then, after mention of the friends who had left him,
+Sheriff Gordon, the Leeches, Lemon, Egg and Stone: "reflection and
+pensiveness are coming. I have NOT
+
+ '--seen Fancy write
+ With a pencil of light
+ On the blotter so solid, commanding the sea!'
+
+but I shouldn't wonder if she were to do it, one of these days. Dim
+visions of divers things are floating around me; and I must go to work,
+head foremost, when I get home. I am glad, after all, that I have not
+been at it here; for I am all the better for my idleness, no doubt. . . .
+Roche was very ill last night, and looks like one with his face turned
+to the other world, this morning. When _are_ you coming? Oh what days
+and nights there have been here, this week past!" My consent to a
+suggestion in his next letter, that I should meet him on his way back,
+and join him in a walking-excursion home, got me full absolution for
+broken promises; and the way we took will remind friends of his later
+life, when he was lord of Gadshill, of an object of interest which he
+delighted in taking them to see. "You will come down booked for
+Maidstone (I will meet you at Paddock-wood), and we will go thither in
+company over a most beautiful little line of railroad. The eight miles
+walk from Maidstone to Rochester, and the visit to the Druidical altar
+on the wayside, are charming. This could be accomplished on the Tuesday;
+and Wednesday we might look about us at Chatham, coming home by Cobham
+on Thursday. . . ."
+
+His first seaside holiday in 1849 was at Brighton, where he passed some
+weeks in February; and not, I am bound to add, without the usual
+_un_usual adventure to signalize his visit. He had not been a week in
+his lodgings, where Leech and his wife joined him, when both his
+landlord and the daughter of his landlord went raving mad, and the
+lodgers were driven away to the Bedford hotel. "If you could have heard
+the cursing and crying of the two; could have seen the physician and
+nurse quoited out into the passage by the madman at the hazard of their
+lives; could have seen Leech and me flying to the doctor's rescue; could
+have seen our wives pulling us back; could have seen the M.D. faint with
+fear; could have seen three other M.D.'s come to his aid; with an
+atmosphere of Mrs. Gamps, strait-waistcoats, struggling friends and
+servants, surrounding the whole; you would have said it was quite worthy
+of me, and quite in keeping with my usual proceedings." The letter ended
+with a word on what then his thoughts were full of, but for which no
+name had yet been found. "A sea-fog to-day, but yesterday inexpressibly
+delicious. My mind running, like a high sea, on names--not satisfied
+yet, though." When he next wrote from the seaside, in the beginning of
+July, he had found the name; had started his book; and was "rushing to
+Broadstairs" to write the fourth number of _David Copperfield_.
+
+In this came the childish experiences which had left so deep an
+impression upon him, and over which he had some difficulty in throwing
+the needful disguises. "Fourteen miles to-day in the country," he had
+written to me on the 21st of June, "revolving number four!" Still he did
+not quite see his way. Three days later he wrote: "On leaving you last
+night, I found myself summoned on a special jury in the Queen's Bench
+to-day. I have taken no notice of the document,[153] and hourly expect
+to be dragged forth to a dungeon for contempt of court. I think I should
+rather like it. It might help me with a new notion or two in my
+difficulties. Meanwhile I shall take a stroll to-night in the green
+fields from 7 to 10, if you feel inclined to join." His troubles ended
+when he got to Broadstairs, from which he wrote on the tenth of July to
+tell me that agreeably to the plan we had discussed he had introduced a
+great part of his MS. into the number. "I really think I have done it
+ingeniously, and with a very complicated interweaving of truth and
+fiction. Vous verrez. I am getting on like a house afire in point of
+health, and ditto ditto in point of number."
+
+In the middle of July the number was nearly done, and he was still
+doubtful where to pass his longer summer holiday. Leech wished to join
+him in it, and both desired a change from Broadstairs. At first he
+thought of Folkestone,[154] but disappointment there led to a sudden
+change. "I propose" (15th of July) "returning to town to-morrow by the
+boat from Ramsgate, and going off to Weymouth or the Isle of Wight, or
+both, early the next morning." A few days after, his choice was made.
+
+He had taken a house at Bonchurch, attracted there by the friend who had
+made it a place of interest for him during the last few years, the
+Reverend James White, with whose name and its associations my mind
+connects inseparably many of Dickens's happiest hours. To pay him
+fitting tribute would not be easy, if here it were called for. In the
+kindly shrewd Scotch face, a keen sensitiveness to pleasure and pain was
+the first thing that struck any common observer. Cheerfulness and gloom
+coursed over it so rapidly that no one could question the tale they
+told. But the relish of his life had outlived its more than usual share
+of sorrows; and quaint sly humour, love of jest and merriment, capital
+knowledge of books, and sagacious quips at men, made his companionship
+delightful. Like his life, his genius was made up of alternations of
+mirth and melancholy. He would be immersed, at one time, in those
+darkest Scottish annals from which he drew his tragedies; and
+overflowing, at another, into Sir Frizzle Pumpkin's exuberant farce. The
+tragic histories may probably perish with the actor's perishable art;
+but three little abstracts of history written at a later time in prose,
+with a sunny clearness of narration and a glow of picturesque interest
+to my knowledge unequalled in books of such small pretension, will find,
+I hope, a lasting place in literature. They are filled with felicities
+of phrase, with breadth of understanding and judgment, with manful
+honesty, quiet sagacity, and a constant cheerful piety, valuable for all
+and priceless for the young. Another word I permit myself to add. With
+Dickens, White was popular supremely for his eager good fellowship; and
+few men brought him more of what he always liked to receive. But he
+brought nothing so good as his wife. "He is excellent, but she is
+better," is the pithy remark of his first Bonchurch letter; and the true
+affection and respect that followed is happily still borne her by his
+daughters.
+
+Of course there is something strange to be recorded of the Bonchurch
+holiday, but it does not come till nearer the ending; and, with more
+attention to Mrs. Malaprop's advice to begin with a little aversion,
+might probably not have come at all. He began with an excess of liking.
+Of the Undercliff he was full of admiration. "From the top of the
+highest downs," he wrote in his second letter (28th of July) "there are
+views which are only to be equalled on the Genoese shore of the
+Mediterranean; the variety of walks is extraordinary; things are cheap,
+and everybody is civil. The waterfall acts wonderfully, and the sea
+bathing is delicious. Best of all, the place is certainly cold rather
+than hot, in the summer time. The evenings have been even chilly. White
+very jovial, and emulous of the inimitable in respect of gin-punch. He
+had made some for our arrival. Ha! ha! not bad for a beginner. . . . I
+have been, and am, trying to work this morning; but I can't make
+anything of it, and am going out to think. I am invited by a
+distinguished friend to dine with you on the first of August, but I have
+pleaded distance and the being resident in a cave on the sea shore; my
+food, beans; my drink, the water from the rock. . . . I must pluck up heart
+of grace to write to Jeffrey, of whom I had but poor accounts from
+Gordon just before leaving. Talfourd delightful, and amuses me mightily.
+I am really quite enraptured at his success, and think of his happiness
+with uncommon pleasure." Our friend was now on the bench; which he
+adorned with qualities that are justly the pride of that profession, and
+with accomplishments that have become more rare in its highest places
+than they were in former times. His elevation only made those virtues
+better known. Talfourd assumed nothing with the ermine but the privilege
+of more frequent intercourse with the tastes and friends he loved, and
+he continued to be the most joyous and least affected of companions.
+Such small oddities or foibles as he had made him secretly only dearer
+to Dickens, who had no friend he was more attached to; and the many
+happy nights made happier by the voice so affluent in generous words,
+and the face so bright with ardent sensibility, come back to me
+sorrowfully now. "Deaf the prais'd ear, and mute the tuneful tongue."
+The poet's line has a double application and sadness.
+
+He wrote again on the first of August. "I have just begun to get into
+work. We are expecting the Queen to come by very soon, in grand array,
+and are going to let off ever so many guns. I had a letter from Jeffrey
+yesterday morning, just as I was going to write to him. He has evidently
+been very ill, and I begin to have fears for his recovery. It is a very
+pathetic letter, as to his state of mind; but only in a tranquil
+contemplation of death, which I think very noble." His next letter, four
+days later, described himself as continuing still at work; but also
+taking part in dinners at Blackgang, and picnics of "tremendous success"
+on Shanklin Down. "Two charity sermons for the school are preached
+to-day, and I go to the afternoon one. The examination of said school
+t'other day was very funny. All the boys made Buckstone's bow in the
+_Rough Diamond_, and some in a very wonderful manner recited pieces of
+poetry, about a clock, and may we be like the clock, which is always a
+going and a doing of its duty, and always tells the truth (supposing it
+to be a slap-up chronometer I presume, for the American clock in the
+school was lying frightfully at that moment); and after being bothered
+to death by the multiplication table, they were refreshed with a public
+tea in Lady Jane Swinburne's garden." (There was a reference in one of
+his letters, but I have lost it, to a golden-haired lad of the
+Swinburnes whom his own boys used to play with, since become more widely
+known.) "The rain came in with the first tea-pot, and has been active
+ever since. On Friday we had a grand, and what is better, a very good
+dinner at 'parson' Fielden's, with some choice port. On Tuesday we are
+going on another picnic; with the materials for a fire, at my express
+stipulation; and a great iron pot to boil potatoes in. These things, and
+the eatables, go to the ground in a cart. Last night we had some very
+good merriment at White's, where pleasant Julian Young and his wife
+(who are staying about five miles off) showed some droll new games"--and
+roused the ambition in my friend to give a "mighty conjuring performance
+for all the children in Bonchurch," for which I sent him the materials
+and which went off in a tumult of wild delight. To the familiar names in
+this letter I will add one more, grieving freshly even now to connect it
+with suffering. "A letter from Poole has reached me since I began this
+letter, with tidings in it that you will be very sorry to hear. Poor
+Regnier has lost his only child; the pretty daughter who dined with us
+that nice day at your house, when we all pleased the poor mother by
+admiring her so much. She died of a sudden attack of malignant typhus.
+Poole was at the funeral, and writes that he never saw, or could have
+imagined, such intensity of grief as Regnier's at the grave. How one
+loves him for it. But is it not always true, in comedy and in tragedy,
+that the more real the man the more genuine the actor?"
+
+After a few more days I heard of progress with his writing in spite of
+all festivities. "I have made it a rule that the inimitable is
+invisible, until two every day. I shall have half the number done,
+please God, to-morrow. I have not worked quickly here yet, but I don't
+know what I _may_ do. Divers cogitations have occupied my mind at
+intervals, respecting the dim design." The design was the weekly
+periodical so often in his thoughts, of which more will appear in my
+next chapter. His letter closed with intimations of discomfort in his
+health; of an obstinate cough; and of a determination he had formed to
+mount daily to the top of the downs. "It makes a great difference in
+the climate to get a blow there and come down again." Then I heard of
+the doctor "stethoscoping" him, of his hope that all was right in that
+quarter, and of rubbings "a la St. John Long" being ordered for his
+chest. But the mirth still went on. "There has been a Doctor Lankester
+at Sandown, a very good merry fellow, who has made one at the picnics,
+and whom I went over and dined with, along with Danby (I remember your
+liking for Danby, and don't wonder at it), Leech, and White." A letter
+towards the close of August resumed yet more of his ordinary tone. "We
+had games and forfeits last night at White's. Davy Roberts's pretty
+little daughter is there for a week, with her husband, Bicknell's son.
+There was a dinner first to say good-bye to Danby, who goes to other
+clergyman's-duty, and we were very merry. Mrs. White unchanging; White
+comically various in his moods. Talfourd comes down next Tuesday, and we
+think of going over to Ryde on Monday, visiting the play, sleeping there
+(I don't mean at the play), and bringing the Judge back. Browne is
+coming down when he has done his month's work. Should you like to go to
+Alum Bay while you are here? It would involve a night out, but I think
+would be very pleasant; and if you think so too, I will arrange it sub
+rosa, so that we may not be, like Bobadil, 'oppressed by numbers.' I
+mean to take a fly over from Shanklin to meet you at Ryde; so that we
+can walk back from Shanklin over the landslip, where the scenery is
+wonderfully beautiful. Stone and Egg are coming next month, and we hope
+to see Jerrold before we go." Such notices from his letters may be
+thought hardly worth preserving; but a wonderful vitality in every
+circumstance, as long as life under any conditions remained to the
+writer, is the picture they contribute to; nor would it be complete
+without the addition, that fond as he was, in the intervals of his work,
+of this abundance and variety of enjoyments, to no man were so essential
+also those quieter hours of thought, and talk, not obtainable when
+"oppressed by numbers."
+
+My visit was due at the opening of September, but a few days earlier
+came the full revelation of which only a passing shadow had reached in
+two or three previous letters. "Before I think of beginning my next
+number, I perhaps cannot do better than give you an imperfect
+description of the results of the climate of Bonchurch after a few
+weeks' residence. The first salubrious effect of which the Patient
+becomes conscious is an almost continual feeling of sickness,
+accompanied with great prostration of strength, so that his legs tremble
+under him, and his arms quiver when he wants to take hold of any object.
+An extraordinary disposition to sleep (except at night, when his rest,
+in the event of his having any, is broken by incessant dreams) is always
+present at the same time; and, if he have anything to do requiring
+thought and attention, this overpowers him to such a degree that he can
+only do it in snatches: lying down on beds in the fitful intervals.
+Extreme depression of mind, and a disposition to shed tears from morning
+to night, developes itself at the same period. If the Patient happen to
+have been a good walker, he finds ten miles an insupportable distance;
+in the achievement of which his legs are so unsteady, that he goes from
+side to side of the road, like a drunken man. If he happen to have ever
+possessed any energy of any kind, he finds it quenched in a dull, stupid
+languor. He has no purpose, power, or object in existence whatever. When
+he brushes his hair in the morning, he is so weak that he is obliged to
+sit upon a chair to do it. He is incapable of reading, at all times. And
+his bilious system is so utterly overthrown, that a ball of boiling fat
+appears to be always behind the top of the bridge of his nose, simmering
+between his haggard eyes. If he should have caught a cold, he will find
+it impossible to get rid of it, as his system is wholly incapable of
+making any effort. His cough will be deep, monotonous, and constant.
+'The faithful watch-dog's honest bark' will be nothing to it. He will
+abandon all present idea of overcoming it, and will content himself with
+keeping an eye upon his blood-vessels to preserve them whole and sound.
+_Patient's name, Inimitable B._ . . . It's a mortal mistake!--That's the
+plain fact. Of all the places I ever have been in, I have never been in
+one so difficult to exist in, pleasantly. Naples is hot and dirty, New
+York feverish, Washington bilious, Genoa exciting, Paris rainy--but
+Bonchurch, smashing. I am quite convinced that I should die here, in a
+year. It's not hot, it's not close, I don't know what it is, but the
+prostration of it is _awful_. Nobody here has the least idea what I
+think of it; but I find, from all sorts of hints from Kate, Georgina,
+and the Leeches, that they are all affected more or less in the same
+way, and find it very difficult to make head against. I make no sign,
+and pretend not to know what is going on. But they are right. I believe
+the Leeches will go soon, and small blame to 'em!--For me, when I leave
+here at the end of this September, I must go down to some cold place; as
+Ramsgate for example, for a week or two; or I seriously believe I shall
+feel the effects of it for a long time. . . . What do you think of
+_that_? . . . The longer I live, the more I doubt the doctors. I am
+perfectly convinced, that, for people suffering under a wasting disease,
+this Undercliff is madness altogether. The doctors, with the old
+miserable folly of looking at one bit of a subject, take the patient's
+lungs and the Undercliff's air, and settle solemnly that they are fit
+for each other. But the whole influence of the place, never taken into
+consideration, is to reduce and overpower vitality. I am quite confident
+that I should go down under it, as if it were so much lead, slowly
+crushing me. An American resident in Paris many years, who brought me a
+letter from Olliffe, said, the day before yesterday, that he had always
+had a passion for the sea never to be gratified enough, but that after
+living here a month, he could not bear to look at it; he couldn't endure
+the sound of it; he didn't know how it was, but it seemed associated
+with the decay of his whole powers." These were grave imputations
+against one of the prettiest places in England; but of the generally
+depressing influence of that Undercliff on particular temperaments, I
+had already enough experience to abate something of the surprise with
+which I read the letter. What it too bluntly puts aside are the
+sufferings other than his own, projected and sheltered by what only
+aggravated his; but my visit gave me proof that he had really very
+little overstated the effect upon himself. Making allowance, which
+sometimes he failed to do, for special peculiarities, and for the
+excitability never absent when he had in hand an undertaking such as
+_Copperfield_, I observed a nervous tendency to misgivings and
+apprehensions to the last degree unusual with him, which seemed to make
+the commonest things difficult; and though he stayed out his time, and
+brought away nothing that his happier associations with the place and
+its residents did not long survive, he never returned to Bonchurch.
+
+In the month that remained he completed his fifth number, and with the
+proof there came the reply to some questions of which I hardly remember
+more than that they referred to doubts of mine; one being as to the
+propriety of the kind of delusion he had first given to poor Mr.
+Dick,[155] which I thought a little too farcical for that really
+touching delineation of character. "Your suggestion is perfectly wise
+and sound," he wrote back (22nd of August). "I have acted on it. I have
+also, instead of the bull and china-shop delusion, given Dick the idea,
+that, when the head of king Charles the First was cut off, some of the
+trouble was taken out of it, and put into his (Dick's)". When he next
+wrote, there was news very welcome to me for the pleasure to himself it
+involved. "Browne has sketched an uncommonly characteristic and capital
+Mr. Micawber for the next number. I hope the present number is a good
+one. I hear nothing but pleasant accounts of the general satisfaction."
+The same letter told me of an intention to go to Broadstairs, put aside
+by doubtful reports of its sanitary condition; but it will be seen
+presently that there was another graver interruption. With his work well
+off his hands, however, he had been getting on better where he was; and
+they had all been very merry. "Yes," he said, writing after a couple of
+days (23rd of September), "we have been sufficiently rollicking since I
+finished the number; and have had great games at rounders every
+afternoon, with all Bonchurch looking on; but I begin to long for a
+little peace and solitude. And now for my less pleasing piece of news.
+The sea has been running very high, and Leech, while bathing, was
+knocked over by a bad blow from a great wave on the forehead. He is in
+bed, and had twenty of his namesakes on his temples this morning. When I
+heard of him just now, he was asleep--which he had not been all night."
+He closed his letter hopefully, but next day (24th September) I had less
+favourable report. "Leech has been very ill with congestion of the brain
+ever since I wrote, and being still in excessive pain has had ice to his
+head continuously, and been bled in the arm besides. Beard and I sat up
+there, all night." On the 26th he wrote, "My plans are all unsettled by
+Leech's illness; as of course I do not like to leave this place while I
+can be of any service to him and his good little wife. But all visitors
+are gone to-day, and Winterbourne once more left to the engaging family
+of the inimitable B. Ever since I wrote to you Leech has been seriously
+worse, and again very heavily bled. The night before last he was in such
+an alarming state of restlessness, which nothing could relieve, that I
+proposed to Mrs. Leech to try magnetism. Accordingly, in the middle of
+the night I fell to; and after a very fatiguing bout of it, put him to
+sleep for an hour and thirty-five minutes. A change came on in the
+sleep, and he is decidedly better. I talked to the astounded little Mrs.
+Leech across him, when he was asleep, as if he had been a truss of
+hay. . . . What do you think of my setting up in the magnetic line with a
+large brass plate? 'Terms, twenty-five guineas per nap.'" When he wrote
+again on the 30th, he had completed his sixth number; and his friend was
+so clearly on the way to recovery that he was next day to leave for
+Broadstairs with his wife, her sister, and the two little girls. "I will
+merely add that I entreat to be kindly remembered to Thackeray" (who had
+a dangerous illness at this time); "that I think I have, without a
+doubt, _got_ the Periodical notion; and that I am writing under the
+depressing and discomforting influence of paying off the tribe of bills
+that pour in upon an unfortunate family-young-man on the eve of a
+residence like this. So no more at present from the disgusted, though
+still inimitable, and always affectionate B."
+
+He stayed at Broadstairs till he had finished his number seven, and what
+else chiefly occupied him were thoughts about the Periodical of which
+account will presently be given. "Such a night and day of rain," ran his
+first letter, "I should think the oldest inhabitant never saw! and yet,
+in the ould formiliar Broadstairs, I somehow or other don't mind it
+much. The change has done Mamey a world of good, and I have begun to
+sleep again. As for news, you might as well ask me for dolphins. Nobody
+in Broadstairs--to speak of. Certainly nobody in Ballard's. We are in
+the part, which is the house next door to the hotel itself, that we once
+had for three years running, and just as quiet and snug now as it was
+then. I don't think I shall return before the 20th or so, when the
+number is done; but I _may_, in some inconstant freak, run up to you
+before. Preliminary despatches and advices shall be forwarded in any
+case to the fragrant neighbourhood of Clare-market and the
+Portugal-street burying-ground." Such was his polite designation of my
+whereabouts: for which nevertheless he had secret likings. "On the
+Portsmouth railway, coming here, encountered Kenyon. On the ditto ditto
+at Reigate, encountered young Dilke, and took him in tow to Canterbury.
+On the ditto ditto at ditto (meaning Reigate), encountered Fox, M. P.
+for Oldham, and his daughter. All within an hour. Young Dilke great
+about the proposed Exposition under the direction of H. R. H. Prince
+Albert, and evincing, very pleasantly to me, unbounded faith in our old
+friend his father." There was one more letter, taking a rather gloomy
+view of public affairs in connection with an inflated pastoral from
+Doctor Wiseman "given out of the Flaminian Gate," and speaking dolefully
+of some family matters; which was subscribed, each word forming a
+separate line, "Yours Despondently, And Disgustedly, Wilkins Micawber."
+
+His visit to the little watering-place in the following year was
+signalised by his completion of the most famous of his novels, and his
+letters otherwise were occupied by elaborate managerial preparation for
+the private performances at Knebworth. But again the plague of itinerant
+music flung him into such fevers of irritation, that he finally resolved
+against any renewed attempt to carry on important work here; and the
+summer of 1851, when he was only busy with miscellaneous writing, was
+the last of his regular residences in the place. He then let his London
+house for the brief remainder of its term; ran away at the end of May,
+when some grave family sorrows had befallen him, from the crowds and
+excitements of the Great Exhibition; and with intervals of absence,
+chiefly at the Guild representations, stayed in his favourite Fort-house
+by the sea until October, when he took possession of Tavistock-house.
+From his letters may be added a few notices of this last holiday at
+Broadstairs, which he had always afterwards a kindly word for; and to
+which he said pleasant adieu in the sketch of "Our Watering-place,"
+written shortly before he left.
+
+"It is more delightful here" (1st of June) "than I can express. Corn
+growing, larks singing, garden full of flowers, fresh air on the sea--O
+it is wonderful! Why can't you come down next Saturday (bringing work)
+and go back with me on Wednesday for the _Copperfield_ banquet?
+Concerning which, of course, I say yes to Talfourd's kind proposal.
+Lemon by all means. And--don't you think? Browne? Whosoever, besides,
+pleases Talfourd will please me." Great was the success of that banquet.
+The scene was the Star-and-Garter at Richmond; Thackeray and Alfred
+Tennyson joined in the celebration; and the generous giver was in his
+best vein. I have rarely seen Dickens happier than he was amid the
+sunshine of that day. Jerrold and Thackeray returned to town with us;
+and a little argument between them about money and its uses, led to an
+avowal of Dickens about himself to which I may add the confirmation of
+all our years of intercourse. "No man," he said, "attaches less
+importance to the possession of money, or less disparagement to the want
+of it, than I do."
+
+Vague mention of a "next book" escaped in a letter at the end of July,
+on which I counselled longer abstinence. "Good advice," he replied, "but
+difficult: I wish you'd come to us and preach another kind of
+abstinence. Fancy the Preventive men finding a lot of brandy in barrels
+on the rocks here, the day before yesterday! Nobody knows anything about
+the barrels, of course. They were intended to have been landed with the
+next tide, and to have been just covered at low water. But the water
+being unusually low, the tops of the barrels became revealed to
+Preventive telescopes, and descent was made upon the brandy. They are
+always at it, hereabouts, I have no doubt. And of course B would not
+have had any of it. O dear no! certainly not."
+
+His reading was considerable and very various at these intervals of
+labour, and in this particular summer took in all the minor tales as
+well as the plays of Voltaire, several of the novels (old favourites
+with him) of Paul de Kock, Ruskin's _Lamps of Architecture_, and a
+surprising number of books of African and other travel for which he had
+insatiable relish: but the notices of all this in his letters were few.
+"By the bye, I observe, reading that wonderful book the _French
+Revolution_ again, for the 500th time, that Carlyle, who knows
+everything, don't know what Mumbo Jumbo is. It is not an Idol. It is a
+secret preserved among the men of certain African tribes, and never
+revealed by any of them, for the punishment of their women. Mumbo Jumbo
+comes in hideous form out of the forest, or the mud, or the river, or
+where not, and flogs some woman who has been backbiting, or scolding, or
+with some other domestic mischief disturbing the general peace. Carlyle
+seems to confound him with the common Fetish; but he is quite another
+thing. He is a disguised man; and all about him is a freemasons' secret
+_among the men_."--"I finished the _Scarlet Letter_ yesterday. It falls
+off sadly after that fine opening scene. The psychological part of the
+story is very much over-done, and not truly done I think. Their
+suddenness of meeting and agreeing to go away together, after all those
+years, is very poor. Mr. Chillingworth ditto. The child out of nature
+altogether. And Mr. Dimmisdale certainly never could have begotten her."
+In Mr. Hawthorne's earlier books he had taken especial pleasure; his
+_Mosses from an Old Manse_ having been the first book he placed in my
+hands on his return from America, with reiterated injunctions to read
+it. I will add a word or two of what he wrote of the clever story of
+another popular writer, because it hits well the sort of ability that
+has become so common, which escapes the highest point of cleverness, but
+stops short only at the very verge of it. "The story extremely good
+indeed; but all the strongest things of which it is capable, missed. It
+shows just how far that kind of power can go. It is more like a note of
+the idea than anything else. It seems to me as if it were written by
+somebody who lived next door to the people, rather than inside of 'em."
+
+I joined him for the August regatta and stayed a pleasant fortnight. His
+paper on "Our Watering-place" appeared while I was there, and great was
+the local excitement. His own restlessness with fancies for a new book
+had now risen beyond bounds, and for the time he was eager to open it in
+that prettiest quaintest bit of English landscape, Strood valley, which
+reminded him always of a Swiss scene. I had not left him many days when
+these lines followed me. "I very nearly packed up a portmanteau and went
+away, the day before yesterday, into the mountains of Switzerland,
+alone! Still the victim of an intolerable restlessness, I shouldn't be
+at all surprised if I wrote to you one of these mornings from under Mont
+Blanc. I sit down between whiles to think of a new story, and, as it
+begins to grow, such a torment of a desire to be anywhere but where I
+am; and to be going I don't know where, I don't know why; takes hold of
+me, that it is like being _driven away_. If I had had a passport, I
+sincerely believe I should have gone to Switzerland the night before
+last. I should have remembered our engagement--say, at Paris, and have
+come back for it; but should probably have left by the next express
+train."
+
+At the end of November, when he had settled himself in his new London
+abode, the book was begun; and as generally happened with the more
+important incidents of his life, but always accidentally, begun on a
+Friday.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[153] My friend Mr. Shirley Brooks sends me a "characteristic" cutting
+from an autograph catalogue in which these few lines are given from an
+early letter in the Doughty-street days. "I always pay my taxes when
+they won't call any longer, in order to get a bad name in the parish and
+so escape all honours." It is a touch of character, certainly; but
+though his motive in later life was the same, his method was not. He
+attended to the tax-collector, but of any other parochial or political
+application took no notice whatever.
+
+[154] Even in the modest retirement of a note I fear that I shall offend
+the dignity of history, and of biography, by printing the lines in which
+this intention was announced to me. They were written "in character;"
+and the character was that of the "waterman" at the Charing-cross
+cabstand, first discovered by George Cattermole, whose imitations of him
+were a delight to Dickens at this time, and adapted themselves in the
+exuberance of his admiration to every conceivable variety of subject.
+The painter of the Derby Day will have a fullness of satisfaction in
+remembering this. "Sloppy" the hero in question, had a friend "Jack" in
+whom he was supposed to typify his own early and hard experiences before
+he became a convert to temperance; and Dickens used to point to "Jack"
+as the justification of himself and Mrs. Gamp for their portentous
+invention of Mrs. Harris. It is amazing nonsense to repeat; but to hear
+Cattermole, in the gruff hoarse accents of what seemed to be the remains
+of a deep bass voice wrapped up in wet straw, repeat the wild
+proceedings of Jack, was not to be forgotten. "Yes sir, Jack went mad
+sir, just afore he 'stablished hisself by Sir Robert Peel's-s-s, sir. He
+was allis a callin' for a pint o' beer sir, and they brings him water
+sir. Yes sir. And so sir, I sees him dodgin' about one day sir, yes sir,
+and at last he gits a hopportunity sir and claps a pitch-plaster on the
+mouth o' th' pump sir, and says he's done for his wust henemy sir. Yes
+sir. And then they finds him a-sittin' on the top o' the corn-chest sir,
+yes sir, a crammin' a old pistol with wisps o' hay and horse-beans sir,
+and swearin' he's a goin' to blow hisself to hattoms, yes sir, but he
+doesn't, no sir. For I sees him arterwards a lyin' on the straw a
+manifacktrin' Bengal cheroots out o' corn-chaff sir and swearin' he'd
+make 'em smoke sir, but they hulloxed him off round by the corner of
+Drummins's-s-s-s-s-s sir, just afore I come here sir, yes sir. And so
+you never see'd us together sir, no sir." This was the remarkable
+dialect in which Dickens wrote from Broadstairs on the 13th of July.
+"About Saturday sir?--Why sir, I'm a-going to _Folkestone_ a Saturday
+sir!--not on accounts of the manifacktring of Bengal cheroots as there
+is there but for the survayin' o' the coast sir. 'Cos you see sir, bein'
+here sir, and not a finishin' my work sir till to-morrow sir, I couldn't
+go afore! And if I wos to come home, and not go, and come back agin sir,
+wy it would be nat'rally a hulloxing of myself sir. Yes sir. Wy sir, I
+b'lieve that the gent as is a goin' to 'stablish hisself sir, in the
+autumn, along with me round the corner sir (by Drummins's-s-s-s-s-s
+bank) is a comin' down to Folkestone Saturday arternoon--Leech by name
+sir--yes sir--another Jack sir--and if you wos to come down along with
+him sir by the train as gits to Folkestone twenty minutes arter five,
+you'd find me a smoking a Bengal cheroot (made of clover-chaff and
+horse-beans sir) on the platform. You couldn't spend your arternoon
+better sir. Dover, Sandgate, Herne Bay--they're all to be wisited sir,
+most probable, till such times as a 'ouse is found sir. Yes sir. Then
+decide to come sir, and say you will, and do it. I shall be here till
+arter post time Saturday mornin' sir. Come on then!
+
+ "SLOPPY
+ "His x mark."
+
+[155] It stood originally thus: "'Do you recollect the date,' said Mr.
+Dick, looking earnestly at me, and taking up his pen to note it down,
+'when that bull got into the china warehouse and did so much mischief?'
+I was very much surprised by the inquiry; but remembering a song about
+such an occurrence that was once popular at Salem House, and thinking he
+might want to quote it, replied that I believed it was on St. Patrick's
+Day. 'Yes, I know,' said Mr. Dick--'in the morning; but what year?' I
+could give no information on this point." Original MS. of _Copperfield_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+HAUNTED MAN AND HOUSEHOLD WORDS.
+
+1848-1850.
+
+ Friendly Plea for Mr. Macrone--Completion of
+ Christmas Tale--The "Ghost" Story and the
+ "Bargain"--The Tetterby Family--Moral of the
+ Story--_Copperfield_ Sales--Letter from
+ Russia--The Periodical taking Form--Hopes of
+ Success--Doubts respecting it--New Design
+ chosen--Names proposed--Appearance of First
+ Number--Earliest Contributors--His Opinion of
+ Mr. Sala--Child's Dream of a Star--A Fancy
+ derived from his Childhood.
+
+
+IT has been seen that his fancy for his Christmas book of 1848 first
+arose to him at Lausanne in the summer of 1846, and that, after writing
+its opening pages in the autumn of the following year, he laid it aside
+under the pressure of his _Dombey_. These lines were in the letter that
+closed his 1848 Broadstairs holiday. "At last I am a mentally matooring
+of the Christmas book--or, as poor Macrone[156] used to write, 'booke,'
+'boke,' 'buke,' &c." It was the first labour to which he applied himself
+at his return.
+
+In London it soon came to maturity; was published duly as _The Haunted
+Man, or the Ghost's Bargain_; sold largely, beginning with a
+subscription of twenty thousand; and had a great success on the Adelphi
+stage, to which it was rather cleverly adapted by Lemon. He had placed
+on its title page originally four lines from Tennyson's "Departure,"
+
+ "And o'er the hills, and far away
+ Beyond their utmost purple rim,
+ Beyond the night, across the day,
+ Thro' all the world IT follow'd him;"
+
+but they were less applicable to the close than to the opening of the
+tale, and were dropped before publication. The hero is a great chemist,
+a lecturer at an old foundation, a man of studious philosophic habits,
+haunted with recollections of the past "o'er which his melancholy sits
+on brood," thinking his knowledge of the present a worthier substitute,
+and at last parting with that portion of himself which he thinks he can
+safely cast away. The recollections are of a great wrong done him in
+early life, and of all the sorrow consequent upon it; and the ghost he
+holds nightly conference with, is the darker presentiment of himself
+embodied in those bitter recollections. This part is finely managed. Out
+of heaped-up images of gloomy and wintry fancies, the supernatural takes
+a shape which is not forced or violent; and the dialogue which is no
+dialogue, but a kind of dreary dreamy echo, is a piece of ghostly
+imagination better than Mrs. Radcliffe. The boon desired is granted and
+the bargain struck. He is not only to lose his own recollection of grief
+and wrong, but to destroy the like memory in all whom he approaches. By
+this means the effect is shown in humble as well as higher minds, in the
+worst poverty as in competence or ease, always with the same result. The
+over-thinking sage loses his own affections and sympathy, sees them
+crushed in others, and is brought to the level of the only creature whom
+he cannot change or influence, an outcast of the streets, a boy whom the
+mere animal appetites have turned into a small fiend. Never having had
+his mind awakened, evil is this creature's good; avarice, irreverence,
+and vindictiveness, are his nature; sorrow has no place in his memory;
+and from his brutish propensities the philosopher can take nothing away.
+The juxtaposition of two people whom such opposite means have put in
+the same moral position is a stroke of excellent art. There are plenty
+of incredibilities and inconsistencies, just as in the pleasant _Cricket
+on the Hearth_, which one does not care about, but enjoy rather than
+otherwise; and, as in that charming little book, there were minor
+characters as delightful as anything in Dickens. The Tetterby group, in
+whose humble, homely, kindly, ungainly figures there is everything that
+could suggest itself to a clear eye, a piercing wit, and a loving heart,
+became enormous favourites. Tilly Slowboy and her little dot of a baby,
+charging folks with it as if it were an offensive instrument, or handing
+it about as if it were something to drink, were not more popular than
+poor Johnny Tetterby staggering under his Moloch of an infant, the
+Juggernaut that crushes all his enjoyments. The story itself consists of
+nothing more than the effects of the Ghost's gift upon the various
+groups of people introduced, and the way the end is arrived at is very
+specially in Dickens's manner. What the highest exercise of the
+intellect had missed is found in the simplest form of the affections.
+The wife of the custodian of the college where the chemist is professor,
+in whom are all the unselfish virtues that can beautify and endear the
+humblest condition, is the instrument of the change. Such sorrow as she
+had suffered had made her only zealous to relieve others' sufferings:
+and the discontented wise man learns from her example that the world is,
+after all, a much happier compromise than it seems to be, and life
+easier than wisdom is apt to think it; that grief gives joy its relish,
+purifying what it touches truly; and that "sweet are the uses of
+adversity" when its clouds are not the shadow of dishonour. All this
+can be shown but lightly within such space, it is true; and in the
+machinery a good deal has to be taken for granted. But Dickens was quite
+justified in turning aside from objections of that kind. "You must
+suppose," he wrote to me (21st of November), "that the Ghost's saving
+clause gives him those glimpses without which it would be impossible to
+carry out the idea. Of course my point is that bad and good are
+inextricably linked in remembrance, and that you could not choose the
+enjoyment of recollecting only the good. To have all the best of it you
+must remember the worst also. My intention in the other point you
+mention is, that he should not know himself how he communicates the
+gift, whether by look or touch; and that it should diffuse itself in its
+own way in each case. I can make this clearer by a very few lines in the
+second part. It is not only necessary to be so, for the variety of the
+story, but I think it makes the thing wilder and stranger." Critical
+niceties are indeed out of place, where wildness and strangeness in the
+means matter less than that there should be clearness in the drift and
+intention. Dickens leaves no doubt as to this. He thoroughly makes out
+his fancy, that no man should so far question the mysterious
+dispensations of evil in this world as to desire to lose the
+recollection of such injustice or misery as he may suppose it to have
+done to himself. There may have been sorrow, but there was the kindness
+that assuaged it; there may have been wrong, but there was the charity
+that forgave it; and with both are connected inseparably so many
+thoughts that soften and exalt whatever else is in the sense of memory,
+that what is good and pleasurable in life would cease to continue so if
+these were forgotten. The old proverb does not tell you to forget that
+you may forgive, but to forgive that you may forget. It is forgiveness
+of wrong, for forgetfulness of the evil that was in it; such as poor old
+Lear begged of Cordelia.
+
+The design for his much-thought-of new Periodical was still "dim," as we
+have seen, when the first cogitation of it at Bonchurch occupied him;
+but the expediency of making it clearer came soon after with a visit
+from Mr. Evans, who brought his half-year's accounts of sales, and some
+small disappointment for him in those of _Copperfield_. "The accounts
+are rather shy, after _Dombey_, and what you said comes true after all.
+I am not sorry I cannot bring myself to care much for what opinions
+people may form; and I have a strong belief, that, if any of my books
+are read years hence, _Dombey_ will be remembered as among the best of
+them: but passing influences are important for the time, and as
+_Chuzzlewit_ with its small sale sent me up, _Dombey's_ large sale has
+tumbled me down. Not very much, however, in real truth. These accounts
+only include the first three numbers, have of course been burdened with
+all the heavy expenses of number one, and ought not in reason to be
+complained of. But it is clear to me that the Periodical must be set
+agoing in the spring; and I have already been busy, at odd half-hours,
+in shadowing forth a name and an idea. Evans says they have but one
+opinion repeated to them of _Copperfield_, and they feel very confident
+about it. A steady twenty-five thousand, which it is now on the verge
+of, will do very well. The back numbers are always going off. Read the
+enclosed."
+
+It was a letter from a Russian man of letters, dated from St. Petersburg
+and signed "Trinarch Ivansvitch Wredenskii," sending him a translation
+of _Dombey_ into Russian; and informing him that his works, which before
+had only been translated in the journals, and with certain omissions,
+had now been translated in their entire form by his correspondent,
+though even he had found an omission to be necessary in his version of
+_Pickwick_. He adds, with an exquisite courtesy to our national tongue
+which is yet not forgetful of the claims of his own nationality, that
+his difficulties (in the Sam Weller direction and others) had arisen
+from the "impossibility of portraying faithfully the beauties of the
+original in the Russian language, which, though the richest in Europe in
+its expressiveness, is far from being elaborate enough for literature
+like other civilized languages." He had however, he assured Dickens,
+been unremitting in his efforts to live with his thoughts; and the
+exalted opinion he had formed of them was attended by only one wish,
+that such a writer "could but have expanded under a Russian sky!" Still,
+his fate was an enviable one. "For the last eleven years your name has
+enjoyed a wide celebrity in Russia, and from the banks of the Neva to
+the remotest parts of Siberia you are read with avidity. Your _Dombey_
+continues to inspire with enthusiasm the whole of the literary Russia."
+Much did we delight in the good Wredenskii; and for a long time, on
+anything going "contrairy" in the public or private direction with him,
+he would tell me he had ordered his portmanteau to be packed for the
+more sympathizing and congenial climate of "the remotest parts of
+Siberia."
+
+The week before he left Bonchurch I again had news of the old and often
+recurring fancy. "The old notion of the Periodical, which has been
+agitating itself in my mind for so long, I really think is at last
+gradually growing into form." That was on the 24th of September; and on
+the 7th of October, from Broadstairs, I had something of the form it had
+been taking. "I do great injustice to my floating ideas (pretty speedily
+and comfortably settling down into orderly arrangement) by saying
+anything about the Periodical now: but my notion is a weekly journal,
+price either three-halfpence or two-pence, matter in part original and
+in part selected, and always having, if possible, a little good
+poetry. . . . Upon the selected matter, I have particular notions. One is,
+that it should always be _a subject_. For example, a history of Piracy;
+in connexion with which there is a vast deal of extraordinary, romantic,
+and almost unknown matter. A history of Knight-errantry, and the wild
+old notion of the Sangreal. A history of Savages, showing the singular
+respects in which all savages are like each other; and those in which
+civilised men, under circumstances of difficulty, soonest become like
+savages. A history of remarkable characters, good and bad, _in_ history;
+to assist the reader's judgment in his observation of men, and in his
+estimates of the truth of many characters in fiction. All these things,
+and fifty others that I have already thought of, would be compilations;
+through the whole of which the general intellect and purpose of the
+paper should run, and in which there would be scarcely less interest
+than in the original matter. The original matter to be essays, reviews,
+letters, theatrical criticisms, &c, &c, as amusing as possible, but all
+distinctly and boldly going to what in one's own view ought to be the
+spirit of the people and the time. . . . Now to bind all this together, and
+to get a character established as it were which any of the writers may
+maintain without difficulty, I want to suppose a certain SHADOW, which
+may go into any place, by sunlight, moonlight, starlight, firelight,
+candlelight, and be in all homes, and all nooks and corners, and be
+supposed to be cognisant of everything, and go everywhere, without the
+least difficulty. Which may be in the Theatre, the Palace, the House of
+Commons, the Prisons, the Unions, the Churches, on the Railroad, on the
+Sea, abroad and at home: a kind of semi-omniscient, omnipresent,
+intangible creature. I don't think it would do to call the paper THE
+SHADOW: but I want something tacked to that title, to express the notion
+of its being a cheerful, useful, and always welcome Shadow. I want to
+open the first number with this Shadow's account of himself and his
+family. I want to have all the correspondence addressed to him. I want
+him to issue his warnings from time to time, that he is going to fall on
+such and such a subject; or to expose such and such a piece of humbug;
+or that he may be expected shortly in such and such a place. I want the
+compiled part of the paper to express the idea of this Shadow's having
+been in libraries, and among the books referred to. I want him to loom
+as a fanciful thing all over London; and to get up a general notion of
+'What will the Shadow say about this, I wonder? What will the Shadow
+say about that? Is the Shadow here?' and so forth. Do you understand? . . .
+I have an enormous difficulty in expressing what I mean, in this stage
+of the business; but I think the importance of the idea is, that once
+stated on paper, there is no difficulty in keeping it up. That it
+presents an odd, unsubstantial, whimsical, new thing: a sort of
+previously unthought-of Power going about. That it will concentrate into
+one focus all that is done in the paper. That it sets up a creature
+which isn't the Spectator, and isn't Isaac Bickerstaff, and isn't
+anything of that kind: but in which people will be perfectly willing to
+believe, and which is just mysterious and quaint enough to have a sort
+of charm for their imagination, while it will represent common-sense and
+humanity. I want to express in the title, and in the grasp of the idea
+to express also, that it is the Thing at everybody's elbow, and in
+everybody's footsteps. At the window, by the fire, in the street, in the
+house, from infancy to old age, everyone's inseparable companion. . . . Now
+do you make anything out of this? which I let off as if I were a bladder
+full of it, and you had punctured me. I have not breathed the idea to
+any one; but I have a lively hope that it _is_ an idea, and that out of
+it the whole scheme may be hammered."
+
+Excellent the idea doubtless, and so described in his letter that hardly
+anything more characteristic survives him. But I could not make anything
+out of it that had a quite feasible look. The ordinary ground of
+miscellaneous reading, selection, and compilation out of which it was to
+spring, seemed to me no proper soil for the imaginative produce it was
+meant to bear. As his fancies grew and gathered round it, they had given
+it too much of the range and scope of his own exhaustless land of
+invention and marvel; and the very means proposed for letting in the
+help of others would only more heavily have weighted himself. Not to
+trouble the reader now with objections given him in detail, my judgment
+was clear against his plan; less for any doubt of the effect if its
+parts could be brought to combine, than for my belief that it was not in
+that view practicable; and though he did not immediately accept my
+reasons, he acquiesced in them ultimately. "I do not lay much stress on
+your grave doubts about Periodical, but more anon." The more anon
+resolved itself into conversations out of which the shape given to the
+project was that which it finally took.
+
+It was to be a weekly miscellany of general literature; and its stated
+objects were to be, to contribute to the entertainment and instruction
+of all classes of readers, and to help in the discussion of the more
+important social questions of the time. It was to comprise short stories
+by others as well as himself; matters of passing interest in the
+liveliest form that could be given to them; subjects suggested by books
+that might most be attracting attention; and poetry in every number if
+possible, but in any case something of romantic fancy. This was to be a
+cardinal point. There was to be no mere utilitarian spirit; with all
+familiar things, but especially those repellent on the surface,
+something was to be connected that should be fanciful or kindly; and the
+hardest workers were to be taught that their lot is not necessarily
+excluded from the sympathies and graces of imagination. This was all
+finally settled by the close of 1849, when a general announcement of the
+intended adventure was made. There remained only a title and an
+assistant editor; and I am happy now to remember that for the latter
+important duty Mr. Wills was chosen at my suggestion. He discharged his
+duties with admirable patience and ability for twenty years, and
+Dickens's later life had no more intimate friend.
+
+The title took some time and occupied many letters. One of the first
+thought-of has now the curious interest of having foreshadowed, by the
+motto proposed to accompany it, the title of the series of _All the Year
+Round_ which he was led to substitute for the older series in 1859. "THE
+ROBIN. With this motto from Goldsmith. '_The redbreast, celebrated for
+its affection to mankind, continues with us, the year round._'" That
+however was rejected. Then came: "MANKIND. This I think very good." It
+followed the other nevertheless. After it came: "And here a strange
+idea, but with decided advantages. 'CHARLES DICKENS. A weekly journal
+designed for the instruction and entertainment of all classes of
+readers. CONDUCTED BY HIMSELF.'" Still, there was something wanting in
+that also. Next day arrived: "I really think if there _be_ anything
+wanting in the other name, that this is very pretty, and just supplies
+it. THE HOUSEHOLD VOICE. I have thought of many others, as--THE
+HOUSEHOLD GUEST. THE HOUSEHOLD FACE. THE COMRADE. THE MICROSCOPE. THE
+HIGHWAY OF LIFE. THE LEVER. THE ROLLING YEARS. THE HOLLY TREE (with two
+lines from Southey for a motto). EVERYTHING, But I rather think the
+VOICE is it." It was near indeed; but the following day came, "HOUSEHOLD
+WORDS. This is a very pretty name:" and the choice was made.
+
+The first number appeared on Saturday the 30th of March 1850, and
+contained among other things the beginning of a story by a very original
+writer, Mrs. Gaskell, for whose powers he had a high admiration, and
+with whom he had friendly intercourse during many years. Other
+opportunities will arise for mention of those with whom this new labour
+brought him into personal communication, but I may at once say that of
+all the writers, before unknown, whom his journal helped to make
+familiar to a wide world of readers, he had the strongest personal
+interest in Mr. Sala, and placed at once in the highest rank his
+capabilities of help in such an enterprise.[157] An illustrative trait
+of what I have named as its cardinal point to him will fitly close my
+account of its establishment. Its first number, still unpublished, had
+not seemed to him quite to fulfil his promise, "tenderly to cherish the
+light of fancy inherent in all breasts;" and, as soon as he received
+the proof of the second, I heard from him. "Looking over the suggested
+contents of number two at breakfast this morning" (Brighton: 14th of
+March 1850) "I felt an uneasy sense of there being a want of something
+tender, which would apply to some universal household knowledge. Coming
+down in the railroad the other night (always a wonderfully suggestive
+place to me when I am alone) I was looking at the stars, and revolving a
+little idea about them. Putting now these two things together, I wrote
+the enclosed little paper, straightway; and should like you to read it
+before you send it to the printers (it will not take you five minutes),
+and let me have a proof by return." This was the child's "dream of a
+star," which opened his second number; and, not appearing among his
+reprinted pieces, may justify a word or two of description. It is of a
+brother and sister, constant child-companions, who used to make friends
+of a star, watching it together until they knew when and where it would
+rise, and always bidding it good-night; so that when the sister dies the
+lonely brother still connects her with the star, which he then sees
+opening as a world of light, and its rays making a shining pathway from
+earth to heaven; and he also sees angels waiting to receive travellers
+up that sparkling road, his little sister among them; and he thinks ever
+after that he belongs less to the earth than to the star where his
+sister is; and he grows up to youth and through manhood and old age,
+consoled still under the successive domestic bereavements that fall to
+his earthly lot by renewal of that vision of his childhood; until at
+last, lying on his own bed of death, he feels that he is moving as a
+child to his child-sister, and he thanks his heavenly father that the
+star had so often opened before to receive the dear ones who awaited
+him.
+
+His sister Fanny and himself, he told me long before this paper was
+written, used to wander at night about a churchyard near their house,
+looking up at the stars; and her early death, of which I am now to
+speak, had vividly reawakened all the childish associations which made
+her memory dear to him.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[156] The mention of this name may remind me to state that I have
+received, in reference to the account in my first volume of Dickens's
+repurchase of his _Sketches_ from Mr. Macrone, a letter from the
+solicitor and friend of that gentleman so expressed that I could have
+greatly wished to revise my narrative into nearer agreement with its
+writer's wish. But farther enquiry, and an examination of the books of
+Messrs. Chapman and Hall, have confirmed the statement given. Mr.
+Hansard is in error in supposing that "unsold impressions" of the books
+were included in the transaction (the necessary requirement being simply
+that the small remainders on hand should be transferred with a view to
+being "wasted"): I know myself that it could not have included any
+supposed right of Mr. Macrone to have a novel written for him, because
+upon that whole matter, and his continued unauthorised advertisements of
+the tale, I decided myself the reference against him: and Mr. Hansard
+may be assured that the L2000 was paid for the copyright alone. For the
+same copyright, a year before, Dickens had received L250, both the first
+and second series being included in the payment; and he had already had
+about the same sum as his half share of the profits of sales. I quote
+the close of Mr. Hansard's letter. "Macrone no doubt was an adventurer,
+but he was sanguine to the highest degree. He was a dreamer of dreams,
+putting no restraint on his exultant hopes by the reflection that he was
+not dealing justly towards others. But reproach has fallen upon him from
+wrong quarters. He died in poverty, and his creditors received nothing
+from his estate. But that was because he had paid away all he had, and
+all he had derived from trust and credit, _to authors_." This may have
+been so, but Dickens was not among the authors so benefited. The
+_Sketches_ repurchased for the high price I have named never afterwards
+really justified such an outlay.
+
+[157] Mr. Sala's first paper appeared in September 1851, and in the same
+month of the following year I had an allusion in a letter from Dickens
+which I shall hope to have Mr. Sala's forgiveness for printing. "That
+was very good indeed of Sala's" (some essay he had written). "He was
+twenty guineas in advance, by the bye, and I told Wills delicately to
+make him a present of it. I find him a very conscientious fellow. When
+he gets money ahead, he is not like the imbecile youth who so often do
+the like in Wellington-street" (the office of _Household Words_) "and
+walk off, but only works more industriously. I think he improves with
+everything he does. He looks sharply at the alterations in his articles,
+I observe; and takes the hint next time."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+LAST YEARS IN DEVONSHIRE TERRACE.
+
+1848-1851.
+
+ Sentiment about Places--Personal
+ Revelations--At his Sister's Sick-bed--Sister's
+ Death--Book to be written in First
+ Person--Visiting the Scene of a Tragedy--First
+ sees Yarmouth--Birth of Sixth Son--Title of
+ _Copperfield_ chosen--Difficulties of
+ Opening--Memorable Dinner--Rogers and
+ Benedict--Wit of Fonblanque--Procter and
+ Macready--The Sheridans--Dinner to Halevy and
+ Scribe--Expedition with Lord Mulgrave--The Duke
+ at Vauxhall--Carlyle and Thackeray--Marryat's
+ Delight with Children--Monckton Milnes and Lord
+ Lytton--Lords Dudley, Stuart, and
+ Nugent--Kemble, Harness, and Dyce--Mrs. Siddons
+ and John Kemble--Mazzini and Edinburgh
+ Friends--Artist Acquaintance--Friends from
+ America--M. Van de Weyer--Doubtful
+ Compliment--A Hint for London Citizens--Letter
+ against Public Executions--An American Observer
+ in England--Marvels of English Manners--Letter
+ from Rockingham--Private Theatricals--A Family
+ Scene--Death of Francis Jeffrey--Progress of
+ _Copperfield_--A Run to Paris--Third Daughter
+ born--At Great Malvern--Macready's
+ Farewell--The Home at Shepherd's-bush--Death of
+ John Dickens--Tribute by his
+ Son--Theatrical-fund Dinner--Plea for Small
+ Actors--Death of his Little
+ Daughter--Advocating Sanitary Reform--Lord
+ Shaftesbury--Realities of his Books to Dickens.
+
+
+EXCEPTING always the haunts and associations of his childhood, Dickens
+had no particular sentiment of locality, and any special regard for
+houses he had lived in was not a thing noticeable in him. But he cared
+most for Devonshire-terrace, perhaps for the bit of ground attached to
+it; and it was with regret he suddenly discovered, at the close of
+1847, that he should have to resign it "next lady-day three years. I had
+thought the lease two years more." To that brief remaining time belong
+some incidents of which I have still to give account; and I connect them
+with the house in which he lived during the progress of what is
+generally thought his greatest book, and of what I think were his
+happiest years.
+
+We had never had such intimate confidences as in the interval since his
+return from Paris; but these have been used in my narrative of the
+childhood and boyish experiences, and what remain are incidental only.
+Of the fragment of autobiography there also given, the origin has been
+told; but the intention of leaving such a record had been in his mind,
+we now see, at an earlier date; and it was the very depth of our
+interest in the opening of his fragment that led to the larger design in
+which it became absorbed. "I hardly know why I write this," was his own
+comment on one of his personal revelations, "but the more than
+friendship which has grown between us seems to force it on me in my
+present mood. We shall speak of it all, you and I, Heaven grant, wisely
+and wonderingly many and many a time in after years. In the meanwhile I
+am more at rest for having opened all my heart and mind to you. . . . This
+day eleven years, poor dear Mary died."[158]
+
+That was written on the seventh of May 1848, but another sadness
+impending at the time was taking his thoughts still farther back; to
+when he trotted about with his little elder sister in the small garden
+to the house at Portsea. The faint hope for her which Elliotson had
+given him in Paris had since completely broken down; and I was to hear,
+in less than two months after the letter just quoted, how nearly the end
+was come. "A change took place in poor Fanny," he wrote on the 5th of
+July, "about the middle of the day yesterday, which took me out there
+last night. Her cough suddenly ceased almost, and, strange to say, she
+immediately became aware of her hopeless state; to which she resigned
+herself, after an hour's unrest and struggle, with extraordinary
+sweetness and constancy. The irritability passed, and all hope faded
+away; though only two nights before, she had been planning for 'after
+Christmas.' She is greatly changed. I had a long interview with her
+to-day, alone; and when she had expressed some wishes about the funeral,
+and her being buried in unconsecrated ground" (Mr. Burnett's family were
+dissenters), "I asked her whether she had any care or anxiety in the
+world. She said No, none. It was hard to die at such a time of life, but
+she had no alarm whatever in the prospect of the change; felt sure we
+should meet again in a better world; and although they had said she
+might rally for a time, did not really wish it. She said she was quite
+calm and happy, relied upon the mediation of Christ, and had no terror
+at all. She had worked very hard, even when ill; but believed that was
+in her nature, and neither regretted nor complained of it. Burnett had
+been always very good to her; they had never quarrelled; she was sorry
+to think of his going back to such a lonely home; and was distressed
+about her children, but not painfully so. She showed me how thin and
+worn she was; spoke about an invention she had heard of that she would
+like to have tried, for the deformed child's back; called to my
+remembrance all our sister Letitia's patience and steadiness; and,
+though she shed tears sometimes, clearly impressed upon me that her mind
+was made up, and at rest. I asked her very often, if she could ever
+recall anything that she could leave to my doing, to put it down, or
+mention it to somebody if I was not there; and she said she would, but
+she firmly believed that there was nothing--nothing. Her husband being
+young, she said, and her children infants, she could not help thinking
+sometimes, that it would be very long in the course of nature before
+they were reunited; but she knew that was a mere human fancy, and could
+have no reality after she was dead. Such an affecting exhibition of
+strength and tenderness, in all that early decay, is quite
+indescribable. I need not tell you how it moved me. I cannot look round
+upon the dear children here, without some misgiving that this sad
+disease will not perish out of our blood with her; but I am sure I have
+no selfishness in the thought, and God knows how small the world looks
+to one who comes out of such a sick-room on a bright summer day. I don't
+know why I write this before going to bed. I only know that in the very
+pity and grief of my heart, I feel as if it were doing something." After
+not many weeks she died, and the little child who was her last anxiety
+did not long survive her.
+
+In all the latter part of the year Dickens's thoughts were turning much
+to the form his next book should assume. A suggestion that he should
+write it in the first person, by way of change, had been thrown out by
+me, which he took at once very gravely; and this, with other things,
+though as yet not dreaming of any public use of his own personal and
+private recollections, conspired to bring about that resolve. The
+determination once taken, with what a singular truthfulness he contrived
+to blend the fact with the fiction may be shown by a small occurrence of
+this time. It has been inferred, from the vividness of the
+boy-impressions of Yarmouth in David's earliest experiences, that the
+place must have been familiar to his own boyhood: but the truth was that
+at the close of 1848 he first saw that celebrated sea-port. One of its
+earlier months had been signalised by an adventure in which Leech,
+Lemon, and myself took part with him, when, obtaining horses from
+Salisbury, we passed the whole of a March day in riding over every part
+of the Plain; visiting Stonehenge, and exploring Hazlitt's "hut" at
+Winterslow, birthplace of some of his finest essays; altogether with so
+brilliant a success that now (13th of November) he proposed to "repeat
+the Salisbury Plain idea in a new direction in mid-winter, to wit,
+Blackgang Chine in the Isle of Wight, with dark winter cliffs and
+roaring oceans." But mid-winter brought with it too much dreariness of
+its own, to render these stormy accompaniments to it very palatable; and
+on the last day of the year he bethought him "it would be better to make
+an outburst to some old cathedral city we don't know, and what do you
+say to Norwich and Stanfield-hall?" Thither accordingly the three
+friends went, illness at the last disabling me; and of the result I
+heard (12th of January, 1849) that Stanfield-hall, the scene of a recent
+frightful tragedy, had nothing attractive unless the term might be
+applied to "a murderous look that seemed to invite such a crime. We
+arrived," continued Dickens, "between the Hall and Potass farm, as the
+search was going on for the pistol in a manner so consummately stupid,
+that there was nothing on earth to prevent any of Rush's labourers from
+accepting five pounds from Rush junior to find the weapon and give it to
+him. Norwich, a disappointment" (one pleasant face "transformeth a
+city," but he was unable yet to connect it with our delightful friend
+Elwin); "all save its place of execution, which we found fit for a
+gigantic scoundrel's exit. But the success of the trip, for me, was to
+come. Yarmouth, sir, where we went afterwards, is the strangest place in
+the wide world: one hundred and forty-six miles of hill-less marsh
+between it and London. More when we meet. I shall certainly try my hand
+at it." He made it the home of his "little Em'ly."
+
+Everything now was taking that direction with him; and soon, to give his
+own account of it, his mind was upon names "running like a high sea."
+Four days after the date of the last-quoted letter ("all over happily,
+thank God, by four o'clock this morning") there came the birth of his
+eighth child and sixth son; whom at first he meant to call by Oliver
+Goldsmith's name, but settled afterwards into that of Henry Fielding;
+and to whom that early friend Ainsworth who had first made us known to
+each other, welcome and pleasant companion always, was asked to be
+godfather. Telling me of the change in the name of the little fellow,
+which he had made in a kind of homage to the style of work he was now so
+bent on beginning, he added, "What should you think of this for a notion
+of a character? 'Yes, that is very true: but now, _What's his motive?_'
+I fancy I could make something like it into a kind of amusing and more
+innocent Pecksniff. 'Well now, yes--no doubt that was a fine thing to
+do! But now, stop a moment, let us see--_What's his motive?_'" Here
+again was but one of the many outward signs of fancy and fertility that
+accompanied the outset of all his more important books; though, as in
+their cases also, other moods of the mind incident to such beginnings
+were less favourable. "Deepest despondency, as usual, in commencing,
+besets me;" is the opening of the letter in which he speaks of what of
+course was always one of his first anxieties, the selection of a name.
+In this particular instance he had been undergoing doubts and misgivings
+to more than the usual degree. It was not until the 23rd of February he
+got to anything like the shape of a feasible title. "I should like to
+know how the enclosed (one of those I have been thinking of) strikes
+you, on a first acquaintance with it. It is odd, I think, and new; but
+it may have A's difficulty of being 'too comic, my boy.' I suppose I
+should have to add, though, by way of motto, 'And in short it led to the
+very Mag's Diversions. _Old Saying._' Or would it be better, there being
+equal authority for either, 'And in short they all played Mag's
+Diversions. _Old Saying?_'
+
+ _Mag's Diversions._
+ Being the personal history of
+ MR. THOMAS MAG THE YOUNGER,
+ Of Blunderstone House."
+
+This was hardly satisfactory, I thought; and it soon became apparent
+that he thought so too, although within the next three days I had it in
+three other forms. "_Mag's Diversions_, being the Personal History,
+Adventures, Experience and Observation of Mr. David Mag the Younger, of
+Blunderstone House." The second omitted Adventures, and called his hero
+Mr. David Mag the Younger, of Copperfield House. The third made nearer
+approach to what the destinies were leading him to, and transformed Mr.
+David Mag into Mr. David Copperfield the Younger and his great-aunt
+Margaret; retaining still as his leading title, _Mag's Diversions_. It
+is singular that it should never have occurred to him, while the name
+was thus strangely as by accident bringing itself together, that the
+initials were but his own reversed; but he was much startled when I
+pointed this out, and protested it was just in keeping with the fates
+and chances which were always befalling him. "Why else," he said,
+"should I so obstinately have kept to that name when once it turned up?"
+
+It was quite true that he did so, as I had curious proof following close
+upon the heels of that third proposal. "I wish," he wrote on the 26th of
+February, "you would look over carefully the titles now enclosed, and
+tell me to which you most incline. You will see that they give up _Mag_
+altogether, and refer exclusively to one name--that which I last sent
+you. I doubt whether I could, on the whole, get a better name.
+
+ "1. _The Copperfield Disclosures._ Being the
+ personal history, experience, and observation,
+ of Mr. David Copperfield the Younger, of
+ Blunderstone House.
+
+ "2. _The Copperfield Records._ Being the
+ personal history, experience, and observation,
+ of Mr. David Copperfield the Younger, of
+ Copperfield Cottage.
+
+ "3. _The Last Living Speech and Confession of
+ David Copperfield Junior_, of Blunderstone
+ Lodge, who was never executed at the Old
+ Bailey. Being his personal history found among
+ his papers.
+
+ "4. _The Copperfield Survey of the World as it
+ Rolled._ Being the personal history,
+ experience, and observation, of David
+ Copperfield the Younger, of Blunderstone
+ Rookery.
+
+ "5. _The Last Will and Testament of Mr. David
+ Copperfield._ Being his personal history left
+ as a legacy.
+
+ "6. _Copperfield, Complete._ Being the whole
+ personal history and experience of Mr. David
+ Copperfield of Blunderstone House, which he
+ never meant to be published on any account.
+
+Or, the opening words of No. 6 might be _Copperfield's Entire_; and _The
+Copperfield Confessions_ might open Nos. 1 and 2. Now, WHAT SAY YOU?"
+
+What I said is to be inferred from what he wrote back on the 28th. "The
+_Survey_ has been my favourite from the first. Kate picked it out from
+the rest, without my saying anything about it. Georgy too. You hit upon
+it, on the first glance. Therefore I have no doubt that it is
+indisputably the best title; and I will stick to it." There was a change
+nevertheless. His completion of the second chapter defined to himself,
+more clearly than before, the character of the book; and the propriety
+of rejecting everything not strictly personal from the name given to it.
+The words proposed, therefore, became ultimately these only: "The
+Personal History, Adventures, Experience, and Observation of David
+Copperfield the Younger, of Blunderstone Rookery, which he never meant
+to be published on any account." And the letter which told me that with
+this name it was finally to be launched on the first of May, told me
+also (19th April) the difficulties that still beset him at the opening.
+"My hand is out in the matter of _Copperfield_. To-day and yesterday I
+have done nothing. Though I know what I want to do, I am lumbering on
+like a stage-waggon. I can't even dine at the Temple to-day, I feel it
+so important to stick at it this evening, and make some head. I am quite
+aground; quite a literary Benedict, as he appeared when his heels
+wouldn't stay upon the carpet; and the long Copperfieldian perspective
+looks snowy and thick, this fine morning."[159] The allusion was to a
+dinner at his house the night before; when not only Rogers had to be
+borne out, having fallen sick at the table, but, as we rose soon after
+to quit the dining-room, Mr. Jules Benedict had quite suddenly followed
+the poet's lead, and fallen prostrate on the carpet in the midst of us.
+Amid the general consternation there seemed a want of proper attendance
+on the sick: the distinguished musician faring in this respect hardly so
+well as the famous bard, by whose protracted sufferings in the library,
+whither he had been removed, the sanitary help available on the
+establishment was still absorbed; and as Dickens had been eloquent
+during dinner on the atrocities of a pauper-farming case at Tooting
+which was then exciting a fury of indignation, Fonblanque now declared
+him to be no better himself than a second Drouet, reducing his guests to
+a lamentable state by the food he had given them, and aggravating their
+sad condition by absence of all proper nursing. The joke was well kept
+up by Quin and Edwin Landseer, Lord Strangford joining in with a tragic
+sympathy for his friend the poet; and the banquet so dolefully
+interrupted ended in uproarious mirth. For nothing really serious had
+happened. Benedict went laughing away with his wife, and I helped Rogers
+on with his overshoes for his usual night-walk home. "Do you know how
+many waistcoats I wear?" asked the poet of me, as I was doing him this
+service. I professed my inability to guess. "Five!" he said: "and here
+they are!" Upon which he opened them, in the manner of the gravedigger
+in _Hamlet_, and showed me every one.
+
+That dinner was in the April of 1849, and among others present were Mrs.
+Procter and Mrs. Macready, dear and familiar names always in his house.
+No swifter or surer perception than Dickens's for what was solid and
+beautiful in character; he rated it higher than intellectual effort; and
+the same lofty place, first in his affection and respect, would have
+been Macready's and Procter's, if the one had not been the greatest of
+actors, and the other a poet as genuine as old Fletcher or Beaumont.
+There were present at this dinner also the American minister and Mrs.
+Bancroft (it was the year of that visit of Macready to America, which
+ended in the disastrous Forrest riots); and it had among its guests Lady
+Graham, the wife of Sir James Graham, than whom not even the wit and
+beauty of her nieces, Mrs. Norton and Lady Dufferin, better represented
+the brilliant family of the Sheridans; so many of whose members, and
+these three above all, Dickens prized among his friends. The table that
+day will be "full" if I add the celebrated singer Miss Catherine Hayes,
+and her homely good-natured Irish mother, who startled us all very much
+by complimenting Mrs. Dickens on her having had for her father so clever
+a painter as Mr. Hogarth.
+
+Others familiar to Devonshire-terrace in these years will be indicated
+if I name an earlier dinner (3rd of January), for the "christening" of
+the _Haunted Man_, when, besides Lemons, Evanses, Leeches, Bradburys,
+and Stanfields, there were present Tenniel, Topham, Stone, Robert Bell,
+and Thomas Beard. Next month (24th of March) I met at his table, Lord
+and Lady Lovelace; Milner Gibson, Mowbray Morris, Horace Twiss, and
+their wives; Lady Molesworth and her daughter (Mrs. Ford); John
+Hardwick, Charles Babbage, and Dr. Locock. That distinguished physician
+had attended the poor girl, Miss Abercrombie, whose death by strychnine
+led to the exposure of Wainewright's murders; and the opinion he had
+formed of her chances of recovery, the external indications of that
+poison being then but imperfectly known, was first shaken, he told me,
+by the gloomy and despairing cries of the old family nurse, that her
+mother and her uncle had died exactly so! These, it was afterwards
+proved, had been among the murderer's former victims. The Lovelaces
+were frequent guests after the return from Italy, Sir George Crawford,
+so friendly in Genoa, having married Lord Lovelace's sister; and few had
+a greater warmth of admiration for Dickens than Lord Byron's "Ada," on
+whom Paul Dombey's death laid a strange fascination. They were again at
+a dinner got up in the following year for Scribe and the composer
+Halevy, who had come over to bring out the _Tempest_ at Her
+Majesty's-theatre, then managed by Mr. Lumley, who with M. Van de Weyer,
+Mrs. Gore and her daughter, the Hogarths, and I think the fine French
+comedian, Samson, were also among those present. Earlier that year there
+were gathered at his dinner-table the John Delanes, Isambard Brunels,
+Thomas Longmans (friends since the earliest Broadstairs days, and
+special favourites always), Lord Mulgrave, and Lord Carlisle, with all
+of whom his intercourse was intimate and frequent, and became especially
+so with Delane in later years. Lord Carlisle amused us that night, I
+remember, by repeating what the good old Brougham had said to him of
+"those _Punch_ people," expressing what was really his fixed belief.
+"They never get my face, and are obliged" (which, like Pope, he always
+pronounced obleeged), "to put up with my plaid trousers!" Of Lord
+Mulgrave, pleasantly associated with the first American experiences, let
+me add that he now went with us to several outlying places of amusement
+of which he wished to acquire some knowledge, and which Dickens knew
+better than any man; small theatres, saloons, and gardens in city or
+borough, to which the Eagle and Britannia were as palaces; and I think
+he was of the party one famous night in the summer of 1849 (29th of
+June), when with Talfourd, Edwin Landseer, and Stanfield, we went to the
+_Battle of Waterloo_ at Vauxhall, and were astounded to see pass in
+immediately before us, in a bright white overcoat, the great Duke
+himself, Lady Douro on his arm, the little Ladies Ramsay by his side,
+and everybody cheering and clearing the way before him. That the old
+hero enjoyed it all, there could be no doubt, and he made no secret of
+his delight in "Young Hernandez;" but the "Battle" was undeniably
+tedious, and it was impossible not to sympathize with the repeatedly and
+very audibly expressed wish of Talfourd, that "the Prussians would come
+up!"
+
+The preceding month was that of the start of _David Copperfield_, and to
+one more dinner (on the 12th) I may especially refer for those who were
+present at it. Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle came, Thackeray and Rogers, Mrs.
+Gaskell and Kenyon, Jerrold and Hablot Browne, with Mr. and Mrs. Tagart;
+and it was a delight to see the enjoyment of Dickens at Carlyle's
+laughing reply to questions about his health, that he was, in the
+language of Mr. Peggotty's housekeeper, a lorn lone creature and
+everything went contrairy with him. Things were not likely to go better,
+I thought, as I saw the great writer,--kindest as well as wisest of men,
+but not very patient under sentimental philosophies,--seated next the
+good Mr. Tagart, who soon was heard launching at him various
+metaphysical questions in regard to heaven and such like; and the relief
+was great when Thackeray introduced, with quaint whimsicality, a story
+which he and I had heard Macready relate in talking to us about his
+boyish days, of a country actor who had supported himself for six months
+on his judicious treatment of the "tag" to the _Castle Spectre_. In the
+original it stands that you are to do away with suspicion, banish vile
+mistrust, and, almost in the words we had just heard from the minister
+to the philosopher, "Believe there is a Heaven nor Doubt that Heaven is
+just!" in place of which Macready's friend, observing that the drop fell
+for the most part quite coldly, substituted one night the more telling
+appeal, "And give us your Applause, for _that_ is ALWAYS JUST!" which
+brought down the house with rapture.
+
+This chapter would far outrun its limits if I spoke of other as pleasant
+gatherings under Dickens's roof during the years which I am now more
+particularly describing; when, besides the dinners, the musical
+enjoyments and dancings, as his children became able to take part in
+them, were incessant. "Remember that for my Biography!" he said to me
+gravely on twelfth-day in 1849, after telling me what he had done the
+night before; and as gravely I now redeem my laughing promise that I
+would. Little Mary and her sister Kate had taken much pains to teach
+their father the polka, that he might dance it with them at their
+brother's birthday festivity (held this year on the 7th, as the 6th was
+a Sunday); and in the middle of the previous night as he lay in bed, the
+fear had fallen on him suddenly that the step was forgotten, and then
+and there, in that wintry dark cold night, he got out of bed to practise
+it. Anything _more_ characteristic could certainly not be told; unless I
+could have shown him dancing it afterwards, and far excelling the
+youngest performer in untiring vigour and vivacity. There was no one who
+approached him on these occasions excepting only our attached friend
+Captain Marryat, who had a frantic delight in dancing, especially with
+children, of whom and whose enjoyments he was as fond as it became so
+thoroughly good hearted a man to be. His name would have stood first
+among those I have been recalling, as he was among the first in
+Dickens's liking; but in the autumn of 1848 he had unexpectedly passed
+away. Other names however still reproach me for omission as my memory
+goes back. With Marryat's on the earliest page of this volume stands
+that of Monckton Milnes, familiar with Dickens over all the time it
+covers, and still more prominent in Tavistock-house days when with Lady
+Houghton he brought fresh claims to my friend's admiration and regard.
+Of Bulwer Lytton's frequent presence in all his houses, and of Dickens's
+admiration for him as one of the supreme masters in his art, so
+unswerving and so often publicly declared, it would be needless again to
+speak. Nor shall I dwell upon his interchange of hospitalities with
+distinguished men in the two great professions so closely allied to
+literature and its followers; Denmans, Pollocks, Campbells, and Chittys;
+Watsons, Southwood Smiths, Lococks, and Elliotsons. To Alfred Tennyson,
+through all the friendly and familiar days I am describing, he gave full
+allegiance and honoured welcome. Tom Taylor was often with him; and
+there was a charm for him I should find it difficult to exaggerate in
+Lord Dudley Stuart's gentle yet noble character, his refined
+intelligence and generous public life, expressed so perfectly in his
+chivalrous face. Incomplete indeed would be the list if I did not add to
+it the frank and hearty Lord Nugent, who had so much of his grandfather,
+Goldsmith's friend, in his lettered tastes and jovial enjoyments. Nor
+should I forget occasional days with dear old Charles Kemble and one or
+other of his daughters; with Alexander Dyce; and with Harness and his
+sister, or his niece and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Archdale; made
+especially pleasant by talk about great days of the stage. It was
+something to hear Kemble on his sister's Mrs. Beverley; or to see
+Harness and Dyce exultant in recollecting her Volumnia. The enchantment
+of the Mrs. Beverley, her brother would delightfully illustrate by
+imitation of her manner of restraining Beverley's intemperance to their
+only friend, "You are too busy, sir!" when she quietly came down the
+stage from a table at which she had seemed to be occupying herself, laid
+her hand softly on her husband's arm, and in a gentle half-whisper "No,
+not too busy; mistaken perhaps; but----" not only stayed his temper but
+reminded him of obligations forgotten in the heat of it. Up to where the
+tragic terror began, our friend told us, there was nothing but this
+composed domestic sweetness, expressed even in the simplicity and neat
+arrangement of her dress, her cap with the strait band, and her hair
+gathered up underneath; but all changing when the passion _did_ begin;
+one single disordered lock escaping at the first outbreak, and, in the
+final madness, all of it streaming dishevelled down her beautiful face.
+Kemble made no secret of his belief that his sister had the higher
+genius of the two; but he spoke with rapture of "John's" Macbeth and
+parts of his Othello; comparing his "Farewell the tranquil mind" to the
+running down of a clock, an image which he did not know that Hazlitt had
+applied to the delivery of "To-morrow and to-morrow," in the other
+tragedy. In all this Harness seemed to agree; and I thought a
+distinction was not ill put by him, on the night of which I speak, in
+his remark that the nature in Kemble's acting only supplemented his
+magnificent art, whereas, though the artist was not less supreme in his
+sister, it was on nature she most relied, bringing up the other power
+only to the aid of it. "It was in another sense like your writing," said
+Harness to Dickens, "the commonest natural feelings made great, even
+when not rendered more refined, by art." Her Constance would have been
+fishwify, he declared, if its wonderful truth had not overborne every
+other feeling; and her Volumnia escaped being vulgar only by being so
+excessively grand. But it was just what was so called "vulgarity" that
+made its passionate appeal to the vulgar in a better meaning of the
+word. When she first entered, Harness said, swaying and surging from
+side to side with every movement of the Roman crowd itself, as it went
+out and returned in confusion, she so absorbed her son into herself as
+she looked at him, so swelled and amplified in her pride and glory for
+him, that "the people in the pit blubbered all round," and he could no
+more help it than the rest.
+
+There are yet some other names that should have place in these rambling
+recollections, though I by no means affect to remember all. One Sunday
+evening Mazzini made memorable by taking us to see the school he had
+established in Clerkenwell for the Italian organ-boys. This was after
+dining with Dickens, who had been brought into personal intercourse with
+the great Italian by having given money to a begging impostor who made
+unauthorized use of his name. Edinburgh friends made him regular visits
+in the spring time: not Jeffrey and his family alone, but sheriff Gordon
+and his, with whom he was not less intimate, Lord Murray and his wife,
+Sir William Allan and his niece, Lord Robertson with his wonderful
+Scotch mimicries, and Peter Fraser with his enchanting Scotch songs; our
+excellent friend Liston the surgeon, until his fatal illness came in
+December 1848, being seldom absent from those assembled to bid such
+visitors welcome. Allan's name may remind me of other artists often at
+his house, Eastlakes, Leslies, Friths, and Wards, besides those who have
+had frequent mention, and among whom I should have included Charles as
+well as Edwin Landseer, and William Boxall. Nor should I drop from this
+section of his friends, than whom none were more attractive to him, such
+celebrated names in the sister arts as those of Miss Helen Faucit, an
+actress worthily associated with the brightest days of our friend
+Macready's managements, Mr. Sims Reeves, Mr. John Parry, Mr. Phelps, Mr.
+Webster, Mr. Harley, Mr. and Mrs. Keeley, Mr. Whitworth, and Miss Dolby.
+Mr. George Henry Lewes he had an old and great regard for; among other
+men of letters should not be forgotten the cordial Thomas Ingoldsby, and
+many-sided true-hearted Charles Knight; Mr. R. H. Horne and his wife
+were frequent visitors both in London and at seaside holidays; and I
+have met at his table Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall. There were the Duff
+Gordons too, the Lyells, and, very old friends of us both, the Emerson
+Tennents; there was the good George Raymond, Mr. Frank Beard and his
+wife; the Porter Smiths, valued for Macready's sake as well as their
+own; Mr. and Mrs. Charles Black, near connections by marriage of George
+Cattermole, with whom there was intimate intercourse both before and
+during the residence in Italy; Mr. Thompson, brother of Mrs. Smithson
+formerly named, and his wife, whose sister Frederick Dickens married;
+Mr. Mitton, his own early companion; and Mrs. Torrens, who had played
+with the amateurs in Canada. These are all in my memory so connected
+with Devonshire-terrace, as friends or familiar acquaintance, that they
+claim this word before leaving it; and visitors from America, I may
+remark, had always a grateful reception. Of the Bancrofts mention has
+been made, and with them should be coupled the Abbot Lawrences,
+Prescott, Hillard, George Curtis, and Felton's brother. Felton himself
+did not visit England until the Tavistock-house time. In 1847 there was
+a delightful day with the Coldens and the Wilkses, relatives by marriage
+of Jeffrey; in the following year, I think at my rooms because of some
+accident that closed Devonshire-terrace that day (25th of April),
+Dickens, Carlyle, and myself foregathered with the admirable Emerson;
+and M. Van de Weyer will probably remember a dinner where he took joyous
+part with Dickens in running down a phrase which the learned in books,
+Mr. Cogswell, on a mission here for the Astor library, had startled us
+by denouncing as an uncouth Scotch barbarism--_open up_. You found it
+constantly in Hume, he said, but hardly anywhere else; and he defied us
+to find it more than once through the whole of the volumes of Gibbon.
+Upon this, after brief wonder and doubt, we all thought it best to take
+part in a general assault upon _open up_, by invention of phrases on the
+same plan that should show it in exaggerated burlesque, and support Mr.
+Cogswell's indictment. Then came a struggle who should carry the
+absurdity farthest; and the victory remained with M. Van de Weyer until
+Dickens surpassed even him, and "opened up" depths of almost frenzied
+absurdity that would have delighted the heart of Leigh Hunt. It will
+introduce the last and not least honoured name into my list of his
+acquaintance and friends, if I mention his amusing little interruption
+one day to Professor Owen's description of a telescope of huge
+dimensions built by an enterprising clergyman who had taken to the study
+of the stars; and who was eager, said Owen, to see farther into
+heaven--he was going to say, than Lord Rosse; if Dickens had not drily
+interposed, "than his professional studies had enabled him to
+penetrate."
+
+Some incidents that belong specially to the three years that closed his
+residence in the home thus associated with not the least interesting
+part of his career, will farther show what now were his occupations and
+ways of life. In the summer of 1849 he came up from Broadstairs to
+attend a Mansion-house dinner, which the lord mayor of that day had been
+moved by a laudable ambition to give to "literature and art," which he
+supposed would be adequately represented by the Royal Academy, the
+contributors to _Punch_, Dickens, and one or two newspaper men. On the
+whole the result was not cheering; the worthy chief magistrate, no
+doubt quite undesignedly, expressing too much surprise at the
+unaccustomed faces around him to be altogether complimentary. In general
+(this was the tone) we are in the habit of having princes, dukes,
+ministers, and what not for our guests, but what a delight, all the
+greater for being unusual, to see gentlemen like you! In other words,
+what could possibly be pleasanter than for people satiated with
+greatness to get for a while by way of change into the butler's pantry?
+This in substance was Dickens's account to me next day, and his reason
+for having been very careful in his acknowledgment of the toast of "the
+Novelists." He was nettled not a little therefore by a jesting allusion
+to himself in the _Daily News_ in connection with the proceedings, and
+asked me to forward a remonstrance. Having a strong dislike to all such
+displays of sensitiveness, I suppressed the letter; but it is perhaps
+worth printing now. Its date is Broadstairs, Wednesday 11th of July
+1849. "I have no other interest in, or concern with, a most facetious
+article on last Saturday's dinner at the Mansion-house, which appeared
+in your paper of yesterday, and found its way here to-day, than that it
+misrepresents me in what I said on the occasion. If you should not think
+it at all damaging to the wit of that satire to state what I did say, I
+shall be much obliged to you. It was this. . . . That I considered the
+compliment of a recognition of Literature by the citizens of London the
+more acceptable to us because it was unusual in that hall, and likely to
+be an advantage and benefit to them in proportion as it became in future
+less unusual. That, on behalf of the novelists, I accepted the tribute
+as an appropriate one; inasmuch as we had sometimes reason to hope that
+our imaginary worlds afforded an occasional refuge to men busily engaged
+in the toils of life, from which they came forth none the worse to a
+renewal of its strivings; and certainly that the chief magistrate of the
+greatest city in the world might be fitly regarded as the representative
+of that class of our readers."
+
+Of an incident towards the close of the year, though it had important
+practical results, brief mention will here suffice. We saw the Mannings
+executed on the walls of Horsemonger-lane gaol; and with the letter
+which Dickens wrote next day to the _Times_ descriptive of what we had
+witnessed on that memorable morning, there began an active agitation
+against public executions which never ceased until the salutary change
+was effected which has worked so well. Shortly after this he visited
+Rockingham-castle, the seat of Mr. and Mrs. Watson, his Lausanne
+friends; and I must preface by a word or two the amusing letter in which
+he told me of this visit. It was written in character, and the character
+was that of an American visitor to England.
+
+"I knew him, Horatio;" and a very kindly honest man he was, who had come
+to England authorised to make enquiry into our general agricultural
+condition, and who discharged his mission by publishing some reports
+extremely creditable to his good sense and ability, expressed in a plain
+nervous English that reminded one of the rural writings of Cobbett. But
+in an evil hour he published also a series of private letters to friends
+written from the various residences his introductions had opened to him;
+and these were filled with revelations as to the internal economy of
+English noblemen's country houses, of a highly startling description. As
+for example, how, on arrival at a house your "name is announced, and
+your portmanteau immediately taken into your chamber, which the servant
+shows you, with every convenience." How "you are asked by the servant at
+breakfast what you will have, or you get up and help yourself." How at
+dinner you don't dash at the dishes, or contend for the "fixings," but
+wait till "his portion is handed by servants to every one." How all the
+wines, fruit, glasses, candlesticks, lamps, and plate are "taken care
+of" by butlers, who have under-butlers for their "adjuncts;" how ladies
+never wear "white satin shoes or white gloves more than once;" how
+dinner napkins are "never left upon the table, but either thrown into
+your chair or on the floor under the table;" how no end of pains are
+taken to "empty slops;" and above all what a national propensity there
+is to brush a man's clothes and polish his boots, whensoever and
+wheresoever the clothes and boots can be seized without the man.[160]
+This was what Dickens good-humouredly laughs at.
+
+"Rockingham Castle: Friday, thirtieth of November, 1849. Picture to
+yourself, my dear F, a large old castle, approached by an ancient keep,
+portcullis, &c, &c, filled with company, waited on by six-and-twenty
+servants; the slops (and wine-glasses) continually being emptied; and my
+clothes (with myself in them) always being carried off to all sorts of
+places; and you will have a faint idea of the mansion in which I am at
+present staying. I should have written to you yesterday, but for having
+had a very busy day. Among the guests is a Miss B, sister of the
+Honourable Miss B (of Salem, Mass.), whom we once met at the house of
+our distinguished literary countryman Colonel Landor. This lady is
+renowned as an amateur actress, so last night we got up in the great
+hall some scenes from the _School for Scandal_; the scene with the
+lunatic on the wall, from the _Nicholas Nickleby_ of Major-General the
+Hon. C. Dickens (Richmond, Va.); some conjuring; and then finished off
+with country-dances; of which we had two admirably good ones, quite new
+to me, though really old. Getting the words, and making the
+preparations, occupied (as you may believe) the whole day; and it was
+three o'clock before I got to bed. It was an excellent entertainment,
+and we were all uncommonly merry. . . . I had a very polite letter from our
+enterprising countryman Major Bentley[161] (of Lexington, Ky.), which I
+shall show you when I come home. We leave here this afternoon, and I
+shall expect you according to appointment, at a quarter past ten A.M.
+to-morrow. Of all the country-houses and estates I have yet seen in
+England, I think this is by far the best. Everything undertaken
+eventuates in a most magnificent hospitality; and you will be pleased to
+hear that our celebrated fellow citizen General Boxall (Pittsburg,
+Penn.) is engaged in handing down to posterity the face of the owner of
+the mansion and of his youthful son and daughter. At a future time it
+will be my duty to report on the turnips, mangel-wurzel, ploughs, and
+live stock; and for the present I will only say that I regard it as a
+fortunate circumstance for the neighbouring community that this
+patrimony should have fallen to my spirited and enlightened host. Every
+one has profited by it, and the labouring people in especial are
+thoroughly well cared-for and looked after. To see all the household,
+headed by an enormously fat housekeeper, occupying the back benches last
+night, laughing and applauding without any restraint; and to see a
+blushing sleek-headed footman produce, for the watch-trick, a silver
+watch of the most portentous dimensions, amidst the rapturous delight of
+his brethren and sisterhood; was a very pleasant spectacle, even to a
+conscientious republican like yourself or me, who cannot but contemplate
+the parent country with feelings of pride in our own land, which (as was
+well observed by the Honorable Elias Deeze, of Hertford, Conn.) is truly
+the land of the free. Best remembrances from Columbia's daughters. Ever
+thine, my dear F,--C.H." Dickens, during the too brief time this
+excellent friend was spared to him, often repeated his visits to
+Rockingham, always a surpassing enjoyment; and in the winter of 1851 he
+accomplished there, with help of the country carpenter, "a very elegant
+little theatre," of which he constituted himself manager, and had among
+his actors a brother of the lady referred to in his letter, "a very good
+comic actor, but loose in words;" poor Augustus Stafford "more than
+passable;" and "a son of Vernon Smith's, really a capital low comedian."
+It will be one more added to the many examples I have given of his
+untiring energy both in work and play, if I mention the fact that this
+theatre was opened at Rockingham for their first representation on
+Wednesday the 15th of January; that after the performance there was a
+country dance which lasted far into the morning; and that on the next
+evening, after a railway journey of more than 120 miles, he dined in
+London with the prime minister, Lord John Russell.
+
+A little earlier in that winter we had together taken his eldest son to
+Eton, and a little later he had a great sorrow. "Poor dear Jeffrey!" he
+wrote to me on the 29th January, 1850. "I bought a _Times_ at the
+station yesterday morning, and was so stunned by the announcement, that
+I felt it in that wounded part of me, almost directly; and the bad
+symptoms (modified) returned within a few hours. I had a letter from him
+in extraordinary good spirits within this week or two--he was better, he
+said, than he had been for a long time--and I sent him proof-sheets of
+the number only last Wednesday. I say nothing of his wonderful abilities
+and great career, but he was a most affectionate and devoted friend to
+me; and though no man could wish to live and die more happily, so old in
+years and yet so young in faculties and sympathies, I am very very
+deeply grieved for his loss." He was justly entitled to feel pride in
+being able so to word his tribute of sorrowing affection. Jeffrey had
+completed with consummate success, if ever man did, the work appointed
+him in this world; and few, after a life of such activities, have left a
+memory so unstained and pure. But other and sharper sorrows awaited
+Dickens.
+
+The chief occupation of the past and present year, _David Copperfield_,
+will have a chapter to itself, and in this may be touched but lightly.
+Once fairly in it, the story bore him irresistibly along; certainly with
+less trouble to himself in the composition, beyond that ardent sympathy
+with the creatures of the fancy which always made so absolutely real to
+him their sufferings or sorrows; and he was probably never less harassed
+by interruptions or breaks in his invention. His principal hesitation
+occurred in connection with the child-wife Dora, who had become a great
+favourite as he went on; and it was shortly after her fate had been
+decided, in the early autumn of 1850,[162] but before she breathed her
+last, that a third daughter was born to him, to whom he gave his dying
+little heroine's name. On these and other points, without forestalling
+what waits to be said of the composition of this fine story, a few
+illustrative words from his letters will properly find a place here.
+"_Copperfield_ half done," he wrote of the second number on the 6th of
+June. "I feel, thank God, quite confident in the story. I have a move in
+it ready for this month; another for next; and another for the next." "I
+think it is necessary" (15th of November) "to decide against the special
+pleader. Your reasons quite suffice. I am not sure but that the banking
+house might do. I will consider it in a walk." "Banking business
+impracticable" (17th of November) "on account of the confinement: which
+would stop the story, I foresee. I have taken, for the present at all
+events, the proctor. I am wonderfully in harness, and nothing galls or
+frets." "_Copperfield_ done" (20th of November) "after two days' very
+hard work indeed; and I think a smashing number. His first dissipation I
+hope will be found worthy of attention, as a piece of grotesque truth."
+"I feel a great hope" (23rd of January, 1850) "that I shall be
+remembered by little Em'ly, a good many years to come." "I begin to have
+my doubts of being able to join you" (20th of February), "for
+_Copperfield_ runs high, and must be done to-morrow. But I'll do it if
+possible, and strain every nerve. Some beautiful comic love, I hope, in
+the number." "Still undecided about Dora" (7th of May), "but MUST decide
+to-day."[163] "I have been" (Tuesday, 20th of August) "very hard at work
+these three days, and have still Dora to kill. But with good luck, I may
+do it to-morrow. Obliged to go to Shepherd's-bush to-day, and can
+consequently do little this morning. Am eschewing all sorts of things
+that present themselves to my fancy--coming in such crowds!" "Work in a
+very decent state of advancement" (13th of August) "domesticity
+notwithstanding. I hope I shall have a splendid number. I feel the story
+to its minutest point." "Mrs. Micawber is still" (15th of August), "I
+regret to say, in statu quo. Ever yours, WILKINS MICAWBER." The little
+girl was born the next day, the 16th, and received the name of Dora
+Annie. The most part of what remained of the year was passed away from
+home.
+
+The year following did not open with favourable omen, both the child and
+its mother having severe illness. The former rallied however, and
+"little Dora is getting on bravely, thank God!" was his bulletin of the
+early part of February. Soon after, it was resolved to make trial of
+Great Malvern for Mrs. Dickens; and lodgings were taken there in March,
+Dickens and her sister accompanying her, and the children being left in
+London. "It is a most beautiful place," he wrote to me (15th of March).
+"O Heaven, to meet the Cold Waterers (as I did this morning when I went
+out for a shower-bath) dashing down the hills, with severe expressions
+on their countenances, like men doing matches and not exactly winning!
+Then, a young lady in a grey polka going _up_ the hills, regardless of
+legs; and meeting a young gentleman (a bad case, I should say) with a
+light black silk cap on under his hat, and the pimples of I don't know
+how many douches under that. Likewise an old man who ran over a
+milk-child, rather than stop!--with no neckcloth, on principle; and with
+his mouth wide open, to catch the morning air." This was the month, as
+we have seen, when the performances for the Guild were in active
+preparation, and it was also the date of the farewell dinner to our
+friend Macready on his quitting the stage. Dickens and myself came up
+for it from Malvern, to which he returned the next day; and from the
+spirited speech in which he gave the health of the chairman at the
+dinner, I will add a few words for the sake of the truth expressed in
+them. "There is a popular prejudice, a kind of superstition, that
+authors are not a particularly united body, and I am afraid that this
+may contain half a grain or so of the veracious. But of our chairman I
+have never in my life made public mention without adding what I can
+never repress, that in the path we both tread I have uniformly found him
+to be, from the first, the most generous of men; quick to encourage,
+slow to disparage, and ever anxious to assert the order of which he is
+so great an ornament. That we men of letters are, or have been,
+invariably or inseparably attached to each other, it may not be possible
+to say, formerly or now; but there cannot now be, and there cannot ever
+have been, among the followers of literature, a man so entirely without
+the grudging little jealousies that too often disparage its brightness,
+as Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton." That was as richly merited as it is
+happily said.
+
+Dickens had to return to London after the middle of March for business
+connected with a charitable Home established at Shepherd's-bush by Miss
+Coutts, in the benevolent hope of rescuing fallen women by testing their
+fitness for emigration, of which future mention will be made, and which
+largely and regularly occupied his time for several years. On this
+occasion his stay was prolonged by the illness of his father. His
+health had been failing latterly, and graver symptoms were now spoken
+of. "I saw my poor father twice yesterday," he wrote to me on the 27th,
+"the second time between ten and eleven at night. In the morning I
+thought him not so well. At night, as well as any one in such a
+situation could be." Next day he was so much better that his son went
+back to Malvern, and even gave us grounds for hope that we might yet
+have his presence in Hertfordshire to advise on some questions connected
+with the comedy which Sir Edward Lytton had written for the Guild. But
+the end came suddenly. I returned from Knebworth to London, supposing
+that some accident had detained him at Malvern; and at my house this
+letter waited me. "Devonshire-terrace, Monday, thirty-first of March
+1851. . . . My poor father died this morning at five and twenty minutes to
+six. They had sent for me to Malvern, but I passed John on the railway;
+for I came up with the intention of hurrying down to Bulwer Lytton's
+to-day before you should have left. I arrived at eleven last night, and
+was in Keppel-street at a quarter past eleven. But he did not know me,
+nor any one. He began to sink at about noon yesterday, and never rallied
+afterwards. I remained there until he died--O so quietly. . . . I hardly
+know what to do. I am going up to Highgate to get the ground. Perhaps
+you may like to go, and I should like it if you do. I will not leave
+here before two o'clock. I think I must go down to Malvern again, at
+night, to know what is to be done about the children's mourning; and as
+you are returning to Bulwer's I should like to have gone that way, if
+_Bradshaw_ gave me any hope of doing it. I wish most particularly to
+see you, I needn't say. I must not let myself be distracted by
+anything--and God knows I have left a sad sight!--from the scheme on
+which so much depends. Most part of the alterations proposed I think
+good." Mr. John Dickens was laid in Highgate Cemetery on the 5th of
+April; and the stone placed over him by the son who has made his name a
+famous one in England, bore tribute to his "zealous, useful, cheerful
+spirit." What more is to be said of him will be most becomingly said in
+speaking of _David Copperfield_. While the book was in course of being
+written, all that had been best in him came more and more vividly back
+to its author's memory; as time wore on, nothing else was remembered;
+and five years before his own death, after using in one of his letters
+to me a phrase rather out of the common with him, this was added: "I
+find this looks like my poor father, whom I regard as a better man the
+longer I live."
+
+He was at this time under promise to take the chair at the General
+Theatrical Fund on the 14th of April. Great efforts were made to relieve
+him from the promise; but such special importance was attached to his
+being present, and the Fund so sorely then required help, that, no
+change of day being found possible for the actors who desired to attend,
+he yielded to the pressure put upon him; of which the result was to
+throw upon me a sad responsibility. The reader will understand why, even
+at this distance of time; my allusion to it is brief.
+
+The train from Malvern brought him up only five minutes short of the
+hour appointed for the dinner, and we first met that day at the London
+Tavern. I never heard him to greater advantage than in the speech that
+followed. His liking for this Fund was the fact of its not confining its
+benefits to any special or exclusive body of actors, but opening them
+generously to all; and he gave a description of the kind of actor, going
+down to the infinitesimally small, not omitted from such kind help,
+which had a half-pathetic humour in it that makes it charming still. "In
+our Fund," he said, "the word exclusiveness is not known. We include
+every actor, whether he be Hamlet or Benedict: the ghost, the bandit, or
+the court physician; or, in his one person, the whole king's army. He
+may do the light business, or the heavy, or the comic, or the eccentric.
+He may be the captain who courts the young lady, whose uncle still
+unaccountably persists in dressing himself in a costume one hundred
+years older than his time. Or he may be the young lady's brother in the
+white gloves and inexpressibles, whose duty in the family appears to be
+to listen to the female members of it whenever they sing, and to shake
+hands with everybody between all the verses. Or he may be the baron who
+gives the fete, and who sits uneasily on the sofa under a canopy with
+the baroness while the fete is going on. Or he may be the peasant at the
+fete who comes on the stage to swell the drinking chorus, and who, it
+may be observed, always turns his glass upside down before he begins to
+drink out of it. Or he may be the clown who takes away the doorstep of
+the house where the evening party is going on. Or he may be the
+gentleman who issues out of the house on the false alarm, and is
+precipitated into the area. Or, if an actress, she may be the fairy who
+resides for ever in a revolving star with an occasional visit to a bower
+or a palace. Or again, if an actor, he may be the armed head of the
+witch's cauldron; or even that extraordinary witch, concerning whom I
+have observed in country places, that he is much less like the notion
+formed from the description of Hopkins than the Malcolm or Donalbain of
+the previous scenes. This society, in short, says, 'Be you what you may,
+be you actor or actress, be your path in your profession never so high
+or never so low, never so haughty or never so humble, we offer you the
+means of doing good to yourselves, and of doing good to your brethren.'"
+
+Half an hour before he rose to speak I had been called out of the room.
+It was the servant from Devonshire-terrace to tell me his child Dora was
+suddenly dead. She had not been strong from her birth; but there was
+just at this time no cause for special fear, when unexpected convulsions
+came, and the frail little life passed away. My decision had to be
+formed at once; and I satisfied myself that it would be best to permit
+his part of the proceedings to close before the truth was told to him.
+But as he went on, after the sentences I have quoted, to speak of actors
+having to come from scenes of sickness, of suffering, aye, even of death
+itself, to play their parts before us, my part was very difficult. "Yet
+how often is it with all of us," he proceeded to say, and I remember to
+this hour with what anguish I listened to words that had for myself
+alone, in all the crowded room, their full significance: "how often is
+it with all of us, that in our several spheres we have to do violence to
+our feelings, and to hide our hearts in carrying on this fight of life,
+if we would bravely discharge in it our duties and responsibilities." In
+the disclosure that followed when he left the chair, Mr. Lemon, who was
+present, assisted me; and I left this good friend with him next day,
+when I went myself to Malvern and brought back Mrs. Dickens and her
+sister. The little child lies in a grave at Highgate near that of Mr.
+and Mrs. John Dickens; and on the stone which covers her is now written
+also her father's name, and those of two of her brothers.
+
+One more public discussion he took part in, before quitting London for
+the rest of the summer; and what he said (it was a meeting, with Lord
+Carlisle in the chair, in aid of Sanitary reform) very pregnantly
+illustrates what was remarked by me on a former page. He declared his
+belief that neither education nor religion could do anything really
+useful in social improvement until the way had been paved for their
+ministrations by cleanliness and decency. He spoke warmly of the
+services of Lord Ashley in connection with ragged schools, but he put
+the case of a miserable child tempted into one of those schools out of
+the noisome places in which his life was passed, and he asked what a few
+hours' teaching could effect against the ever-renewed lesson of a whole
+existence. "But give him, and his, a glimpse of heaven through a little
+of its light and air; give them water; help them to be clean; lighten
+the heavy atmosphere in which their spirits flag, and which makes them
+the callous things they are; take the body of the dead relative from the
+room where the living live with it, and where such loathsome familiarity
+deprives death itself of awe; and then, but not before, they will be
+brought willingly to hear of Him whose thoughts were so much with the
+wretched, and who had compassion for all human sorrow." He closed by
+proposing Lord Ashley's health as having preferred the higher ambition
+of labouring for the poor to that of pursuing the career open to him in
+the service of the State; and as having also had "the courage on all
+occasions to face the cant which is the worst and commonest of all, the
+cant about the cant of philanthropy." Lord Shaftesbury first dined with
+him in the following year at Tavistock-house.
+
+Shortly after the Sanitary meeting came the first Guild performances;
+and then Dickens left Devonshire-terrace, never to return to it. What
+occupied him in the interval before he took possession of his new abode,
+has before been told; but two letters were overlooked in describing his
+progress in the labour of the previous year, and brief extracts from
+them will naturally lead me to the subject of my next chapter. "I have
+been" (15th of September) "tremendously at work these two days; eight
+hours at a stretch yesterday, and six hours and a half to-day, with the
+Ham and Steerforth chapter, which has completely knocked me
+over--utterly defeated me!" "I am" (21st of October) "within three pages
+of the shore; and am strangely divided, as usual in such cases, between
+sorrow and joy. Oh, my dear Forster, if I were to say half of what
+_Copperfield_ makes me feel to-night, how strangely, even to you, I
+should be turned inside out! I seem to be sending some part of myself
+into the Shadowy World."
+
+
+=END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.=
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[158] I take the opportunity of saying that there was an omission of
+three words in the epitaph quoted on a former page (vol. i. p. 120). The
+headstone at the grave in Kensal-green bears this inscription: "Young,
+beautiful, and good, God in His mercy numbered her among His angels at
+the early age of seventeen."
+
+[159] From letters of nearly the same date here is another
+characteristic word: "Pen and ink before me! Am I not at work on
+_Copperfield_! Nothing else would have kept me here until half-past two
+on such a day. . . . Indian news bad indeed. Sad things come of bloody war.
+If it were not for Elihu, I should be a peace and arbitration man."
+
+[160] Here is really an only average specimen of the letters as
+published: "I forgot to say, if you leave your chamber twenty times a
+day, after using your basin, you would find it clean, and the pitcher
+replenished on your return, and that you cannot take your clothes off,
+but they are taken away, brushed, folded, pressed, and placed in the
+bureau; and at the dressing-hour, before dinner, you find your candles
+lighted, your clothes laid out, your shoes cleaned, and everything
+arranged for use; . . . the dress-clothes brushed and folded in the nicest
+manner, and cold water, and hot water, and clean napkins in the greatest
+abundance. . . . Imagine an elegant chamber, fresh water in basins, in
+goblets, in tubs, and sheets of the finest linen!"
+
+[161] From this time to his death there was always friendly intercourse
+with his old publisher Mr. Bentley.
+
+[162] It may be proper to record the fact that he had made a short run
+to Paris, with Maclise, at the end of June, of which sufficient farther
+note will have been taken if I print the subjoined passages from a
+letter to me dated 24th June, 1850, Hotel Windsor, Rue de Rivoli. "There
+being no room in the Hotel Brighton, we are lodged (in a very good
+apartment) here. The heat is absolutely frightful. I never felt anything
+like it in Italy. Sleep is next to impossible, except in the day, when
+the room is dark, and the patient exhausted. We purpose leaving here on
+Saturday morning and going to Rouen, whence we shall proceed either to
+Havre or Dieppe, and so arrange our proceedings as to be home, please
+God, on Tuesday evening. We are going to some of the little theatres
+to-night, and on Wednesday to the Francais, for Rachel's last
+performance before she goes to London. There does not seem to be
+anything remarkable in progress, in the theatrical way. Nor do I observe
+that out of doors the place is much changed, except in respect of the
+carriages which are certainly less numerous. I also think the Sunday is
+even much more a day of business than it used to be. As we are going
+into the country with Regnier to-morrow, I write this after letter-time
+and before going out to dine at the Trois Freres, that it may come to
+you by to-morrow's post. The twelve hours' journey here is
+astounding--marvellously done, except in respect of the means of
+refreshment, which are absolutely none. Mac is very well (extremely
+loose as to his waistcoat, and otherwise careless in regard of buttons)
+and sends his love. De Fresne proposes a dinner with all the
+notabilities of Paris present, but I WON'T stand it! I really have
+undergone so much fatigue from work, that I am resolved not even to see
+him, but to please myself. I find, my child (as Horace Walpole would
+say), that I have written you nothing here, but you will take the will
+for the deed."
+
+[163] The rest of the letter may be allowed to fill the corner of a
+note. The allusions to Rogers and Landor are by way of reply to an
+invitation I had sent him. "I am extremely sorry to hear about Fox.
+Shall call to enquire, as I come by to the Temple. And will call on you
+(taking the chance of finding you) on my way to that Seat of Boredom. I
+wrote my paper for _H. W._ yesterday, and have begun _Copperfield_ this
+morning. Still undecided about Dora, but MUST decide to-day. La
+difficulte d'ecrire l'Anglais m'est extremement ennuyeuse. Ah, mon Dieu!
+si l'on pourrait toujours ecrire cette belle langue de France! Monsieur
+Rogere! Ah! qu'il est homme d'esprit, homme de genie, homme des lettres!
+Monsieur Landore! Ah qu'il parle Francais--pas parfaitement comme un
+ange--un peu (peut-etre) comme un diable! Mais il est bon
+garcon--serieusement, il est un de la vraie noblesse de la nature. Votre
+tout devoue, CHARLES. A Monsieur Monsieur Fos-tere."
+
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
+
+Pages 47-48, word split over two pages was mistyped. Word "yester-
+terday" changed to "yesterday" (Ditto yesterday; except)
+
+Footnote 116, "inim table" changed to "inimitable" (facetiousness of the
+inimitable)
+
+Page 310, "Nove ber" changed to "November" (21st of November)
+
+Page 311, "hem" changed to "them" (perfect joy in them)
+
+Footnote 139, "Edi burgh" changed to "Edinburgh" (Lord Cockburn.
+"EDINBURGH)
+
+Footnote 143, "l ght" changed to "light" (Wellbred's light ease)
+
+
+To retain the integrity of the original text, varied hyphenations,
+capitalizations, and, at times, spellings were retained.
+
+For example:
+
+Varied hyphenation and capitalization of Devonshire Terrace was
+retained. Also fac-simile and facsimile. Varied spelling of
+A'Beckett/A'Becket was retained.
+
+
+
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+For the reader: Italic text is surrounded by _underscores_, bold text is
+surrounded by =equal signs= and underlined text is surrounded by
+~tildes~. Two breves above the letter e are indicated by [)e] in the
+text.
+
+
+
+THE LIFE
+
+OF
+
+[Illustration: Signature: Charles Dickens]
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFE
+
+OF
+
+CHARLES DICKENS
+
+BY
+
+JOHN FORSTER.
+
+VOL. III.
+
+1852-1870.
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+
+ PAGE
+ Autograph of Charles Dickens _Fly-leaf_
+
+ Charles Dickens, aet. 56. From the last photograph
+ taken in America, in 1868. Engraved by J. C.
+ Armytage _Frontispiece_
+
+ Devonshire Terrace. From a drawing by Daniel
+ Maclise, R.A. 41
+
+ Tavistock House 53
+
+ Facsimile of plan prepared for first number of _David
+ Copperfield_ 157
+
+ Facsimile of plan prepared for first number of _Little
+ Dorrit_ 158
+
+ The Porch at Gadshill 204
+
+ The Chalet 213
+
+ House and conservatory, from the meadow 216
+
+ The study at Gadshill 222
+
+ Facsimile from the last page of _Edwin Drood_, written
+ on the 8th of June, 1870 468
+
+ Facsimile of a page of _Oliver Twist_, written in 1837 469
+
+ The Grave. From an original water-colour drawing,
+ executed for this Work, by S. L. Fildes. Engraved by
+ J. Saddler _to face_ p. 544
+
+
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. 1850-1853.
+
+Pages 21-50.
+
+DAVID COPPERFIELD AND BLEAK HOUSE. AET. 38-41.
+
+ PAGE
+
+ Interest of _Copperfield_ 21
+ Real people in novels 22
+ Scott, Smollett, and Fielding 22
+ Complaint and atonement 23
+ Earlier and later methods 24
+ Boythorn and Skimpole 26
+ Yielding to temptation 27
+ Changes made in Skimpole 28
+ Relatives put into books 29
+ Scott and his father 29
+ Dickens and his father 30
+ No harm done 32
+ Micawber and Skimpole 32
+ Dickens and David 33
+ Dangers of autobiography 34
+ Design of David's character 35
+ Why books continue 36
+ The storm and shipwreck 37
+ Goethe on the insane 38
+ The two heroines 39
+ Risks not worth running 40
+ Devonshire Terrace 41
+ _Bleak House_ 43
+ Defects of the novel 44
+ Set-offs and successes 45
+ Value of critical judgments 46
+ The contact of extremes 47
+ Dean Ramsay on Jo 48
+ Town graves 49
+ One last friend 49
+ Truth of Gridley's case 50
+
+
+CHAPTER II. 1853-1855.
+
+Pages 51-75.
+
+HOME INCIDENTS AND HARD TIMES. AET. 41-43.
+
+ Titles proposed for _Bleak House_ 52
+ Restlessness 52
+ Tavistock House 53
+ Last child born 54
+ A young stage aspirant 54
+ Deaths of friends 55
+ At Boulogne 55
+ Publishing agreements 56
+ At Birmingham 56
+ Self-changes 57
+ Employments in Boulogne 59
+ First reading in public 60
+ Argument against paid readings 61
+ Children's theatricals 62
+ Mr. H. in _Tom Thumb_ 62
+ Dickens in Fortunio 63
+ Titles for a new story 65
+ Difficulties of weekly parts 66
+ Mr. Ruskin on _Hard Times_ 67
+ Truths enforced 68
+ Early experiences 69
+ Strike at Preston 69
+ Speaking at Drury Lane 70
+ Stanfield scenes 71
+ Tavistock House theatricals 71
+ Peter Cunningham 73
+ Incident of a November night 74
+ Degrees in misery 75
+
+
+CHAPTER III. 1853.
+
+Pages 76-95.
+
+SWITZERLAND AND ITALY REVISITED. AET. 41.
+
+ Swiss people 76
+ Narrow escape 77
+ Lausanne and Genoa 78
+ The Peschiere and its owner 79
+ On the way to Naples 80
+ A night on board ship 81
+ A Greek potentate 82
+ Going out to dinner 83
+ The old idle Frenchman 84
+ Changes and old friends 85
+ A "scattering" party 86
+ The puppets at Rome 87
+ Malaria and desolation 88
+ Plague-smitten places 89
+ Again in Venice 90
+ A painter among paintings 91
+ Liking for the Sardinians 92
+ Neapolitans in exile 93
+ Travelling police arrangements 94
+ Dickens and the Austrian 95
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. 1853, 1854, and 1856.
+
+Pages 96-120.
+
+THREE SUMMERS AT BOULOGNE. AET. 41, 42, 44.
+
+ Visits to France 96
+ First summer residence (1853) 97
+ Villa des Moulineaux 98
+ Doll's house and offices 99
+ Bon garcon of a landlord 100
+ Making the most of it 101
+ Among Putney market-gardeners 102
+ Shakespearian performance 103
+ Pictures at the pig-market 104
+ English friends 105
+ Change of villa (1854) 105
+ The Northern Camp 106
+ Visit of Prince Albert 107
+ Emperor, Prince, and Dickens 108
+ "Like boxing" 109
+ The Empress at a review 110
+ A French conjuror 110
+ Conjuring by Dickens 111
+ Making demons of cards 112
+ Conjuror's compliment and vision 114
+ Old residence resumed (1856) 115
+ Last of the Camp 116
+ A household war 117
+ State of siege 118
+ Death of Gilbert A'Becket 119
+ Leaving for England 119
+
+CHAPTER V. 1855, 1856.
+
+Pages 121-153.
+
+RESIDENCE IN PARIS. AET. 43-44.
+
+ Actors and dramas 122
+ Frederic Lemaitre 122
+ Last scene in _Gambler's Life_ 123
+ Apartment in Champs Elysees 124
+ French Translation of Dickens 125
+ Ary Scheffer and Daniel Manin 126
+ English friends 126
+ Acting at the Francais 127
+ Dumas' _Orestes_ 129
+ _Paradise Lost_ at the Ambigu 130
+ Profane nonsense 131
+ French _As You Like It_ 132
+ Story of a French drama 133
+ A delightful "Tag" 134
+ Auber and Queen Victoria 134
+ Scribe and his wife 136
+ At Regnier's 137
+ Viardot in _Orphee_ 138
+ Meets Georges Sand 138
+ Banquet at Girardin's 139
+ Second banquet 141
+ Bourse and its victims 142
+ Entry of troops from Crimea 143
+ Zouaves and their dog 144
+ Streets on New Year's Day 145
+ English and French art 146
+ Emperor and Edwin Landseer 147
+ Sitting to Ary Scheffer 148
+ Scheffer as to the likeness 149
+ A duchess murdered 150
+ Truth is stranger than fiction 151
+ Singular scenes described 152
+ What became of the actors 153
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. 1855-1857.
+
+Pages 154-176.
+
+LITTLE DORRIT, AND A LAZY TOUR. AET. 43-45.
+
+ Watts's Rochester charity 155
+ Tablet to Dickens in Cathedral 155
+ _Nobody's Fault_ 155
+ How the _Dorrit_ story grew 156
+ Number-Plan of _Copperfield_ 157
+ Number-Plan of _Dorrit_ 158
+ Circumlocution Office 159
+ Flora and Mr. F---- 160
+ Weak and strong points 161
+ A scene of boy-trials 162
+ Reception of the novel 163
+ Christmas theatricals 164
+ Theatre-making 165
+ Rush for places 166
+ Douglas Jerrold's death 168
+ Exertions and result 168
+ Seeing the serpents fed 169
+ Lazy Tour projected 170
+ Up Carrick Fell 170
+ Accident to Mr. Wilkie Collins 171
+ At Wigton and Allonby 172
+ The Yorkshire landlady 173
+ Doncaster in race week 174
+ A performance of _Money_ 175
+
+CHAPTER VII. 1857-1858.
+
+Pages 177-201.
+
+WHAT HAPPENED AT THIS TIME. AET. 45-46.
+
+ Disappointments and distastes 177
+ What we seem and are 178
+ Compensations of Art 179
+ Misgivings 180
+ A defect and a merit 181
+ Reply to a remonstrance 182
+ Dangerous comfort 183
+ One happiness missed 184
+ Homily on life 185
+ Confidences 186
+ Rejoinder to a reply 187
+ What the world cannot give 189
+ An old project revived 189
+ Shakespeare on acting 191
+ Hospital for sick children 192
+ Charities of the very poor 192
+ Unsolved mysteries 194
+ Appeal for sick children 195
+ Reading for Child's Hospital 195
+ Proposal for Paid readings 196
+ Question of the Plunge 198
+ Mr. Arthur Smith 199
+ Separation from Mrs. Dickens 200
+ What alone concerned the public 201
+
+CHAPTER VIII. 1856-1870.
+
+Pages 202-222.
+
+GADSHILL PLACE. AET. 44-58.
+
+ First description of it 202
+ The porch 204
+ Negotiations for purchase 204
+ Becomes his home 205
+ Gadshill a century ago 206
+ Past owners and tenants 207
+ Sinking a well 209
+ Gradual additions 210
+ Gift from Mr. Fechter 211
+ Dickens's writing-table 211
+ The chalet 213
+ Much coveted acquisition 214
+ Last improvement 215
+ Visits of friends 216
+ Dickens's Dogs 218
+ A Fenian mastiff 218
+ Linda and Mrs. Bouncer 219
+ Favourite walks 220
+ The study and chair 222
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. 1858-1859.
+
+Pages 223-238.
+
+FIRST PAID READINGS. AET. 46-47.
+
+ Various managements 223
+ One day's work 224
+ Impressions of Dublin 225
+ Irish audiences 226
+ Young Ireland and Old England 227
+ Railway ride to Belfast 229
+ Brought near his Fame 229
+ A knowing audience 231
+ Greeting in Manchester 231
+ Joined by his daughters 232
+ Strange life 233
+ Scotch audiences 234
+ When most successful in reading 235
+ At public meetings 236
+ Miss Marie Wilton as _Pippo_ 237
+ Ed. Landseer on Frith's portrait 238
+
+
+CHAPTER X. 1859-1861.
+
+Pages 239-254.
+
+ALL THE YEAR ROUND AND THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. AET. 47-49.
+
+ _Household Words_ discontinued 240
+ Earliest and latest publishers 240
+ Dickens and Mr. Bentley 241
+ In search of a title 242
+ A title found 243
+ Success of new periodical 244
+ Difference from the old 245
+ At Knebworth 246
+ Commercial Travellers' Schools 247
+ A Traveller for human interests 248
+ Personal references in writing 249
+ Birds and low company 250
+ Bethnal-green fowls 251
+ An incident of Doughty Street 252
+ Offers from America 253
+
+CHAPTER XI. 1861-1863.
+
+Pages 255-274.
+
+SECOND SERIES OF READINGS. AET. 49-51.
+
+ Daughter Kate's marriage 255
+ Charles Alston Collins 257
+ Sale of Tavistock House 257
+ Brother Alfred's death 258
+ Metropolitan readings 258
+ Provincial circuit 259
+ New subjects for readings 260
+ Death of Mr. Arthur Smith 261
+ Death of Mr. Henry Austin 262
+ Readings at Brighton 263
+ At Canterbury and Dover 264
+ Alarming scene 265
+ Impromptu reading-hall 266
+ Scenes in Scotland 267
+ At Torquay 268
+ Death of C. C. Felton 269
+ Offers for Australia 270
+ Writing or Reading? 271
+ Home arguments 272
+ Religious Richardson's Show 273
+ Exiled ex-potentate 274
+
+
+CHAPTER XII. 1855-1865.
+
+Pages 275-297.
+
+HINTS FOR BOOKS WRITTEN AND UNWRITTEN. AET. 43-53.
+
+ Book of MS. memoranda 275
+ Originals of characters 277
+ Fancies put into books 277
+ Notions for _Little Dorrit_ 278
+ Suggestions for other books 279
+ Hints for last completed book 280
+ Fancies never used 281
+ Ideas not worked out 282
+ A touching fancy 284
+ Domestic subjects 284
+ Characters of women 285
+ Other female groups 286
+ Uncle Sam 288
+ Sketches of selfishness 288
+ Striking thoughts 290
+ Subjects not accomplished 290
+ Characters laid aside 291
+ Available names 293
+ Titles for books 293
+ Names for girls and boys 295
+ An undistinguished crowd 296
+ Mr. Brobity's snuff-box 297
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII. 1864-1867.
+
+Pages 298-324.
+
+THIRD SERIES OF READINGS. AET. 52-55.
+
+ Death of Thackeray 298
+ Mother's death 300
+ Death of second son 300
+ Interest in Mr. Fechter 301
+ Notes on theatres 302
+ Sorrowful new year 303
+ C. W. Dilke's death 303
+ Staplehurst accident 305
+ Illness and suffering 305
+ Enters on new readings 306
+ Last meeting with Mrs. Carlyle 308
+ Mrs. Carlyle's death 309
+ Offer for more readings 309
+ Grave warnings 311
+ In Scotland 312
+ Exertion and its result 313
+ Self-deception 314
+ An old malady 314
+ Scene at Tynemouth 316
+ In Dublin with the Fenians 317
+ Yielding to temptation 318
+ Pressure from America 319
+ At bay at last 320
+ Warning unheeded 321
+ Discussion useless 322
+ The case in a nutshell 323
+ Decision to go 324
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV. 1836-1870.
+
+Pages 325-386.
+
+DICKENS AS A NOVELIST. AET. 24-58.
+
+ See before you oversee 326
+ M. Taine's criticism 326
+ What is overlooked in it 327
+ A popularity explained 328
+ National excuses for Dickens 330
+ Comparison with Balzac 330
+ Anticipatory reply to M. Taine 332
+ A critic in the _Fortnightly Review_ 333
+ Blame and praise to be reconciled 333
+ A plea for objectors 334
+ "Hallucinative" imagination 335
+ Vain critical warnings 336
+ The critic and the criticised 336
+ An opinion on the Micawbers 338
+ Hallucinative phenomena 338
+ Scott writing _Bride of Lammermoor_ 339
+ Claim to be fairly judged 340
+ Dickens's leading quality 341
+ Dangers of Humour 342
+ His earlier books 343
+ Mastery of dialogue 344
+ Character-drawing 345
+ Realities of fiction 346
+ Fielding and Dickens 347
+ Touching of extremes 347
+ Why the creations of fiction live 349
+ Enjoyment of his own humour 350
+ Unpublished note of Lord Lytton 350
+ Exaggerations of humour 351
+ Temptations of all great humourists 352
+ A word for fanciful descriptions 353
+ _Tale of Two Cities_ 355
+ Difficulties and success 355
+ Specialty of treatment 356
+ Reply to objections 357
+ Care with which Dickens worked 358
+ An American critic 359
+ _Great Expectations_ 360
+ Pip and Magwitch 361
+ Another boy-child for hero 362
+ Unlikeness in likeness 363
+ Vivid descriptive writing 364
+ Masterly drawing of character 365
+ A day on the Thames 366
+ Homely and shrewd satire 367
+ Incident changed for Lytton 368
+ As originally written 369
+ Christmas Sketches 370
+ _Our Mutual Friend_ 370
+ Writing numbers in advance 373
+ Working slowly 374
+ Death of John Leech 375
+ A fatal anniversary 376
+ Effects on himself and his novel 376
+ A tale by Edmond About 378
+ First and Last 378
+ _Doctor Marigold_ 379
+ Minor stories 380
+ "Something from Above" 381
+ Purity of Dickens's writings 382
+ Substitute for an alleged deficiency 382
+ True province of humour 383
+ Horace Greeley and Longfellow 384
+ Letters from an American 385
+ Companions for solitude 386
+
+
+CHAPTER XV. 1867.
+
+Pages 387-406.
+
+AMERICA REVISITED. NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER, 1867. AET. 55.
+
+ Warmth of the greeting 388
+ Same cause as in 1842 388
+ Old and new friends 389
+ Changes since 1842 390
+ First Boston reading 391
+ Scene at New York sales 393
+ First New York reading 393
+ An action against Dickens 394
+ A fire at his hotel 395
+ Local and general politics 397
+ Railway arrangements 398
+ Police of New York 398
+ Mistletoe from England 399
+ As to newspapers 400
+ Nothing lasts long 401
+ Cities chosen for readings 401
+ Scene of a murder visited 402
+ A dinner at the murderer's 403
+ Illness and abstinence 404
+ Miseries of American travel 405
+ Startling prospect 406
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI. 1868.
+
+Pages 407-443.
+
+AMERICA REVISITED. JANUARY TO APRIL, 1868. AET. 56.
+
+ Speculators and public 408
+ An Englishman's disadvantage 408
+ "Freedom and independence" 408
+ Mountain-sneezers and eye-openers 409
+ The work and the gain 410
+ A scene at Brooklyn 411
+ At Philadelphia 412
+ "Looking up the judge" 413
+ Improved social ways 414
+ Result of thirty-four readings 415
+ Shadow to the sunshine 416
+ Readings in a church 417
+ Change of plan 417
+ Baltimore women 418
+ Success in Philadelphia 419
+ Objections to coloured people 420
+ With Sumner at Washington 421
+ President Lincoln's dream 423
+ Interview with President Johnson 423
+ Washington audiences 424
+ A comical dog 425
+ Incident before a reading 426
+ The child and the doll 427
+ North-west tour 428
+ Political excitement 429
+ Struggle for tickets 430
+ American female beauty 432
+ Sherry to "slop round" with 432
+ Final impression of Niagara 433
+ Letter to Mr. Ouvry 434
+ "Getting along" through water 435
+ Again attacked by lameness 437
+ Illness and exertion 437
+ Seeing prevents believing 439
+ All but used up 439
+ Last Boston readings 440
+ New York farewells 441
+ The receipts throughout 441
+ Promise at public dinner 442
+ The Adieu 443
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII. 1868-1870.
+
+Pages 444-460.
+
+LAST READINGS. AET. 56-58.
+
+ Health improved 444
+ What the readings did and undid 445
+ Expenses and gains in America 446
+ Noticeable changes in him 447
+ _Oliver Twist_ reading proposed 448
+ Objections to it 449
+ Death of Frederick Dickens 450
+ Macready at _Oliver Twist_ reading 451
+ Another attack of illness 452
+ A doctors' difference 454
+ At Emerson Tennent's funeral 454
+ The illness at Preston 455
+ Brought to London 456
+ Sir Thomas Watson consulted 456
+ His note of the case 457
+ Guarded sanction to other readings 458
+ Close of career as public reader 460
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII. 1869-1870.
+
+Pages 461-477.
+
+LAST BOOK. AET. 57-58.
+
+ The agreement for _Edwin Drood_ 461
+ First fancy for it 462
+ Story as planned in his mind 463
+ What to be its course and end 463
+ Merits of the fragment 464
+ Comparison of early and late MSS 466
+ Discovery of an unpublished scene 467
+ Last page of _Drood_ in fac-simile 468
+ Page of _Oliver Twist_ in fac-simile 469
+ Delightful specimen of Dickens 470
+ Unpublished scene for _Drood_ 470-476
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX. 1836-1870.
+
+Pages 478-526.
+
+PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. AET. 24-58.
+
+ Dickens not a bookish man 479
+ Books and their critics 479
+ Design of present book stated 480
+ Dickens made to tell his own story 480
+ Charge of personal obtrusiveness 481
+ Lord Russell on Dickens's letters 481
+ Shallower judgments 481
+ Absence of self-conceit in Dickens 482
+ Letter to youngest son 483
+ As to religion and prayer 485
+ Letter to a clergyman in 1856 485
+ Letter to a layman in 1870 486
+ Objection to posthumous honours 487
+ As to patronage of literature 488
+ Vanity of human wishes 488
+ As to writers and publishers 489
+ Editorship of his weekly serials 490
+ Work for his contributors 491
+ Editorial troubles and pleasures 493
+ Letter to an author 493
+ Help to younger novelists 495
+ Adelaide Procter's poetry 495
+ Effect of periodical writing 496
+ Proposed satirical papers 497
+ Political opinions 498
+ Not the man for Finsbury 499
+ The Liverpool dinner in 1869 500
+ Reply to Lord Houghton 501
+ Tribute to Lord Russell 501
+ People governing and governed 502
+ Alleged offers from her Majesty 503
+ Silly Rigmarole 504
+ The Queen sees him act (1857) 505
+ Desires to hear him read (1858) 506
+ Interview at the Palace (1870) 507
+ What passed at the interview 507
+ Dickens's grateful impression 508
+ A hope at the close of life 509
+ Games in Gadshill meadow 510
+ Home enjoyments 512
+ Habits of life everywhere 513
+ Family dependence on him 514
+ Carlyle's opinion of Dickens 514
+ Street walks and London haunts 515
+ Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 517
+ The first attack of lameness 518
+ Effect upon his dogs 518
+ Why right things to be done 519
+ Silent heroisms 519
+ At social meetings 520
+ Delight in "assumption" 520
+ Humouring a joke 522
+ Unlucky hits 522
+ Ghost stories 524
+ Predominant feeling of his life 525
+ Sermon of the Master of Balliol 525
+
+
+CHAPTER XX. 1869-1870.
+
+Pages 527-545.
+
+THE END. AET. 57-58.
+
+ Last summer and autumn 527
+ Showing London to a visitor 528
+ His son Henry's scholarship 529
+ Twelve more readings 530
+ Medical attendance at them 531
+ Excitement incident to them 532
+ The Farewell 533
+ Last public appearances 535
+ At Royal Academy dinner 535
+ Eulogy of Daniel Maclise 536
+ Return of illness 537
+ Our last meeting 538
+ A noteworthy incident 538
+ Last letter received from him 539
+ Final days at Gadshill 539
+ Wednesday the 8th of June 540
+ Last piece of writing 540
+ The 8th and 9th of June 541
+ The general grief 542
+ The burial 544
+ Unbidden mourners 544
+ The grave 544
+
+ * * * * *
+
+
+APPENDIX.
+
+ I. THE WRITINGS OF CHARLES DICKENS 547
+
+ II. THE WILL OF CHARLES DICKENS 561
+
+ III. CORRECTIONS MADE IN THE LATER EDITIONS OF
+ THE SECOND VOLUME OF THIS WORK 566
+
+
+ INDEX 571
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFE
+
+OF
+
+CHARLES DICKENS.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+DAVID COPPERFIELD AND BLEAK HOUSE.
+
+1850-1853.
+
+ Interest of _Copperfield_--Scott, Smollett, and
+ Fielding--Too close to the Real--Earlier and
+ Later Methods--Dickens at Hatton-garden
+ (1837)--Originals of Boythorn and
+ Skimpole--Last Glimpse of Leigh Hunt
+ (1859)--Changes made in
+ Skimpole--Self-defence--Scott and his
+ Father--Dickens and his Father--Sayings of John
+ Dickens--Skimpole and Micawber--Dickens and
+ David--Self-portraiture not attempted--The
+ Autobiographic Form--Consistent Drawing--Design
+ of David's Character--Tone of the Novel--The
+ Peggottys--Miss Dartle--Mrs. Steerforth--Betsey
+ Trotwood--A Country Undertaker--The Two
+ Heroines--Contrast of Esther and David--Plot of
+ the Story--Incidents and Persons
+ interwoven--Defects of _Bleak House_--Success
+ in Character--Value of Critical
+ Judgments--Pathetic Touches--Dean Ramsay on
+ _Bleak House_ and Jo--Originals of Chancery
+ Abuses.
+
+
+DICKENS never stood so high in reputation as at the completion of
+_Copperfield_. The popularity it obtained at the outset increased to a
+degree not approached by any previous book excepting _Pickwick_. "You
+gratify me more than I can tell you," he wrote to Bulwer Lytton (July
+1850), "by what you say about _Copperfield_, because I hope myself that
+some heretofore deficient qualities are there." If the power was not
+greater than in _Chuzzlewit_, the subject had more attractiveness; there
+was more variety of incident, with a freer play of character; and there
+was withal a suspicion, which though general and vague had sharpened
+interest not a little, that underneath the fiction lay something of the
+author's life. How much, was not known by the world until he had passed
+away.
+
+To be acquainted with English literature is to know, that, into its most
+famous prose fiction, autobiography has entered largely in disguise, and
+that the characters most familiar to us in the English novel had
+originals in actual life. Smollett never wrote a story that was not in
+some degree a recollection of his own adventures; and Fielding, who put
+something of his wife into all his heroines, had been as fortunate in
+finding, not Trulliber only, but Parson Adams himself, among his living
+experiences. To come later down, there was hardly any one ever known to
+Scott of whom his memory had not treasured up something to give minuter
+reality to the people of his fancy; and we know exactly whom to look for
+in Dandie Dinmont and Jonathan Oldbuck, in the office of Alan Fairford
+and the sick room of Crystal Croftangry. We are to observe also that it
+is never anything complete that is thus taken from life by a genuine
+writer, but only leading traits, or such as may give greater finish;
+that the fine artist will embody in his portraiture of one person his
+experiences of fifty; and that this would have been Fielding's answer to
+Trulliber if he had objected to the pigstye, and to Adams if he had
+sought to make a case of scandal out of the affair in Mrs. Slipslop's
+bedroom. Such questioning befell Dickens repeatedly in the course of his
+writings, where he freely followed, as we have seen, the method thus
+common to the masters in his art; but there was an instance of alleged
+wrong in the course of _Copperfield_ where he felt his vindication to be
+hardly complete, and what he did thereupon was characteristic.
+
+"I have had the queerest adventure this morning," he wrote (28th of
+December 1849) on the eve of his tenth number, "the receipt of the
+enclosed from Miss Moucher! It is serio-comic, but there is no doubt one
+is wrong in being tempted to such a use of power." Thinking a grotesque
+little oddity among his acquaintance to be safe from recognition, he had
+done what Smollett did sometimes, but never Fielding, and given way, in
+the first outburst of fun that had broken out around the fancy, to the
+temptation of copying too closely peculiarities of figure and face
+amounting in effect to deformity. He was shocked at discovering the pain
+he had given, and a copy is before me of the assurances by way of reply
+which he at once sent to the complainant. That he was grieved and
+surprised beyond measure. That he had not intended her altogether. That
+all his characters, being made up out of many people, were composite,
+and never individual. That the chair (for table) and other matters were
+undoubtedly from her, but that other traits were not hers at all; and
+that in Miss Moucher's "Ain't I volatile" his friends had quite
+correctly recognized the favourite utterance of a different person. That
+he felt nevertheless he had done wrong, and would now do anything to
+repair it. That he had intended to employ the character in an unpleasant
+way, but he would, whatever the risk or inconvenience, change it all, so
+that nothing but an agreeable impression should be left. The reader will
+remember how this was managed, and that the thirty-second chapter went
+far to undo what the twenty-second had done.
+
+A much earlier instance is the only one known to me where a character in
+one of his books intended to be odious was copied wholly from a living
+original. The use of such material, never without danger, might have
+been justifiable here if anywhere, and he had himself a satisfaction in
+always admitting the identity of Mr. Fang in _Oliver Twist_ with Mr.
+Laing of Hatton-garden. But the avowal of his purpose in that case, and
+his mode of setting about it, mark strongly a difference of procedure
+from that which, following great examples, he adopted in his later
+books. An allusion to a common friend in one of his letters of the
+present date--"A dreadful thought occurs to me! how brilliant in a
+book!"--expresses both the continued strength of his temptations and the
+dread he had brought himself to feel of immediately yielding to them;
+but he had no such misgivings in the days of _Oliver Twist_. Wanting an
+insolent and harsh police-magistrate, he bethought him of an original
+ready to his hand in one of the London offices; and instead of pursuing
+his later method of giving a personal appearance that should in some
+sort render difficult the identification of mental peculiarities, he was
+only eager to get in the whole man complete upon his page, figure and
+face as well as manners and mind.
+
+He wrote accordingly (from Doughty-street on the 3rd of June 1837) to
+Mr. Haines,[164] a gentleman who then had general supervision over the
+police reports for the daily papers. "In my next number of _Oliver
+Twist_ I must have a magistrate; and, casting about for a magistrate
+whose harshness and insolence would render him a fit subject to be
+_shown up_, I have as a necessary consequence stumbled upon Mr. Laing of
+Hatton-garden celebrity. I know the man's character perfectly well; but
+as it would be necessary to describe his personal appearance also, I
+ought to have seen him, which (fortunately or unfortunately as the case
+may be) I have never done. In this dilemma it occurred to me that
+perhaps I might under your auspices be smuggled into the Hatton-garden
+office for a few moments some morning. If you can further my object I
+shall be really very greatly obliged to you." The opportunity was found;
+the magistrate was brought up before the novelist; and shortly after, on
+some fresh outbreak of intolerable temper, the home-secretary found it
+an easy and popular step to remove Mr. Laing from the bench.
+
+This was a comfort to everybody, saving only the principal person; but
+the instance was highly exceptional, and it rarely indeed happens that
+to the individual objection natural in every such case some
+consideration should not be paid. In the book that followed
+_Copperfield_, two characters appeared having resemblances in manner and
+speech to two distinguished writers too vivid to be mistaken by their
+personal friends. To Lawrence Boythorn, under whom Landor figured, no
+objection was made; but Harold Skimpole, recognizable for Leigh Hunt,
+led to much remark; the difference being, that ludicrous traits were
+employed in the first to enrich without impairing an attractive person
+in the tale, whereas to the last was assigned a part in the plot which
+no fascinating foibles or gaieties of speech could redeem from contempt.
+Though a want of consideration was thus shown to the friend whom the
+character would be likely to recall to many readers, it is nevertheless
+very certain that the intention of Dickens was not at first, or at any
+time, an unkind one. He erred from thoughtlessness only. What led him to
+the subject at all, he has himself stated. Hunt's philosophy of moneyed
+obligations, always, though loudly, half jocosely proclaimed, and his
+ostentatious wilfulness in the humouring of that or any other theme on
+which he cared for the time to expatiate,[165] had so often seemed to
+Dickens to be whimsical and attractive that, wanting an "airy quality"
+for the man he invented, this of Hunt occurred to him; and "partly for
+that reason, and partly, he has since often grieved to think, for the
+pleasure it afforded to find a delightful manner reproducing itself
+under his hand, he yielded to the temptation of too often making the
+character speak like his old friend." This apology was made[166] after
+Hunt's death, and mentioned a revision of the first sketch, so as to
+render it less like, at the suggestion of two other friends of Hunt. The
+friends were Procter (Barry Cornwall) and myself; the feeling having
+been mine from the first that the likeness was too like. Procter did not
+immediately think so, but a little reflection brought him to that
+opinion. "You will see from the enclosed," Dickens wrote (17th of March
+1852), "that Procter is much of my mind. I will nevertheless go through
+the character again in the course of the afternoon, and soften down
+words here and there." But before the day closed Procter had again
+written to him, and next morning this was the result. "I have again
+gone over every part of it very carefully, and I think I have made it
+much less like. I have also changed Leonard to Harold. I have no right
+to give Hunt pain, and I am so bent upon not doing it that I wish you
+would look at all the proof once more, and indicate any particular place
+in which you feel it particularly like. Whereupon I will alter that
+place."
+
+Upon the whole the alterations were considerable, but the radical wrong
+remained. The pleasant sparkling airy talk, which could not be mistaken,
+identified with odious qualities a friend only known to the writer by
+attractive ones; and for this there was no excuse. Perhaps the only
+person acquainted with the original who failed to recognize the copy,
+was the original himself (a common case); but good-natured friends in
+time told Hunt everything, and painful explanations followed, where
+nothing was possible to Dickens but what amounted to a friendly evasion
+of the points really at issue. The time for redress had gone. I yet well
+remember with what eager earnestness, on one of these occasions, he
+strove to set Hunt up again in his own esteem. "Separate in your own
+mind," he said to him, "what you see of yourself from what other people
+tell you that they see. As it has given you so much pain, I take it at
+its worst, and say I am deeply sorry, and that I feel I did wrong in
+doing it. I should otherwise have taken it at its best, and ridden off
+upon what I strongly feel to be the truth, that there is nothing in it
+that _should_ have given you pain. Every one in writing must speak from
+points of his experience, and so I of mine with you: but when I have
+felt it was going too close I stopped myself, and the most blotted
+parts of my MS. are those in which I have been striving hard to make the
+impression I was writing from, _un_like you. The diary-writing I took
+from Haydon, not from you. I now first learn from yourself that you ever
+set anything to music, and I could not have copied _that_ from you. The
+character is not you, for there are traits in it common to fifty
+thousand people besides, and I did not fancy you would ever recognize
+it. Under similar disguises my own father and mother are in my books,
+and you might as well see your likeness in Micawber." The distinction is
+that the foibles of Mr. Micawber and of Mrs. Nickleby, however
+laughable, make neither of them in speech or character less loveable;
+and that this is not to be said of Skimpole's. The kindly or unkindly
+impression makes all the difference where liberties are taken with a
+friend; and even this entirely favourable condition will not excuse the
+practice to many, where near relatives are concerned.
+
+For what formerly was said of the Micawber resemblances, Dickens has
+been sharply criticized; and in like manner it was thought objectionable
+in Scott that for the closing scenes of Crystal Croftangry he should
+have found the original of his fretful patient at the death-bed of his
+own father. Lockhart, who tells us this, adds with a sad significance
+that he himself lived to see the curtain fall at Abbotsford upon even
+such another scene. But to no purpose will such objections still be
+made. All great novelists will continue to use their experiences of
+nature and fact, whencesoever derivable; and a remark made to Lockhart
+by Scott himself suggests their vindication. "If a man will paint from
+nature, he will be most likely to interest and amuse those who are daily
+looking at it."
+
+The Micawber offence otherwise was not grave. We have seen in what way
+Dickens was moved or inspired by the rough lessons of his boyhood, and
+the groundwork of the character was then undoubtedly laid; but the
+rhetorical exuberance impressed itself upon him later, and from this, as
+it expanded and developed in a thousand amusing ways, the full-length
+figure took its great charm. Better illustration of it could not perhaps
+be given than by passages from letters of Dickens, written long before
+Micawber was thought of, in which this peculiarity of his father found
+frequent and always agreeable expression. Several such have been given
+in this work from time to time, and one or two more may here be added.
+It is proper to preface them by saying that no one could know the elder
+Dickens without secretly liking him the better for these flourishes of
+speech, which adapted themselves so readily to his gloom as well as to
+his cheerfulness, that it was difficult not to fancy they had helped him
+considerably in both, and had rendered more tolerable to him, if also
+more possible, the shade and sunshine of his chequered life. "If you
+should have an opportunity _pendente lite_, as my father would
+observe--indeed did on some memorable ancient occasions when he informed
+me that the ban-dogs would shortly have him at bay"--Dickens wrote in
+December 1847. "I have a letter from my father" (May 1841) "lamenting
+the fine weather, invoking congenial tempests, and informing me that it
+will not be possible for him to stay more than another year in
+Devonshire, as he must then proceed to Paris to consolidate Augustus's
+French." "There has arrived," he writes from the Peschiere in September
+1844, "a characteristic letter for Kate from my father. He dates it
+Manchester, and says he has reason to believe that he will be in town
+with the pheasants, on or about the first of October. He has been with
+Fanny in the Isle of Man for nearly two months: finding there, as he
+goes on to observe, troops of friends, and every description of
+continental luxury at a cheap rate." Describing in the same year the
+departure from Genoa of an English physician and acquaintance, he adds:
+"We are very sorry to lose the benefit of his advice--or, as my father
+would say, to be deprived, to a certain extent, of the concomitant
+advantages, whatever they may be, resulting from his medical skill, such
+as it is, and his professional attendance, in so far as it may be so
+considered." Thus also it delighted Dickens to remember that it was of
+one of his connections his father wrote a celebrated sentence; "And I
+must express my tendency to believe that his longevity is (to say the
+least of it) extremely problematical:" and that it was to another, who
+had been insisting somewhat obtrusively on dissenting and nonconformist
+superiorities, he addressed words which deserve to be no less
+celebrated; "The Supreme Being must be an entirely different individual
+from what I have every reason to believe him to be, if He would care in
+the least for the society of your relations." There was a laugh in the
+enjoyment of all this, no doubt, but with it much personal fondness; and
+the feeling of the creator of Micawber as he thus humoured and
+remembered the foibles of his original, found its counterpart in that
+of his readers for the creation itself, as its part was played out in
+the story. Nobody likes Micawber less for his follies; and Dickens liked
+his father more, the more he recalled his whimsical qualities. "The
+longer I live, the better man I think him," he exclaimed afterwards. The
+fact and the fancy had united whatever was most grateful to him in both.
+
+It is a tribute to the generally healthful and manly tone of the story
+of _Copperfield_ that such should be the outcome of the eccentricities
+of this leading personage in it; and the superiority in this respect of
+Micawber over Skimpole is one of many indications of the inferiority of
+_Bleak House_ to its predecessor. With leading resemblances that make it
+difficult to say which character best represents the principle or no
+principle of impecuniosity, there cannot be any doubt which has the
+advantage in moral and intellectual development. It is genuine humour
+against personal satire. Between the worldly circumstances of the two,
+there is nothing to choose; but as to everything else it is the
+difference between shabbiness and greatness. Skimpole's sunny talk might
+be expected to please as much as Micawber's gorgeous speech, the design
+of both being to take the edge off poverty. But in the one we have no
+relief from attendant meanness or distress, and we drop down from the
+airiest fancies into sordidness and pain; whereas in the other nothing
+pitiful or merely selfish ever touches us. At its lowest depth of what
+is worst, we never doubt that something better must turn up; and of a
+man who sells his bedstead that he may entertain his friend, we
+altogether refuse to think nothing but badly. This is throughout the
+free and cheery style of _Copperfield_. The masterpieces of Dickens's
+humour are not in it; but he has nowhere given such variety of play to
+his invention, and the book is unapproached among his writings for its
+completeness of effect and uniform pleasantness of tone.
+
+What has to be said hereafter of those writings generally, will properly
+restrict what is said here, as in previous instances, mainly to personal
+illustration. The _Copperfield_ disclosures formerly made will for ever
+connect the book with the author's individual story; but too much has
+been assumed, from those revelations, of a full identity of Dickens with
+his hero, and of a supposed intention that his own character as well as
+parts of his career should be expressed in the narrative. It is right to
+warn the reader as to this. He can judge for himself how far the
+childish experiences are likely to have given the turn to Dickens's
+genius; whether their bitterness had so burnt into his nature, as, in
+the hatred of oppression, the revolt against abuse of power, and the war
+with injustice under every form displayed in his earliest books, to have
+reproduced itself only; and to what extent mere compassion for his own
+childhood may account for the strange fascination always exerted over
+him by child-suffering and sorrow. But, many as are the resemblances in
+Copperfield's adventures to portions of those of Dickens, and often as
+reflections occur to David which no one intimate with Dickens could fail
+to recognize as but the reproduction of his, it would be the greatest
+mistake to imagine anything like a complete identity of the fictitious
+novelist with the real one, beyond the Hungerford scenes; or to suppose
+that the youth, who then received his first harsh schooling in life,
+came out of it as little harmed or hardened as David did. The language
+of the fiction reflects only faintly the narrative of the actual fact;
+and the man whose character it helped to form was expressed not less
+faintly in the impulsive impressionable youth, incapable of resisting
+the leading of others, and only disciplined into self-control by the
+later griefs of his entrance into manhood. Here was but another proof
+how thoroughly Dickens understood his calling, and that to weave fact
+with fiction unskilfully would be only to make truth less true.
+
+The character of the hero of the novel finds indeed his right place in
+the story he is supposed to tell, rather by unlikeness than by likeness
+to Dickens, even where intentional resemblance might seem to be
+prominent. Take autobiography as a design to show that any man's life
+may be as a mirror of existence to all men, and the individual career
+becomes altogether secondary to the variety of experiences received and
+rendered back in it. This particular form in imaginative literature has
+too often led to the indulgence of mental analysis, metaphysics, and
+sentiment, all in excess: but Dickens was carried safely over these
+allurements by a healthy judgment and sleepless creative fancy; and even
+the method of his narrative is more simple here than it generally is in
+his books. His imaginative growths have less luxuriance of underwood,
+and the crowds of external images always rising so vividly before him
+are more within control.
+
+Consider Copperfield thus in his proper place in the story, and sequence
+as well as connection will be given to the varieties of its childish
+adventure. The first warm nest of love in which his vain fond mother,
+and her quaint kind servant, cherish him; the quick-following contrast
+of hard dependence and servile treatment; the escape from that premature
+and dwarfed maturity by natural relapse into a more perfect childhood;
+the then leisurely growth of emotions and faculties into manhood; these
+are component parts of a character consistently drawn. The sum of its
+achievement is to be a successful cultivation of letters; and often as
+such imaginary discipline has been the theme of fiction, there are not
+many happier conceptions of it. The ideal and real parts of the boy's
+nature receive development in the proportions which contribute best to
+the end desired; the readiness for impulsive attachments that had put
+him into the leading of others, has underneath it a base of truthfulness
+on which at last he rests in safety; the practical man is the outcome of
+the fanciful youth; and a more than equivalent for the graces of his
+visionary days, is found in the active sympathies that life has opened
+to him. Many experiences have come within its range, and his heart has
+had room for all. Our interest in him cannot but be increased by knowing
+how much he expresses of what the author had himself gone through; but
+David includes far less than this, and infinitely more.
+
+That the incidents arise easily, and to the very end connect themselves
+naturally and unobtrusively with the characters of which they are a
+part, is to be said perhaps more truly of this than of any other of
+Dickens's novels. There is a profusion of distinct and distinguishable
+people, and a prodigal wealth of detail; but unity of drift or purpose
+is apparent always, and the tone is uniformly right. By the course of
+the events we learn the value of self-denial and patience, quiet
+endurance of unavoidable ills, strenuous effort against ills remediable;
+and everything in the fortunes of the actors warns us, to strengthen our
+generous emotions and to guard the purities of home. It is easy thus to
+account for the supreme popularity of _Copperfield_, without the
+addition that it can hardly have had a reader, man or lad, who did not
+discover that he was something of a Copperfield himself. Childhood and
+youth live again for all of us in its marvellous boy-experiences. Mr.
+Micawber's presence must not prevent my saying that it does not take the
+lead of the other novels in humorous creation; but in the use of humour
+to bring out prominently the ludicrous in any object or incident without
+excluding or weakening its most enchanting sentiment, it stands
+decidedly first. It is the perfection of English mirth. We are apt to
+resent the exhibition of too much goodness, but it is here so qualified
+by oddity as to become not merely palatable but attractive; and even
+pathos is heightened by what in other hands would only make it comical.
+That there are also faults in the book is certain, but none that are
+incompatible with the most masterly qualities; and a book becomes
+everlasting by the fact, not that faults are not in it, but that genius
+nevertheless is there.
+
+Of its method, and its author's generally, in the delineation of
+character, something will have to be said on a later page. The author's
+own favourite people in it, I think, were the Peggotty group; and
+perhaps he was not far wrong. It has been their fate, as with all the
+leading figures of his invention, to pass their names into the
+language, and become types; and he has nowhere given happier embodiment
+to that purity of homely goodness, which, by the kindly and
+all-reconciling influences of humour, may exalt into comeliness and even
+grandeur the clumsiest forms of humanity. What has been indicated in the
+style of the book as its greatest charm is here felt most strongly. The
+ludicrous so helps the pathos, and the humour so uplifts and refines the
+sentiment, that mere rude affection and simple manliness in these
+Yarmouth boatmen, passed through the fires of unmerited suffering and
+heroic endurance, take forms half-chivalrous half-sublime. It is one of
+the cants of critical superiority to make supercilious mention of the
+serious passages in this great writer; but the storm and shipwreck at
+the close of _Copperfield_, when the body of the seducer is flung dead
+upon the shore amid the ruins of the home he has wasted and by the side
+of the man whose heart he has broken, the one as unconscious of what he
+had failed to reach as the other of what he has perished to save, is a
+description that may compare with the most impressive in the language.
+There are other people drawn into this catastrophe who are among the
+failures of natural delineation in the book. But though Miss Dartle is
+curiously unpleasant, there are some natural traits in her (which
+Dickens's least life-like people are never without); and it was from one
+of his lady friends, very familiar to him indeed, he copied her
+peculiarity of never saying anything outright, but hinting it merely,
+and making more of it that way. Of Mrs. Steerforth it may also be worth
+remembering that Thackeray had something of a fondness for her. "I knew
+how it would be when I began," says a pleasant letter all about himself
+written immediately after she appeared in the story. "My letters to my
+mother are like this, but then she likes 'em--like Mrs. Steerforth:
+don't you like Mrs. Steerforth?"
+
+Turning to another group there is another elderly lady to be liked
+without a shadow of misgiving; abrupt, angular, extravagant, but the
+very soul of magnanimity and rectitude; a character thoroughly made out
+in all its parts; a gnarled and knotted piece of female timber, sound to
+the core; a woman Captain Shandy would have loved for her startling
+oddities, and who is linked to the gentlest of her sex by perfect
+womanhood. Dickens has done nothing better, for solidness and truth all
+round, than Betsey Trotwood. It is one of her oddities to have a fool
+for a companion; but this is one of them that has also most pertinence
+and wisdom. By a line thrown out in _Wilhelm Meister_, that the true way
+of treating the insane was, in all respects possible, to act to them as
+if they were sane, Goethe anticipated what it took a century to apply to
+the most terrible disorder of humanity; and what Mrs. Trotwood does for
+Mr. Dick goes a step farther, by showing how often asylums might be
+dispensed with, and how large might be the number of deficient
+intellects manageable with patience in their own homes. Characters
+hardly less distinguishable for truth as well as oddity are the kind old
+nurse and her husband the carrier, whose vicissitudes alike of love and
+of mortality are condensed into the three words since become part of
+universal speech, _Barkis is willin'_. There is wholesome satire of much
+utility in the conversion of the brutal schoolmaster of the earlier
+scenes into the tender Middlesex magistrate at the close. Nor is the
+humour anywhere more subtle than in the country undertaker, who makes up
+in fullness of heart for scantness of breath, and has so little of the
+vampire propensity of the town undertaker in _Chuzzlewit_, that he dares
+not even inquire after friends who are ill for fear of unkindly
+misconstruction. The test of a master in creative fiction, according to
+Hazlitt, is less in contrasting characters that are unlike than in
+distinguishing those that are like; and to many examples of the art in
+Dickens, such as the Shepherd and Chadband, Creakle and Squeers, Charley
+Bates and the Dodger, the Guppys and the Wemmicks, Mr. Jaggers and Mr.
+Vholes, Sampson Brass and Conversation Kenge, Jack Bunsby, Captain
+Cuttle, and Bill Barley, the Perkers and Pells, the Dodsons and Fogs,
+Sarah Gamp and Betsy Prig, and a host of others, is to be added the
+nicety of distinction between those eminent furnishers of funerals, Mr.
+Mould and Messrs. Omer and Joram. All the mixed mirth and sadness of the
+story are skilfully drawn into the handling of this portion of it; and,
+amid wooings and preparations for weddings and church-ringing bells for
+baptisms, the steadily-going rat-tat of the hammer on the coffin is
+heard.
+
+Of the heroines who divide so equally between them the impulsive, easily
+swayed, not disloyal but sorely distracted affections of the hero, the
+spoilt foolishness and tenderness of the loving little child-wife, Dora,
+is more attractive than the too unfailing wisdom and self-sacrificing
+goodness of the angel-wife, Agnes. The scenes of the courtship and
+housekeeping are matchless; and the glimpses of Doctors' Commons,
+opening those views, by Mr. Spenlow, of man's vanity of expectation and
+inconsistency of conduct in neglecting the sacred duty of making a will,
+on which he largely moralizes the day before he dies intestate, form a
+background highly appropriate to David's domesticities. This was among
+the reproductions of personal experience in the book; but it was a
+sadder knowledge that came with the conviction some years later, that
+David's contrasts in his earliest married life between his happiness
+enjoyed and his happiness once anticipated, the "vague unhappy loss or
+want of something" of which he so frequently complains, reflected also a
+personal experience which had not been supplied in fact so successfully
+as in fiction. (A closing word may perhaps be allowed, to connect with
+Devonshire-terrace the last book written there. On the page opposite is
+engraved a drawing by Maclise of the house where so many of Dickens's
+masterpieces were composed, done on the first anniversary of the day
+when his daughter Kate was born.)
+
+_Bleak House_ followed _Copperfield_, which in some respects it copied
+in the autobiographical form by means of extracts from the personal
+relation of its heroine. But the distinction between the narrative of
+David and the diary of Esther, like that between Micawber and Skimpole,
+marks the superiority of the first to its successor. To represent a
+storyteller as giving the most surprising vividness to manners, motives,
+and characters of which we are to believe her, all the time, as
+artlessly unconscious, as she is also entirely ignorant of the good
+qualities in herself she is naively revealing in the story, was a
+difficult enterprise, full of hazard in any case, not worth success,
+and certainly not successful. Ingenuity is more apparent than freshness,
+the invention is neither easy nor unstrained, and though the old
+marvellous power over the real is again abundantly manifest, there is
+some alloy of the artificial. Nor can this be said of Esther's relation
+without some general application to the book of which it forms so large
+a part. The novel is nevertheless, in the very important particular of
+construction, perhaps the best thing done by Dickens.
+
+[Illustration: DEVONSHIRE TERRACE.]
+
+In his later writings he had been assiduously cultivating this essential
+of his art, and here he brought it very nearly to perfection. Of the
+tendency of composing a story piecemeal to induce greater concern for
+the part than for the whole, he had been always conscious; but I
+remember a remark also made by him to the effect that to read a story in
+parts had no less a tendency to prevent the reader's noticing how
+thoroughly a work so presented might be calculated for perusal as a
+whole. Look back from the last to the first page of the present novel,
+and not even in the highest examples of this kind of elaborate care will
+it be found, that event leads more closely to event, or that the
+separate incidents have been planned with a more studied consideration
+of the bearing they are severally to have on the general result. Nothing
+is introduced at random, everything tends to the catastrophe, the
+various lines of the plot converge and fit to its centre, and to the
+larger interest all the rest is irresistibly drawn. The heart of the
+story is a Chancery suit. On this the plot hinges, and on incidents
+connected with it, trivial or important, the passion and suffering turn
+exclusively. Chance words, or the deeds of chance people, to appearance
+irrelevant, are found everywhere influencing the course taken by a train
+of incidents of which the issue is life or death, happiness or misery,
+to men and women perfectly unknown to them, and to whom they are
+unknown. Attorneys of all possible grades, law clerks of every
+conceivable kind, the copyist, the law stationer, the usurer, all sorts
+of money lenders, suitors of every description, haunters of the Chancery
+court and their victims, are for ever moving round about the lives of
+the chief persons in the tale, and drawing them on insensibly, but very
+certainly, to the issues that await them. Even the fits of the little
+law-stationer's servant help directly in the chain of small things that
+lead indirectly to Lady Dedlock's death. One strong chain of interest
+holds together Chesney Wold and its inmates, Bleak House and the
+Jarndyce group, Chancery with its sorry and sordid neighbourhood. The
+characters multiply as the tale advances, but in each the drift is the
+same. "There's no great odds betwixt my noble and learned brother and
+myself," says the grotesque proprietor of the rag and bottle shop under
+the wall of Lincoln's-inn, "they call me Lord Chancellor and my shop
+Chancery, and we both of us grub on in a muddle." _Edax rerum_ the motto
+of both, but with a difference. Out of the lumber of the shop emerge
+slowly some fragments of evidence by which the chief actors in the story
+are sensibly affected, and to which Chancery itself might have succumbed
+if its devouring capacities had been less complete. But by the time
+there is found among the lumber the will which puts all to rights in the
+Jarndyce suit, it is found to be too late to put anything to rights. The
+costs have swallowed up the estate, and there is an end of the matter.
+
+What in one sense is a merit however may in others be a defect, and this
+book has suffered by the very completeness with which its Chancery moral
+is worked out. The didactic in Dickens's earlier novels derived its
+strength from being merely incidental to interest of a higher and more
+permanent kind, and not in a small degree from the playful sportiveness
+and fancy that lighted up its graver illustrations. Here it is of
+sterner stuff, too little relieved, and all-pervading. The fog so
+marvellously painted in the opening chapter has hardly cleared away when
+there arises, in _Jarndyce_ v. _Jarndyce_, as bad an atmosphere to
+breathe in; and thenceforward to the end, clinging round the people of
+the story as they come or go, in dreary mist or in heavy cloud, it is
+rarely absent. Dickens has himself described his purpose to have been to
+dwell on the romantic side of familiar things. But it is the romance of
+discontent and misery, with a very restless dissatisfied moral, and is
+too much brought about by agencies disagreeable and sordid. The Guppys,
+Weevles, Snagsbys, Chadbands, Krooks, and Smallweeds, even the Kenges,
+Vholeses, and Tulkinghorns, are much too real to be pleasant; and the
+necessity becomes urgent for the reliefs and contrasts of a finer
+humanity. These last are not wanting; yet it must be said that we hardly
+escape, even with them, into the old freedom and freshness of the
+author's imaginative worlds, and that the too conscious unconsciousness
+of Esther flings something of a shade on the radiant goodness of John
+Jarndyce himself. Nevertheless there are very fine delineations in the
+story. The crazed little Chancery lunatic, Miss Flite; the loud-voiced
+tender-souled Chancery victim, Gridley; the poor good-hearted youth
+Richard, broken up in life and character by the suspense of the Chancery
+suit on whose success he is to "begin the world," believing himself to
+be saving money when he is stopped from squandering it, and thinking
+that having saved it he is entitled to fling it away; trooper George,
+with the Bagnets and their household, where the most ludicrous points
+are more forcible for the pathetic touches underlying them; the Jellyby
+interior, and its philanthropic strong-minded mistress, placid and
+smiling amid a household muddle outmuddling Chancery itself; the model
+of deportment, Turveydrop the elder, whose relations to the young
+people, whom he so superbly patronizes by being dependent on them for
+everything, touch delightfully some subtle points of truth; the
+inscrutable Tulkinghorn, and the immortal Bucket; all these, and
+especially the last, have been added by this book to the list of people
+more intimately and permanently known to us than the scores of actual
+familiar acquaintance whom we see around us living and dying.
+
+But how do we know them? There are plenty to tell us that it is by
+vividness of external observation rather than by depth of imaginative
+insight, by tricks of manner and phrase rather than by truth of
+character, by manifestation outwardly rather than by what lies behind.
+Another opportunity will present itself for some remark on this kind of
+criticism, which has always had a special pride in the subtlety of its
+differences from what the world may have shown itself prone to admire.
+"In my father's library," wrote Landor to Southey's daughter Edith,
+"was the _Critical Review_ from its commencement; and it would have
+taught me, if I could not even at a very early age teach myself better,
+that Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith were really worth nothing." It is a
+style that will never be without cultivators, and its frequent
+application to Dickens will be shown hereafter. But in speaking of a
+book in which some want of all the freshness of his genius first became
+apparent, it would be wrong to omit to add that his method of handling a
+character is as strongly impressed on the better portions of it as on
+the best of his writings. It is difficult to say when a peculiarity
+becomes too grotesque, or an extravagance too farcical, to be within the
+limits of art, for it is the truth of these as of graver things that
+they exist in the world in just the proportions and degree in which
+genius can discover them. But no man had ever so surprising a faculty as
+Dickens of becoming himself what he was representing; and of entering
+into mental phases and processes so absolutely, in conditions of life
+the most varied, as to reproduce them completely in dialogue without
+need of an explanatory word. (He only departed from this method once,
+with a result which will then be pointed out.) In speaking on a former
+page of the impression of reality thus to a singular degree conveyed by
+him, it was remarked that where characters so revealed themselves the
+author's part in them was done; and in the book under notice there is
+none, not excepting those least attractive which apparently present only
+prominent or salient qualities, in which it will not be found that the
+characteristic feature embodied, or the main idea personified, contains
+as certainly also some human truth universally applicable. To expound
+or discuss his creations, to lay them psychologically bare, to analyse
+their organisms, to subject to minute demonstration their fibrous and
+other tissues, was not at all Dickens's way. His genius was his fellow
+feeling with his race; his mere personality was never the bound or limit
+to his perceptions, however strongly sometimes it might colour them; he
+never stopped to dissect or anatomize his own work; but no man could
+better adjust the outward and visible oddities in a delineation to its
+inner and unchangeable veracities. The rough estimates we form of
+character, if we have any truth of perception, are on the whole correct:
+but men touch and interfere with one another by the contact of their
+extremes, and it may very often become necessarily the main business of
+a novelist to display the salient points, the sharp angles, or the
+prominences merely.
+
+The pathetic parts of _Bleak House_ do not live largely in remembrance,
+but the deaths of Richard and of Gridley, the wandering fancies of Miss
+Flite, and the extremely touching way in which the gentleman-nature of
+the pompous old baronet, Dedlock, asserts itself under suffering, belong
+to a high order of writing. There is another most affecting example,
+taking the lead of the rest, in the poor street-sweeper Jo; which has
+made perhaps as deep an impression as anything in Dickens. "We have been
+reading _Bleak House_ aloud," the good Dean Ramsay wrote to me very
+shortly before his death. "Surely it is one of his most powerful and
+successful! What a triumph is Jo! Uncultured nature is _there_ indeed;
+the intimations of true heart-feeling, the glimmerings of higher
+feeling, all are there; but everything still consistent and in harmony.
+Wonderful is the genius that can show all this, yet keep it only and
+really part of the character itself, low or common as it may be, and use
+no morbid or fictitious colouring. To my mind, nothing in the field of
+fiction is to be found in English literature surpassing the death of
+Jo!" What occurs at and after the inquest is as worth remembering. Jo's
+evidence is rejected because he cannot exactly say what will be done to
+him after he is dead if he should tell a lie;[167] but he manages to say
+afterwards very exactly what the deceased while he lived did to him.
+That one cold winter night, when he was shivering in a doorway near his
+crossing, a man turned to look at him, and came back, and, having
+questioned him and found he had not a friend in the world, said,
+"Neither have I. Not one!" and gave him the price of a supper and a
+night's lodging. That the man had often spoken to him since, and asked
+him if he slept of a night, and how he bore cold and hunger, or if he
+ever wished to die; and would say in passing "I am as poor as you
+to-day, Jo" when he had no money, but when he had any would always give
+some. "He wos wery good to me," says the boy, wiping his eyes with his
+wretched sleeve. "Wen I see him a-layin' so stritched out just now, I
+wished he could have heerd me tell him so. He wos werry good to me, he
+wos!" The inquest over, the body is flung into a pestiferous churchyard
+in the next street, houses overlooking it on every side, and a reeking
+little tunnel of a court giving access to its iron gate. "With the
+night, comes a slouching figure through the tunnel-court, to the outside
+of the iron gate. It holds the gate with its hands, and looks in within
+the bars; stands looking in, for a little while. It then, with an old
+broom it carries, softly sweeps the step, and makes the archway clean.
+It does so, very busily, and trimly; looks in again, a little while; and
+so departs." These are among the things in Dickens that cannot be
+forgotten; and if _Bleak House_ had many more faults than have been
+found in it, such salt and savour as this might freshen it for some
+generations.
+
+The first intention was to have made Jo more prominent in the story, and
+its earliest title was taken from the tumbling tenements in Chancery,
+"Tom-all-Alone's," where he finds his wretched habitation; but this was
+abandoned. On the other hand, Dickens was encouraged and strengthened in
+his design of assailing Chancery abuses and delays by receiving, a few
+days after the appearance of his first number, a striking pamphlet on
+the subject containing details so apposite that he took from them,
+without change in any material point, the memorable case related in his
+fifteenth chapter. Any one who examines the tract[168] will see how
+exactly true is the reference to it made by Dickens in his preface. "The
+case of Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actual
+occurrence, made public by a disinterested person who was professionally
+acquainted with the whole of the monstrous wrong from beginning to end."
+The suit, of which all particulars are given, affected a single farm, in
+value not more than L1200, but all that its owner possessed in the
+world, against which a bill had been filed for a L300 legacy left in the
+will bequeathing the farm. In reality there was only one defendant, but
+in the bill, by the rule of the Court, there were seventeen; and, after
+two years had been occupied over the seventeen answers, everything had
+to begin over again because an eighteenth had been accidentally omitted.
+"What a mockery of justice this is," says Mr. Challinor, "the facts
+speak for themselves, and I can personally vouch for their accuracy. The
+costs already incurred in reference to this L300 legacy are not less
+than from L800 to L900, and the parties are no forwarder. Already near
+five years have passed by, and the plaintiff would be glad to give up
+his chance of the legacy if he could escape from his liability to costs,
+while the defendants who own the little farm left by the testator, have
+scarce any other prospect before them than ruin."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[164] This letter is now in the possession of S. R. Goodman Esq. of
+Brighton.
+
+[165] Here are two passages taken from Hunt's writing in the _Tatler_ (a
+charming little paper which it was one of the first ventures of the
+young firm of Chapman and Hall to attempt to establish for Hunt in
+1830), to which accident had unluckily attracted Dickens's
+notice:--"Supposing us to be in want of patronage, and in possession of
+talent enough to make it an honour to notice us, we would much rather
+have some great and comparatively private friend, rich enough to assist
+us, and amiable enough to render obligation delightful, than become the
+public property of any man, or of any government. . . . If a divinity had
+given us our choice we should have said--make us La Fontaine, who goes
+and lives twenty years with some rich friend, as innocent of any harm in
+it as a child, and who writes what he thinks charming verses, sitting
+all day under a tree." Such sayings will not bear to be deliberately
+read and thought over, but any kind of extravagance or oddity came from
+Hunt's lips with a curious fascination. There was surely never a man of
+so sunny a nature, who could draw so much pleasure from common things,
+or to whom books were a world so real, so exhaustless, so delightful. I
+was only seventeen when I derived from him the tastes which have been
+the solace of all subsequent years, and I well remember the last time I
+saw him at Hammersmith, not long before his death in 1859, when, with
+his delicate, worn, but keenly intellectual face, his large luminous
+eyes, his thick shock of wiry grey hair, and a little cape of faded
+black silk over his shoulders, he looked like an old French abbe. He was
+buoyant and pleasant as ever; and was busy upon a vindication of Chaucer
+and Spenser from Cardinal Wiseman, who had attacked them for alleged
+sensuous and voluptuous qualities.
+
+[166] In a paper in _All the Year Round_.
+
+[167] "O! Here's the boy, gentlemen! Here he is, very muddy, very
+hoarse, very ragged. Now, boy!--But stop a minute. Caution. This boy
+must be put through a few preliminary paces. Name, Jo. Nothing else that
+he knows on. Don't know that everybody has two names. Never heerd of
+sich a think. Don't know that Jo is short for a longer name. Thinks it
+long enough for _him. He_ don't find no fault with it. Spell it? No.
+_He_ can't spell it. No father, no mother, no friends. Never been to
+school. What's home? Knows a broom's a broom, and knows it's wicked to
+tell a lie. Don't recollect who told him about the broom, or about the
+lie, but knows both. Can't exactly say what'll be done to him arter he's
+dead if he tells a lie to the gentleman here, but believes it'll be
+something wery bad to punish him, and serve him right--and so he'll tell
+the truth. 'This won't do, gentlemen,' says the coroner, with a
+melancholy shake of the head. . . . '_Can't exactly say_ won't do, you
+know. . . . It's terrible depravity. Put the boy aside.' Boy put aside; to
+the great edification of the audience;--especially of Little Swills, the
+Comic Vocalist."
+
+[168] By W. Challinor Esq. of Leek in Staffordshire, by whom it has been
+obligingly sent to me, with a copy of Dickens's letter acknowledging the
+receipt of it from the author on the 11th of March 1852. On the first of
+that month the first number of _Bleak House_ had appeared, but two
+numbers of it were then already written.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+HOME INCIDENTS AND HARD TIMES.
+
+1853-1854-1855.
+
+ _Bleak House_ Sale--Proposed
+ Titles--Restless--Tavistock House--Last Child
+ born--Death of Friends--Liking for
+ Boulogne--Banquet at
+ Birmingham--Self-changes--Overdoing
+ it--Projected Trip to Italy--First Public
+ Readings--Argument against Paid
+ Readings--Children's Theatricals--Small
+ Actors--Henry Fielding Dickens--Dickens and the
+ Czar--Titles for a New Story--"Hard Times"
+ chosen--Difficulties of Weekly Publication--Mr.
+ Ruskin on _Hard Times_--Exaggerated Rebuke of
+ Exaggeration--Manufacturing Town on
+ Strike--Dinner to Thackeray--Peter
+ Cunningham--Incident of a November Night.
+
+
+_DAVID COPPERFIELD_ had been written, in Devonshire-terrace for the most
+part, between the opening of 1849 and October 1850, its publication
+covering that time; and its sale, which has since taken the lead of all
+his books but _Pickwick_, never then exceeding twenty-five thousand. But
+though it remained thus steady for the time, the popularity of the book
+added largely to the sale of its successor. _Bleak House_ was begun in
+his new abode of Tavistock House at the end of November 1851; was
+carried on, amid the excitements of the Guild performances, through the
+following year; was finished at Boulogne in the August of 1853; and was
+dedicated to "his friends and companions in the Guild of Literature and
+Art."
+
+[Illustration: TAVISTOCK HOUSE.]
+
+In March 1852 the first number appeared,[169] and its sale was
+mentioned in the same letter from Tavistock House (7th of March)
+which told of his troubles in the story at its outset, and of other
+anxieties incident to the common lot and inseparable equally from its
+joys and sorrows, through which his life was passing at the time. "My
+Highgate journey yesterday was a sad one. Sad to think how all journeys
+tend that way. I went up to the cemetery to look for a piece of ground.
+In no hope of a Government bill,[170] and in a foolish dislike to leaving
+the little child shut up in a vault there, I think of pitching a tent
+under the sky. . . . Nothing has taken place here: but I believe, every
+hour, that it must next hour. Wild ideas are upon me of going to
+Paris--Rouen--Switzerland--somewhere--and writing the remaining two-thirds
+of the next No. aloft in some queer inn room. I have been hanging over
+it, and have got restless. Want a change I think. Stupid. We were at
+30,000 when I last heard. . . . I am sorry to say that after all kinds
+of evasions, I am obliged to dine at Lansdowne House to-morrow. But
+maybe the affair will come off to-night and give me an excuse! I enclose
+proofs of No. 2. Browne has done Skimpole, and helped to make him
+singularly unlike the great original. Look it over, and say what occurs
+to you. . . . Don't you think Mrs. Gaskell charming? With one
+ill-considered thing that looks like a want of natural perception, I
+think it masterly." His last allusion is to the story by a delightful
+writer then appearing in _Household Words_; and of the others it only
+needs to say that the family affair which might have excused his absence
+at the Lansdowne dinner did not come off until four days later. On the
+13th of March his last child was born; and the boy, his seventh son,
+bears his godfather's distinguished name, Edward Bulwer Lytton.
+
+The inability to "grind sparks out of his dull blade," as he
+characterized his present labour at _Bleak House_, still fretting him,
+he struck out a scheme for Paris. "I could not get to Switzerland very
+well at this time of year. The Jura would be covered with snow. And if I
+went to Geneva I don't know where I might _not_ go to." It ended at last
+in a flight to Dover; but he found time before he left, amid many
+occupations and some anxieties, for a good-natured journey to Walworth
+to see a youth rehearse who was supposed to have talents for the stage,
+and he was able to gladden Mr. Toole's friends by thinking favourably of
+his chances of success. "I remember what I once myself wanted in that
+way," he said, "and I should like to serve him."
+
+At one of the last dinners in Tavistock House before his departure, Mr.
+Watson of Rockingham was present; and he was hardly settled in
+Camden-crescent, Dover, when he had news of the death of that excellent
+friend. "Poor dear Watson! It was this day two weeks when you rode with
+us and he dined with us. We all remarked after he had gone how happy he
+seemed to have got over his election troubles, and how cheerful he was.
+He was full of Christmas plans for Rockingham, and was very anxious that
+we should get up a little French piece I had been telling him the plot
+of. He went abroad next day to join Mrs. Watson and the children at
+Homburg, and then go to Lausanne, where they had taken a house for a
+month. He was seized at Homburg with violent internal inflammation, and
+died--without much pain--in four days. . . . I was so fond of him that I am
+sorry you didn't know him better. I believe he was as thoroughly good
+and true a man as ever lived; and I am sure I can have felt no greater
+affection for him than he felt for me. When I think of that bright
+house, and his fine simple honest heart, both so open to me, the blank
+and loss are like a dream." Other deaths followed. "Poor d'Orsay!" he
+wrote after only seven days (8th of August). "It is a tremendous
+consideration that friends should fall around us in such awful numbers
+as we attain middle life. What a field of battle it is!" Nor had another
+month quite passed before he lost, in Mrs. Macready, a very dear family
+friend. "Ah me! ah me!" he wrote. "This tremendous sickle certainly does
+cut deep into the surrounding corn, when one's own small blade has
+ripened. But _this_ is all a Dream, may be, and death will wake us."
+
+Able at last to settle to his work, he stayed in Dover three months; and
+early in October, sending home his family caravan, crossed to Boulogne
+to try it as a resort for seaside holiday. "I never saw a better
+instance of our countrymen than this place. Because it is accessible it
+is genteel to say it is of no character, quite English, nothing
+continental about it, and so forth. It is as quaint, picturesque, good a
+place as I know; the boatmen and fishing-people quite a race apart, and
+some of their villages as good as the fishing-villages on the
+Mediterranean. The Haute Ville, with a walk all round it on the
+ramparts, charming. The country walks, delightful. It is the best
+mixture of town and country (with sea air into the bargain) I ever saw;
+everything cheap, everything good; and please God I shall be writing on
+those said ramparts next July!"
+
+Before the year closed, the time to which his publishing arrangements
+with Messrs. Bradbury and Evans were limited had expired, but at his
+suggestion the fourth share in such books as he might write, which they
+had now received for eight years, was continued to them on the
+understanding that the publishers' percentage should no longer be
+charged in the partnership accounts, and with a power reserved to
+himself to withdraw when he pleased. In the new year his first adventure
+was an ovation in Birmingham, where a silver-gilt salver and a diamond
+ring were presented to him, as well for eloquent service specially
+rendered to the Institution, as in general testimony of "varied literary
+acquirements, genial philosophy, and high moral teaching." A great
+banquet followed on Twelfth Night, made memorable by an offer[171] to
+give a couple of readings from his books at the following Christmas, in
+aid of the new Midland Institute. It might seem to have been drawn from
+him as a grateful return for the enthusiastic greeting of his
+entertainers, but it was in his mind before he left London. It was his
+first formal undertaking to read in public.
+
+His eldest son had now left Eton, and, the boy's wishes pointing at the
+time to a mercantile career, he was sent to Leipzig for completion of
+his education.[172] At this date it seemed to me that the overstrain of
+attempting too much, brought upon him by the necessities of his weekly
+periodical, became first apparent in Dickens. Not unfrequently a
+complaint strange upon his lips fell from him. "Hypochondriacal
+whisperings tell me that I am rather overworked. The spring does not
+seem to fly back again directly, as it always did when I put my own work
+aside, and had nothing else to do. Yet I have everything to keep me
+going with a brave heart, Heaven knows!" Courage and hopefulness he
+might well derive from the increasing sale of _Bleak House_, which had
+risen to nearly forty thousand; but he could no longer bear easily what
+he carried so lightly of old, and enjoyments with work were too much for
+him. "What with _Bleak House_, and _Household Words_, and _Child's
+History_" (he dictated from week to week the papers which formed that
+little book, and cannot be said to have quite hit the mark with it),
+"and Miss Coutts's Home, and the invitations to feasts and festivals, I
+really feel as if my head would split like a fired shell if I remained
+here." He tried Brighton first, but did not find it answer, and
+returned.[173] A few days of unalloyed enjoyment were afterwards given
+to the visit of his excellent American friend Felton; and on the 13th of
+June he was again in Boulogne, thanking heaven for escape from a
+breakdown. "If I had substituted anybody's knowledge of myself for my
+own, and lingered in London, I never could have got through."
+
+What befell him in Boulogne will be given, with the incidents of his
+second and third summer visits to the place, on a later page. He
+completed, by the third week of August, his novel of _Bleak House_; and
+it was resolved to celebrate the event by a two months' trip to Italy,
+in company with Mr. Wilkie Collins and Mr. Augustus Egg. The start was
+to be made from Boulogne in the middle of October, when he would send
+his family home; and he described the intervening weeks as a fearful
+"reaction and prostration of laziness" only broken by the _Child's
+History_. At the end of September he wrote: "I finished the little
+_History_ yesterday, and am trying to think of something for the
+Christmas number. After which I shall knock off; having had quite enough
+to do, small as it would have seemed to me at any other time, since I
+finished _Bleak House_." He added, a week before his departure: "I get
+letters from Genoa and Lausanne as if I were going to stay in each place
+at least a month. If I were to measure my deserts by people's
+remembrance of me, I should be a prodigy of intolerability. Have
+recovered my Italian, which I had all but forgotten, and am one entire
+and perfect chrysolite of idleness."
+
+From this trip, of which the incidents have an interest independent of
+my ordinary narrative, Dickens was home again in the middle of December
+1853, and kept his promise to his Birmingham friends by reading in their
+Town Hall his _Christmas Carol_ on the 27th,[174] and his _Cricket on
+the Hearth_ on the 29th. The enthusiasm was great, and he consented to
+read his _Carol_ a second time, on Friday the 30th, if seats were
+reserved for working men at prices within their means. The result was an
+addition of between four and five hundred pounds to the funds for
+establishment of the new Institute; and a prettily worked flower-basket
+in silver, presented to Mrs. Dickens, commemorated these first public
+readings "to nearly six thousand people," and the design they had
+generously helped. Other applications then followed to such extent that
+limits to compliance had to be put; and a letter of the 16th of May 1854
+is one of many that express both the difficulty in which he found
+himself, and his much desired expedient for solving it. "The objection
+you suggest to paid public lecturing does not strike me at all. It is
+worth consideration, but I do not think there is anything in it. On the
+contrary, if the lecturing would have any motive power at all (like my
+poor father this, in the sound!) I believe it would tend the other way.
+In the Colchester matter I had already received a letter from a
+Colchester magnate; to whom I had honestly replied that I stood pledged
+to Christmas readings at Bradford[175] and at Reading, and could in no
+kind of reason do more in the public way." The promise to the people of
+Reading was for Talfourd's sake; the other was given after the
+Birmingham nights, when an institute in Bradford asked similar help, and
+offered a fee of fifty pounds. At first this was entertained; but was
+abandoned, with some reluctance, upon the argument that to become
+publicly a reader must alter without improving his position publicly as
+a writer, and that it was a change to be justified only when the higher
+calling should have failed of the old success. Thus yielding for the
+time, he nevertheless soon found the question rising again with the same
+importunity; his own position to it being always that of a man assenting
+against his will that it should rest in abeyance. But nothing farther
+was resolved on yet. The readings mentioned came off as promised, in aid
+of public objects;[176] and besides others two years later for the
+family of a friend, he had given the like liberal help to institutes in
+Folkestone, Chatham, and again in Birmingham, Peterborough, Sheffield,
+Coventry, and Edinburgh, before the question settled itself finally in
+the announcement for paid public readings issued by him in 1858.
+
+Carrying memory back to his home in the first half of 1854, there are
+few things that rise more pleasantly in connection with it than the
+children's theatricals. These began with the first Twelfth Night at
+Tavistock House, and were renewed until the principal actors ceased to
+be children. The best of the performances were _Tom Thumb_ and
+_Fortunio_, in '54 and '55; Dickens now joining first in the revel, and
+Mr. Mark Lemon bringing into it his own clever children and a very
+mountain of child-pleasing fun in himself. Dickens had become very
+intimate with him, and his merry genial ways had given him unbounded
+popularity with the "young 'uns," who had no such favourite as "Uncle
+Mark." In Fielding's burlesque he was the giantess Glumdalca, and
+Dickens was the ghost of Gaffer Thumb; the names by which they
+respectively appeared being the Infant Phenomenon and the Modern
+Garrick. But the younger actors carried off the palm. There was a Lord
+Grizzle, at whose ballad of Miss Villikins, introduced by desire,
+Thackeray rolled off his seat in a burst of laughter that became
+absurdly contagious. Yet even this, with hardly less fun from the
+Noodles, Doodles, and King Arthurs, was not so good as the pretty,
+fantastic, comic grace of Dollalolla, Huncamunca, and Tom. The girls
+wore steadily the grave airs irresistible when put on by little
+children; and an actor not out of his fourth year, who went through the
+comic songs and the tragic exploits without a wrong note or a victim
+unslain, represented the small helmeted hero. He was in the bills as Mr.
+H----, but bore in fact the name of the illustrious author whose
+conception he embodied; and who certainly would have hugged him for
+Tom's opening song, delivered in the arms of Huncamunca, if he could
+have forgiven the later master in his own craft for having composed it
+afresh to the air of a ditty then wildly popular at the "Coal
+Hole."[177] The encores were frequent, and for the most part the little
+fellow responded to them; but the misplaced enthusiasm that took similar
+form at the heroic intensity with which he stabbed Dollalolla, he
+rebuked by going gravely on to the close. His Fortunio, the next Twelfth
+Night, was not so great; yet when, as a prelude to getting the better of
+the Dragon, he adulterated his drink (Mr. Lemon played the Dragon) with
+sherry, the sly relish with which he watched the demoralization, by this
+means, of his formidable adversary into a helpless imbecility, was
+perfect. Here Dickens played the testy old Baron, and took advantage of
+the excitement against the Czar raging in 1855 to denounce him (in a
+song) as no other than own cousin to the very Bear that Fortunio had
+gone forth to subdue. He depicted him, in his desolation of autocracy,
+as the Robinson Crusoe of absolute state, who had at his court many a
+show-day and many a high-day, but hadn't in all his dominions a
+Friday.[178] The bill, which attributed these interpolations to "the
+Dramatic Poet of the Establishment," deserves also mention for the fun
+of the six large-lettered announcements which stood at the head of it,
+and could not have been bettered by Mr. Crummles himself. "Re-engagement
+of that irresistible comedian" (the performer of Lord Grizzle) "Mr.
+Ainger!" "Reappearance of Mr. H. who created so powerful an impression
+last year!" "Return of Mr. Charles Dickens Junior from his German
+engagements!" "Engagement of Miss Kate, who declined the munificent
+offers of the Management last season!" "Mr. Passe, Mr. Mudperiod, Mr.
+Measly Servile, and Mr. Wilkini Collini!" "First appearance on any stage
+of Mr. Plornishmaroontigoonter (who has been kept out of bed at a vast
+expense)." The last performer mentioned[179] was yet at some distance
+from the third year of his age. Dickens was Mr. Passe.
+
+Gravities were mixed with these gaieties. "I wish you would look" (20th
+of January 1854) "at the enclosed titles for the _H. W._ story, between
+this and two o'clock or so, when I will call. It is my usual day, you
+observe, on which I have jotted them down--Friday! It seems to me that
+there are three very good ones among them. I should like to know whether
+you hit upon the same." On the paper enclosed was written: 1. According
+to Cocker. 2. Prove it. 3. Stubborn Things. 4. Mr. Gradgrind's Facts. 5.
+The Grindstone. 6. Hard Times. 7. Two and Two are Four. 8. Something
+Tangible. 9. Our Hard-headed Friend. 10. Rust and Dust. 11. Simple
+Arithmetic. 12. A Matter of Calculation. 13. A Mere Question of Figures.
+14. The Gradgrind Philosophy.[180] The three selected by me were 2, 6,
+and 11; the three that were his own favourites were 6, 13, and 14; and
+as 6 had been chosen by both, that title was taken.
+
+It was the first story written by him for _Household Words_; and in the
+course of it the old troubles of the _Clock_ came back, with the
+difference that the greater brevity of the weekly portions made it
+easier to write them up to time, but much more difficult to get
+sufficient interest into each. "The difficulty of the space," he wrote
+after a few weeks' trial, "is CRUSHING. Nobody can have an idea of it
+who has not had an experience of patient fiction-writing with some
+elbow-room always, and open places in perspective. In this form, with
+any kind of regard to the current number, there is absolutely no such
+thing." He went on, however; and, of the two designs he started with,
+accomplished one very perfectly and the other at least partially. He
+more than doubled the circulation of his journal; and he wrote a story
+which, though not among his best, contains things as characteristic as
+any he has written. I may not go as far as Mr. Ruskin in giving it a
+high place; but to anything falling from that writer, however one may
+differ from it, great respect is due, and every word here said of
+Dickens's intention is in the most strict sense just.[181] "The
+essential value and truth of Dickens's writings," he says, "have been
+unwisely lost sight of by many thoughtful persons, merely because he
+presents his truth with some colour of caricature. Unwisely, because
+Dickens's caricature, though often gross, is never mistaken. Allowing
+for his manner of telling them, the things he tells us are always true.
+I wish that he could think it right to limit his brilliant exaggeration
+to works written only for public amusement; and when he takes up a
+subject of high national importance, such as that which he handled in
+_Hard Times_, that he would use severer and more accurate analysis. The
+usefulness of that work (to my mind, in several respects, the greatest
+he has written) is with many persons seriously diminished, because Mr.
+Bounderby is a dramatic monster, instead of a characteristic example of
+a worldly master; and Stephen Blackpool a dramatic perfection, instead
+of a characteristic example of an honest workman. But let us not lose
+the use of Dickens's wit and insight, because he chooses to speak in a
+circle of stage fire. He is entirely right in his main drift and purpose
+in every book he has written; and all of them, but especially _Hard
+Times_, should be studied with close and earnest care by persons
+interested in social questions. They will find much that is partial,
+and, because partial, apparently unjust; but if they examine all the
+evidence on the other side, which Dickens seems to overlook, it will
+appear, after all their trouble, that his view was the finally right
+one, grossly and sharply told."[182] The best points in it, out of the
+circle of stage fire (an expression of wider application to this part
+of Dickens's life than its inventor supposed it to be), were the
+sketches of the riding-circus people and the Bounderby household; but it
+is a wise hint of Mr. Ruskin's that there may be, in the drift of a
+story, truths of sufficient importance to set against defects of
+workmanship; and here they challenged wide attention. You cannot train
+any one properly, unless you cultivate the fancy, and allow fair scope
+to the affections. You cannot govern men on a principle of averages; and
+to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market is not the _summum
+bonum_ of life. You cannot treat the working man fairly unless, in
+dealing with his wrongs and his delusions, you take equally into account
+the simplicity and tenacity of his nature, arising partly from limited
+knowledge, but more from honesty and singleness of intention. Fiction
+cannot prove a case, but it can express forcibly a righteous sentiment;
+and this is here done unsparingly upon matters of universal concern.
+The book was finished at Boulogne in the middle of July,[183] and is
+inscribed to Carlyle.
+
+An American admirer accounted for the vivacity of the circus-scenes by
+declaring that Dickens had "arranged with the master of Astley's Circus
+to spend many hours behind the scenes with the riders and among the
+horses;" a thing just as likely as that he went into training as a
+stroller to qualify for Mr. Crummles in _Nickleby_. Such successes
+belonged to the experiences of his youth; he had nothing to add to what
+his marvellous observation had made familiar from almost childish days;
+and the glimpses we get of them in the _Sketches by Boz_ are in these
+points as perfect as anything his later experience could supply. There
+was one thing nevertheless which the choice of his subject made him
+anxious to verify while _Hard Times_ was in hand; and this was a strike
+in a manufacturing town. He went to Preston to see one at the end of
+January, and was somewhat disappointed. "I am afraid I shall not be able
+to get much here. Except the crowds at the street-corners reading the
+placards pro and con; and the cold absence of smoke from the
+mill-chimneys; there is very little in the streets to make the town
+remarkable. I am told that the people 'sit at home and mope.' The
+delegates with the money from the neighbouring places come in to-day to
+report the amounts they bring; and to-morrow the people are paid. When I
+have seen both these ceremonies, I shall return. It is a nasty place (I
+thought it was a model town); and I am in the Bull Hotel, before which
+some time ago the people assembled supposing the masters to be here, and
+on demanding to have them out were remonstrated with by the landlady in
+person. I saw the account in an Italian paper, in which it was stated
+that 'the populace then environed the Palazzo Bull, until the padrona of
+the Palazzo heroically appeared at one of the upper windows and
+addressed them!' One can hardly conceive anything less likely to be
+represented to an Italian mind by this description, than the old,
+grubby, smoky, mean, intensely formal red brick house with a narrow
+gateway and a dingy yard, to which it applies. At the theatre last night
+I saw _Hamlet_, and should have done better to 'sit at home and mope'
+like the idle workmen. In the last scene, Laertes on being asked how it
+was with him replied (verbatim) 'Why, like a woodcock--on account of my
+treachery.'" (29th Jan.)
+
+The home incidents of the summer and autumn of 1855 may be mentioned
+briefly. It was a year of much unsettled discontent with him, and upon
+return from a short trip to Paris with Mr. Wilkie Collins, he flung
+himself rather hotly into agitation with the administrative
+reformers,[184] and spoke at one of the great meetings in Drury-lane
+Theatre. In the following month (April) he took occasion, even from the
+chair of the General Theatrical Fund, to give renewed expression to
+political dissatisfactions.[185] In the summer he threw open to many
+friends his Tavistock House Theatre, having secured for its "lessee and
+manager Mr. Crummles;" for its poet Mr. Wilkie Collins, in an "entirely
+new and original domestic melodrama;" and for its scene-painter "Mr.
+Stanfield, R.A."[186] _The Lighthouse_, by Mr. Wilkie Collins, was then
+produced, its actors being Mr. Crummles the manager (Dickens in other
+words), the Author of the play, Mr. Lemon and Mr. Egg, and the manager's
+sister-in-law and eldest daughter. It was followed by the Guild farce of
+_Mr. Nightingale's Diary_, in which besides the performers named, and
+Dickens in his old personation part, the manager's youngest daughter and
+Mr. Frank Stone assisted. The success was wonderful; and in the three
+delighted audiences who crowded to what the bills described as "the
+smallest theatre in the world," were not a few of the notabilities of
+London. Mr. Carlyle compared Dickens's wild picturesqueness in the old
+lighthouse keeper to the famous figure in Nicholas Poussin's
+bacchanalian dance in the National Gallery; and at one of the joyous
+suppers that followed on each night of the play, Lord Campbell told the
+company that he had much rather have written _Pickwick_ than be Chief
+Justice of England and a peer of parliament.[187]
+
+Then came the beginning of _Nobody's Fault_, as _Little Dorrit_
+continued to be called by him up to the eve of its publication; a flight
+to Folkestone to help his sluggish fancy; and his return to London in
+October to preside at a dinner to Thackeray on his going to lecture in
+America. It was a muster of more than sixty admiring entertainers, and
+Dickens's speech gave happy expression to the spirit that animated all,
+telling Thackeray not alone how much his friendship was prized by those
+present, and how proud they were of his genius, but offering him in the
+name of the tens of thousands absent who had never touched his hand or
+seen his face, life-long thanks for the treasures of mirth, wit, and
+wisdom within the yellow-covered numbers of _Pendennis_ and _Vanity
+Fair_. Peter Cunningham, one of the sons of Allan, was secretary to the
+banquet; and for many pleasures given to the subject of this memoir, who
+had a hearty regard for him, should have a few words to his memory.
+
+His presence was always welcome to Dickens, and indeed to all who knew
+him, for his relish of social life was great, and something of his keen
+enjoyment could not but be shared by his company. His geniality would
+have carried with it a pleasurable glow even if it had stood alone, and
+it was invigorated by very considerable acquirements. He had some
+knowledge of the works of eminent authors and artists; and he had an
+eager interest in their lives and haunts, which he had made the subject
+of minute and novel enquiry. This store of knowledge gave substance to
+his talk, yet never interrupted his buoyancy and pleasantry, because
+only introduced when called for, and not made matter of parade or
+display. But the happy combination of qualities that rendered him a
+favourite companion, and won him many friends, proved in the end
+injurious to himself. He had done much while young in certain lines of
+investigation which he had made almost his own, and there was every
+promise that, in the department of biographical and literary research,
+he would have produced much weightier works with advancing years. This
+however was not to be. The fascinations of good fellowship encroached
+more and more upon literary pursuits, until he nearly abandoned his
+former favourite studies, and sacrificed all the deeper purposes of his
+life to the present temptation of a festive hour. Then his health gave
+way, and he became lost to friends as well as to literature. But the
+impression of the bright and amiable intercourse of his better time
+survived, and his old associates never ceased to think of Peter
+Cunningham with regret and kindness.
+
+Dickens went to Paris early in October, and at its close was brought
+again to London by the sudden death of a friend, much deplored by
+himself, and still more so by a distinguished lady who had his loyal
+service at all times. An incident before his return to France is worth
+brief relation. He had sallied out for one of his night walks, full of
+thoughts of his story, one wintery rainy evening (the 8th of November),
+and "pulled himself up," outside the door of Whitechapel Workhouse, at a
+strange sight which arrested him there. Against the dreary enclosure of
+the house were leaning, in the midst of the downpouring rain and storm,
+what seemed to be seven heaps of rags: "dumb, wet, silent horrors" he
+described them, "sphinxes set up against that dead wall, and no one
+likely to be at the pains of solving them until the General Overthrow."
+He sent in his card to the Master. Against him there was no ground of
+complaint; he gave prompt personal attention; but the casual ward was
+full, and there was no help. The rag-heaps were all girls, and Dickens
+gave each a shilling. One girl, "twenty or so," had been without food a
+day and night. "Look at me," she said, as she clutched the shilling, and
+without thanks shuffled off. So with the rest. There was not a single
+"thank you." A crowd meanwhile, only less poor than these objects of
+misery, had gathered round the scene; but though they saw the seven
+shillings given away they asked for no relief to themselves, they
+recognized in their sad wild way the other greater wretchedness, and
+made room in silence for Dickens to walk on.
+
+Not more tolerant of the way in which laws meant to be most humane are
+too often administered in England, he left in a day or two to resume his
+_Little Dorrit_ in Paris. But before his life there is described, some
+sketches from his holiday trip to Italy with Mr. Wilkie Collins and Mr.
+Augustus Egg, and from his three summer visits to Boulogne, claim to
+themselves two intervening chapters.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[169] I subjoin the dozen titles successively proposed for _Bleak
+House_. 1. "Tom-all-Alone's. The Ruined House;" 2. "Tom-all-Alone's. The
+Solitary House that was always shut up;" 3. "Bleak House Academy;" 4.
+"The East Wind;" 5. "Tom-all-Alone's. The Ruined [House, Building,
+Factory, Mill] that got into Chancery and never got out;" 6.
+"Tom-all-Alone's. The Solitary House where the Grass grew;" 7.
+"Tom-all-Alone's. The Solitary House that was always shut up and never
+Lighted;" 8. "Tom-all-Alone's. The Ruined Mill, that got into Chancery
+and never got out;" 9. "Tom-all-Alone's. The Solitary House where the
+Wind howled;" 10. "Tom-all-Alone's. The Ruined House that got into
+Chancery and never got out;" 11. "Bleak House and the East Wind. How
+they both got into Chancery and never got out;" 12. "Bleak House."
+
+[170] He was greatly interested in the movement for closing town and
+city graves (see the close of the 11th chapter of _Bleak House_), and
+providing places of burial under State supervision.
+
+[171] The promise was formally conveyed next morning in a letter to one
+who took the lead then and since in all good work for Birmingham, Mr.
+Arthur Ryland. The reading would, he said in this letter (7th of Jan.
+1853), "take about two hours, with a pause of ten minutes half way
+through. There would be some novelty in the thing, as I have never done
+it in public, though I have in private, and (if I may say so) with a
+great effect on the hearers."
+
+[172] Baron Tauchnitz, describing to me his long and uninterrupted
+friendly intercourse with Dickens, has this remark: "I give also a
+passage from one of his letters written at the time when he sent his son
+Charles, through my mediation, to Leipzig. He says in it what he desires
+for his son. 'I want him to have all interest in, and to acquire a
+knowledge of, the life around him, and to be treated like a gentleman
+though pampered in nothing. By punctuality in all things, great or
+small, I set great store.'"
+
+[173] From one of his letters while there I take a passage of
+observation full of character. "Great excitement here about a wretched
+woman who has murdered her child. Apropos of which I observed a curious
+thing last night. The newspaper offices (local journals) had placards
+like this outside:
+
+ CHILD MURDER IN BRIGHTON.
+ INQUEST.
+ COMMITTAL OF THE MURDERESS.
+
+I saw so many common people stand profoundly staring at these lines for
+half-an-hour together--and even go back to stare again--that I feel
+quite certain they had not the power of thinking about the thing at all
+connectedly or continuously, without having something about it before
+their sense of sight. Having got that, they were considering the case,
+wondering how the devil they had come into that power. I saw one man in
+a smock frock lose the said power the moment he turned away, and bring
+his hob-nails back again."
+
+[174] The reading occupied nearly three hours: double the time devoted
+to it in the later years.
+
+[175] "After correspondence with all parts of England, and every kind of
+refusal and evasion on my part, I am now obliged to decide this
+question--whether I shall read two nights at Bradford for a hundred
+pounds. If I do, I may take as many hundred pounds as I choose." 27th of
+Jan. 1854.
+
+[176] On the 28th of Dec. 1854 he wrote from Bradford: "The hall is
+enormous, and they expect to seat 3700 people to-night! Notwithstanding
+which, it seems to me a tolerably easy place--except that the width of
+the platform is so very great to the eye at first." From Folkestone, on
+his way to Paris, he wrote in the autumn of 1855: "16th of Sept. I am
+going to read for them here, on the 5th of next month, and have answered
+in the last fortnight thirty applications to do the like all over
+England, Ireland, and Scotland. Fancy my having to come from Paris in
+December, to do this, at Peterborough, Birmingham, and Sheffield--old
+promises." Again: 23rd of Sept. "I am going to read here, next Friday
+week. There are (as there are everywhere) a Literary Institution and a
+Working Men's Institution, which have not the slightest sympathy or
+connexion. The stalls are five shillings, but I have made them fix the
+working men's admission at threepence, and I hope it may bring them
+together. The event comes off in a carpenter's shop, as the biggest
+place that can be got." In 1857, at Paxton's request, he read his
+_Carol_ at Coventry for the Institute.
+
+[177] My name it is Tom Thumb,
+ Small my size,
+ Small my size,
+ My name it is Tom Thumb,
+ Small my size.
+ Yet though I am so small,
+ I have killed the giants tall;
+ And now I'm paid for all,
+ Small my size,
+ Small my size,
+ And now I'm paid for all,
+ Small my size.
+
+[178] This finds mention, I observe, in a pleasant description of "Mr.
+Dickens's Amateur Theatricals," which appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_
+two years ago, by one who had been a member of the Juvenile Company. I
+quote a passage, recommending the whole paper as very agreeably written,
+with some shrewd criticism. "Mr. Planche had in one portion of the
+extravaganza put into the mouth of one of the characters for the moment
+a few lines of burlesque upon Macbeth, and we remember Mr. Dickens's
+unsuccessful attempts to teach the performer how to imitate Macready,
+whom he (the performer) had never seen! And after the performance, when
+we were restored to our evening-party costumes, and the school-room was
+cleared for dancing, still a stray 'property' or two had escaped the
+vigilant eye of the property-man, for Douglas Jerrold had picked up the
+horse's head (Fortunio's faithful steed _Comrade_), and was holding it
+up before the greatest living animal painter, who had been one of the
+audience, with 'Looks as if it knew _you_, Edwin!'"
+
+[179] He went with the rest to Boulogne in the summer, and an anecdote
+transmitted in one of his father's letters will show that he maintained
+the reputation as a comedian which his early debut had awakened.
+"ORIGINAL ANECDOTE OF THE PLORNISHGHENTER. This distinguished wit, being
+at Boulogne with his family, made a close acquaintance with his
+landlord, whose name was M. Beaucourt--the only French word with which
+he was at that time acquainted. It happened that one day he was left
+unusually long in a bathing-machine when the tide was making,
+accompanied by his two young brothers and little English nurse, without
+being drawn to land. The little nurse, being frightened, cried 'M'soo!
+M'soo!' The two young brothers being frightened, cried 'Ici! Ici!'. Our
+wit, at once perceiving that his English was of no use to him under the
+foreign circumstances, immediately fell to bawling 'Beau-court!' which
+he continued to shout at the utmost pitch of his voice and with great
+gravity, until rescued.--_New Boulogne Jest Book_, page 578."
+
+[180] To show the pains he took in such matters I will give other titles
+also thought of for this tale. 1. Fact; 2. Hard-headed Gradgrind; 3.
+Hard Heads and Soft Hearts; 4. Heads and Tales; 5. Black and White.
+
+[181] It is well to remember, too, what he wrote about the story to
+Charles Knight. It had no design, he said, to damage the really useful
+truths of Political Economy, but was wholly directed against "those who
+see figures and averages, and nothing else; who would take the average
+of cold in the Crimea during twelve months as a reason for clothing a
+soldier in nankeen on a night when he would be frozen to death in fur;
+and who would comfort the labourer in travelling twelve miles a day to
+and from his work, by telling him that the average distance of one
+inhabited place from another, on the whole area of England, is not more
+than four miles."
+
+[182] It is curious that with as strong a view in the opposite
+direction, and with an equally mistaken exaltation, above the writer's
+ordinary level, of a book which on the whole was undoubtedly below it,
+Mr. Taine speaks of _Hard Times_ as that one of Dickens's romances which
+is a summary of all the rest: exalting instinct above reason, and the
+intuitions of the heart above practical knowledge; attacking all
+education based on statistic figures and facts; heaping sorrow and
+ridicule on the practical mercantile people; fighting against the pride,
+hardness, and selfishness of the merchant and noble; cursing the
+manufacturing towns for imprisoning bodies in smoke and mud, and souls
+in falsehood and factitiousness;--while it contrasts, with that satire
+of social oppression, lofty eulogy of the oppressed; and searches out
+poor workmen, jugglers, foundlings, and circus people, for types of good
+sense, sweetness of disposition, generosity, delicacy, and courage, to
+perpetual confusion of the pretended knowledge, pretended happiness,
+pretended virtue, of the rich and powerful who trample upon them! This
+is a fair specimen of the exaggerations with which exaggeration is
+rebuked, in Mr. Taine's and much similar criticism.
+
+[183] Here is a note at the close. "Tavistock House. Look at that!
+Boulogne, of course. Friday, 14th of July, 1854. I am three parts mad,
+and the fourth delirious, with perpetual rushing at _Hard Times_. I have
+done what I hope is a good thing with Stephen, taking his story as a
+whole; and hope to be over in town with the end of the book on Wednesday
+night. . . . I have been looking forward through so many weeks and sides of
+paper to this Stephen business, that now--as usual--it being over, I
+feel as if nothing in the world, in the way of intense and violent
+rushing hither and thither, could quite restore my balance."
+
+[184] "I have hope of Mr. Morley--whom one cannot see without knowing to
+be a straightforward, earnest man. Travers, too, I think a man of the
+Anti-corn-law-league order. I also think Higgins will materially help
+them. Generally I quite agree with you that they hardly know what to be
+at; but it is an immensely difficult subject to start, and they must
+have every allowance. At any rate, it is not by leaving them alone and
+giving them no help, that they can be urged on to success." 29th of
+March 1855.
+
+[185] "The Government hit took immensely, but I'm afraid to look at the
+report, these things are so ill done. It came into my head as I was
+walking about at Hampstead yesterday. . . . On coming away I told B. we
+must have a toastmaster in future less given to constant drinking while
+the speeches are going on. B. replied 'Yes sir, you are quite right sir,
+he has no head whatever sir, look at him now sir'--Toastmaster was
+weakly contemplating the coats and hats--'do you not find it difficult
+to keep your hands off him sir, he ought to have his head knocked
+against the wall sir,--and he should sir, I assure you sir, if he was
+not in too debased a condition to be aware of it sir.'" April 3rd 1855.
+
+[186] For the scene of the Eddystone Lighthouse at this little play,
+afterwards placed in a frame in the hall at Gadshill, a thousand guineas
+was given at the Dickens sale. It occupied the great painter only one or
+two mornings, and Dickens will tell how it originated. Walking on
+Hampstead Heath to think over his Theatrical Fund speech, he met Mr.
+Lemon, and they went together to Stanfield. "He has been very ill, and
+he told us that large pictures are too much for him, and he must confine
+himself to small ones. But I would not have this, I declared he must
+paint bigger ones than ever, and what would he think of beginning upon
+an act-drop for a proposed vast theatre at Tavistock House? He laughed
+and caught at this, we cheered him up very much, and he said he was
+quite a man again." April 1855.
+
+[187] Sitting at Nisi Prius not long before, the Chief Justice, with the
+same eccentric liking for literature, had committed what was called at
+the time a breach of judicial decorum. (Such indecorums were less
+uncommon in the great days of the Bench.) "The name," he said, "of the
+illustrious Charles Dickens has been called on the jury, but he has not
+answered. If his great Chancery suit had been still going on, I
+certainly would have excused him, but, as that is over, he might have
+done us the honour of attending here, that he might have seen how we
+went on at common law."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+SWITZERLAND AND ITALY REVISITED.
+
+1853.
+
+ Swiss People--Narrow
+ Escape--Berne--Lausanne--An Old
+ Friend--Genoa--Peschiere revisited--On the Way
+ to Naples--Scene on Board Steamship--A Jaunt to
+ Pisa--A Greek War-ship--At Naples--At
+ Rome--Time's Changes--At the Opera--A
+ "Scattering" Party--Performance of
+ Puppets--Malaria--Desolation--At Bolsena--At
+ Venice--Habits of Gondoliers--Uses of
+ Travel--Tintoretto--At Turin--Liking for the
+ Sardinians--Austrian Police--Police
+ Arrangements--Dickens and the Austrian--An Old
+ Dislike.
+
+
+THE first news of the three travellers was from Chamounix, on the 20th
+of October; and in it there was little made of the fatigue, and much of
+the enjoyment, of their Swiss travel. Great attention and cleanliness at
+the inns, very small windows and very bleak passages, doors opening to
+wintery blasts, overhanging eaves and external galleries, plenty of
+milk, honey, cows, and goats, much singing towards sunset on mountain
+sides, mountains almost too solemn to look at--that was the picture of
+it, with the country everywhere in one of its finest aspects, as winter
+began to close in. They had started from Geneva the previous morning at
+four, and in their day's travel Dickens had again noticed what he spoke
+of formerly, the ill-favoured look of the people in the valleys owing
+to their hard and stern climate. "All the women were like used-up men,
+and all the men like a sort of fagged dogs. But the good, genuine,
+grateful Swiss recognition of the commonest kind word--not too often
+thrown to them by our countrymen--made them quite radiant. I walked the
+greater part of the way, which was like going up the Monument." On the
+day the letter was written they had been up to the Mer de Glace, finding
+it not so beautiful in colour as in summer, but grander in its
+desolation; the green ice, like the greater part of the ascent, being
+covered with snow. "We were alarmingly near to a very dismal accident.
+We were a train of four mules and two guides, going along an immense
+height like a chimney-piece, with sheer precipice below, when there came
+rolling from above, with fearful velocity, a block of stone about the
+size of one of the fountains in Trafalgar-square, which Egg, the last of
+the party, had preceded by not a yard, when it swept over the ledge,
+breaking away a tree, and rolled and tumbled down into the valley. It
+had been loosened by the heavy rains, or by some wood-cutters afterwards
+reported to be above." The only place new to Dickens was Berne: "a
+surprisingly picturesque old Swiss town, with a view of the Alps from
+the outside of it singularly beautiful in the morning light." Everything
+else was familiar to him: though at that winter season, when the inns
+were shutting up, and all who could afford it were off to Geneva, most
+things in the valley struck him with a new aspect. From such of his old
+friends as he found at Lausanne, where a day or two's rest was taken, he
+had the gladdest of greetings; "and the wonderful manner in which they
+turned out in the wettest morning ever beheld for a Godspeed down the
+Lake was really quite pathetic."
+
+He had found time to see again the deaf, dumb, and blind youth at Mr.
+Haldimand's Institution who had aroused so deep an interest in him seven
+years before, but, in his brief present visit, the old associations
+would not reawaken. "Tremendous efforts were made by Hertzel to impress
+him with an idea of me, and the associations belonging to me; but it
+seemed in my eyes quite a failure, and I much doubt if he had the least
+perception of his old acquaintance. According to his custom, he went on
+muttering strange eager sounds like Town and Down and Mown, but nothing
+more. I left ten francs to be spent in cigars for my old friend. If I
+had taken one with me, I think I could, more successfully than his
+master, have established my identity." The child similarly afflicted,
+the little girl whom he saw at the same old time, had been after some
+trial discharged as an idiot.
+
+Before October closed, the travellers had reached Genoa, having been
+thirty-one consecutive hours on the road from Milan. They arrived in
+somewhat damaged condition, and took up their lodging in the top rooms
+of the Croce di Malta, "overlooking the port and sea pleasantly and
+airily enough, but it was no joke to get so high, and the apartment is
+rather vast and faded." The warmth of personal greeting that here
+awaited Dickens was given no less to the friends who accompanied him,
+and though the reader may not share in such private confidences as would
+show the sensation created by his reappearance, and the jovial hours
+that were passed among old associates, he will perhaps be interested to
+know how far the intervening years had changed the aspect of things and
+places made pleasantly familiar to us in his former letters. He wrote to
+his sister-in-law that the old walks were pretty much the same as ever
+except that there had been building behind the Peschiere up the San
+Bartolomeo hill, and the whole town towards San Pietro d'Arena had been
+quite changed. The Bisagno looked just the same, stony just then, having
+very little water in it; the vicoli were fragrant with the same old
+flavour of "very rotten cheese kept in very hot blankets;" and
+everywhere he saw the mezzaro as of yore. The Jesuits' College in the
+Strada Nuova was become, under the changed government, the Hotel de
+Ville, and a splendid caffe with a terrace-garden had arisen between it
+and Palaviccini's old palace. "Pal himself has gone to the dogs."
+Another new and handsome caffe had been built in the Piazza Carlo
+Felice, between the old one of the Bei Arti and the Strada Carlo Felice;
+and the Teatro Diurno had now stone galleries and seats, like an ancient
+amphitheatre. "The beastly gate and guardhouse in the Albaro road are
+still in their dear old beastly state; and the whole of that road is
+just as it was. The man without legs is still in the Strada Nuova; but
+the beggars in general are all cleared off, and our old one-arm'd
+Belisario made a sudden evaporation a year or two ago. I am going to the
+Peschiere to-day." To myself he described his former favourite abode as
+converted into a girls' college; all the paintings of gods and goddesses
+canvassed over, and the gardens gone to ruin; "but O! what a wonderful
+place!" He observed an extraordinary increase everywhere else, since he
+was last in the splendid city, of "life, growth, and enterprise;" and he
+declared his old conviction to be confirmed that for picturesque beauty
+and character there was nothing in Italy, Venice excepted, "near
+brilliant old Genoa."
+
+The voyage thence to Naples, written from the latter place, is too
+capital a description to be lost. The steamer in which they embarked was
+"the new express English ship," but they found her to be already more
+than full of passengers from Marseilles (among them an old friend, Sir
+Emerson Tennent, with his family), and everything in confusion. There
+were no places at the captain's table, dinner had to be taken on deck,
+no berth or sleeping accommodation was available, and heavy first-class
+fares had to be paid. Thus they made their way to Leghorn, where worse
+awaited them. The authorities proved to be not favourable to the "crack"
+English-officered vessel (she had just been started for the India mail);
+and her papers not being examined in time, it was too late to steam away
+again that day, and she had to lie all night long off the lighthouse.
+"The scene on board beggars description. Ladies on the tables; gentlemen
+under the tables; bed-room appliances not usually beheld in public
+airing themselves in positions where soup-tureens had been lately
+developing themselves; and ladies and gentlemen lying indiscriminately
+on the open deck, arranged like spoons on a sideboard. No mattresses, no
+blankets, nothing. Towards midnight attempts were made, by means of
+awning and flags, to make this latter scene remotely approach an
+Australian encampment; and we three (Collins, Egg, and self) lay
+together on the bare planks covered with our coats. We were all
+gradually dozing off, when a perfectly tropical rain fell, and in a
+moment drowned the whole ship. The rest of the night we passed upon the
+stairs, with an immense jumble of men and women. When anybody came up
+for any purpose we all fell down, and when anybody came down we all fell
+up again. Still, the good-humour in the English part of the passengers
+was quite extraordinary. . . . There were excellent officers aboard, and,
+in the morning, the first mate lent me his cabin to wash in--which I
+afterwards lent to Egg and Collins. Then we, the Emerson Tennents, the
+captain, the doctor, and the second officer, went off on a jaunt
+together to Pisa, as the ship was to lie all day at Leghorn. The captain
+was a capital fellow, but I led him, facetiously, such a life the whole
+day, that I got most things altered at night. Emerson Tennent's son,
+with the greatest amiability, insisted on turning out of his state-room
+for me, and I got a good bed there. The store-room down by the hold was
+opened for Collins and Egg; and they slept with the moist sugar, the
+cheese in cut, the spices, the cruets, the apples and pears, in a
+perfect chandler's shop--in company with what a friend of ours would
+call a hold gent, who had been so horribly wet through over night that
+his condition frightened the authorities; a cat; and the steward, who
+dozed in an arm-chair, and all-night-long fell head foremost, once every
+five minutes, on Egg, who slept on the counter or dresser. Last night, I
+had the steward's own cabin, opening on deck, all to myself. It had been
+previously occupied by some desolate lady who went ashore at Civita
+Vecchia. There was little or no sea, thank Heaven, all the trip; but
+the rain was heavier than any I have ever seen, and the lightning very
+constant and vivid. We were, with the crew, some 200 people--provided
+with boats, at the utmost stretch, for one hundred perhaps. I could not
+help thinking what would happen if we met with any accident: the crew
+being chiefly Maltese, and evidently fellows who would cut off alone in
+the largest boat, on the least alarm; the speed very high; and the
+running, thro' all the narrow rocky channels. Thank God, however, here
+we are."
+
+A whimsical postscript closed the amusing narrative. "We towed from
+Civita Vecchia the entire Greek navy, I believe; consisting of a little
+brig of war with no guns, fitted as a steamer, but disabled by having
+burnt the bottoms of her boilers out, in her first run. She was just big
+enough to carry the captain and a crew of six or so: but the captain was
+so covered with buttons and gold that there never would have been room
+for him on board to put those valuables away, if he hadn't worn
+them--which he consequently did, all night. Whenever anything was wanted
+to be done, as slackening the tow-rope or anything of that sort, our
+officers roared at this miserable potentate, in violent English, through
+a speaking trumpet; of which he couldn't have understood a word in the
+most favourable circumstances. So he did all the wrong things first, and
+the right thing always last. The absence of any knowledge of anything
+but English on the part of the officers and stewards was most
+ridiculous. I met an Italian gentleman on the cabin steps yesterday
+morning, vainly endeavouring to explain that he wanted a cup of tea for
+his sick wife. And when we were coming out of the harbour at Genoa, and
+it was necessary to order away that boat of music you remember, the
+chief officer (called 'aft' for the purpose, as 'knowing something of
+Italian') delivered himself in this explicit and clear Italian to the
+principal performer--'Now Signora, if you don't sheer off you'll be run
+down, so you had better trice up that guitar of yours and put about.'"
+
+At Naples some days were passed very merrily; going up Vesuvius and into
+the buried cities, with Layard who had joined them, and with the
+Tennents. Here a small adventure befell Dickens specially, in itself
+extremely unimportant; but told by him with delightful humour in a
+letter to his sister-in-law. The old idle Frenchman, to whom all things
+are possible, with his snuff-box and dusty umbrella, and all the
+delicate and kindly observation, would have enchanted Leigh Hunt, and
+made his way to the heart of Charles Lamb. After mentioning Mr. Lowther,
+then English charge d'affaires in Naples, as a very agreeable fellow who
+had been at the Rockingham play, he alludes to a meeting at his house.
+"We had an exceedingly pleasant dinner of eight, preparatory to which I
+was near having the ridiculous adventure of not being able to find the
+house and coming back dinnerless. I went in an open carriage from the
+hotel in all state, and the coachman to my surprise pulled up at the end
+of the Chiaja. 'Behold the house,' says he, 'of Il Signor Larthoor!'--at
+the same time pointing with his whip into the seventh heaven where the
+early stars were shining. 'But the Signor Larthorr,' says I, 'lives at
+Pausilippo.' 'It is true,' says the coachman (still pointing to the
+evening star), 'but he lives high up the Salita Sant' Antonio where no
+carriage ever yet ascended, and that is the house' (evening star as
+aforesaid), 'and one must go on foot. Behold the Salita Sant' Antonio!'
+I went up it, a mile and a half I should think, I got into the strangest
+places among the wildest Neapolitans; kitchens, washing-places,
+archways, stables, vineyards; was baited by dogs, and answered, in
+profoundly unintelligible language, from behind lonely locked doors in
+cracked female voices, quaking with fear; but could hear of no such
+Englishman, nor any Englishman. Bye and bye, I came upon a polenta-shop
+in the clouds, where an old Frenchman with an umbrella like a faded
+tropical leaf (it had not rained in Naples for six weeks) was staring at
+nothing at all, with a snuff-box in his hand. To him I appealed,
+concerning the Signor Larthoor. 'Sir,' said he, with the sweetest
+politeness, 'can you speak French?' 'Sir,' said I, 'a little.' 'Sir,'
+said he, 'I presume the Signer Loothere'--you will observe that he
+changed the name according to the custom of his country--'is an
+Englishman?' I admitted that he was the victim of circumstances and had
+that misfortune. 'Sir,' said he, 'one word more. _Has_ he a servant with
+a wooden leg?' 'Great heaven, sir,' said I, 'how do I know? I should
+think not, but it is possible.' 'It is always,' said the Frenchman,
+'possible. Almost all the things of the world are always possible.'
+'Sir,' said I--you may imagine my condition and dismal sense of my own
+absurdity, by this time--'that is true.' He then took an immense pinch
+of snuff wiped the dust off his umbrella, led me to an arch commanding
+a wonderful view of the Bay of Naples, and pointed deep into the earth
+from which I had mounted. 'Below there, near the lamp, one finds an
+Englishman with a servant with a wooden leg. It is always possible that
+he is the Signor Loothore.' I had been asked at six o'clock, and it was
+now getting on for seven. I went back in a state of perspiration and
+misery not to be described, and without the faintest hope of finding the
+spot. But as I was going farther down to the lamp, I saw the strangest
+staircase up a dark corner, with a man in a white waistcoat (evidently
+hired) standing on the top of it fuming. I dashed in at a venture, found
+it was the house, made the most of the whole story, and achieved much
+popularity. The best of it was that as nobody ever did find the place,
+Lowther had put a servant at the bottom of the Salita to wait 'for an
+English gentleman;' but the servant (as he presently pleaded), deceived
+by the moustache, had allowed the English gentleman to pass
+unchallenged."
+
+From Naples they went to Rome, where they found Lockhart, "fearfully
+weak and broken, yet hopeful of himself too" (he died the following
+year); smoked and drank punch with David Roberts, then painting everyday
+with Louis Haghe in St. Peter's; and took the old walks. The Coliseum,
+Appian Way, and Streets of Tombs, seemed desolate and grand as ever; but
+generally, Dickens adds, "I discovered the Roman antiquities to be
+_smaller_ than my imagination in nine years had made them. The Electric
+Telegraph now goes like a sunbeam through the cruel old heart of the
+Coliseum--a suggestive thing to think about, I fancied. The Pantheon I
+thought even nobler than of yore." The amusements were of course an
+attraction; and nothing at the Opera amused the party of three English
+more, than another party of four Americans who sat behind them in the
+pit. "All the seats are numbered arm-chairs, and you buy your number at
+the pay-place, and go to it with the easiest direction on the ticket
+itself. We were early, and the four places of the Americans were on the
+next row behind us--all together. After looking about them for some
+time, and seeing the greater part of the seats empty (because the
+audience generally wait in a caffe which is part of the theatre), one of
+them said 'Waal I dunno--I expect we aint no call to set so nigh to one
+another neither--will you scatter Kernel, will you scatter sir?--' Upon
+this the Kernel 'scattered' some twenty benches off; and they
+distributed themselves (for no earthly reason apparently but to get rid
+of one another) all over the pit. As soon as the overture began, in came
+the audience in a mass. Then the people who had got the numbers into
+which they had 'scattered,' had to get them out; and as they understood
+nothing that was said to them, and could make no reply but 'A-mericani,'
+you may imagine the number of cocked hats it took to dislodge them. At
+last they were all got back into their right places, except one. About
+an hour afterwards when Moses (_Moses in Egypt_ was the opera) was
+invoking the darkness, and there was a dead silence all over the house,
+unwonted sounds of disturbance broke out from a distant corner of the
+pit, and here and there a beard got up to look. 'What is it neow sir?'
+said one of the Americans to another;--'some person seems to be getting
+along, again streeem.' 'Waal sir' he replied 'I dunno. But I xpect 'tis
+the Kernel sir, a holdin on.' So it was. The Kernel was ignominiously
+escorted back to his right place, not in the least disconcerted, and in
+perfectly good spirits and temper." The opera was excellently done, and
+the price of the stalls one and threepence English. At Milan, on the
+other hand, the Scala was fallen from its old estate, dirty, gloomy,
+dull, and the performance execrable.
+
+Another theatre of the smallest pretension Dickens sought out with
+avidity in Rome, and eagerly enjoyed. He had heard it said in his old
+time in Genoa that the finest Marionetti were here; and now, after great
+difficulty, he discovered the company in a sort of stable attached to a
+decayed palace. "It was a wet night, and there was no audience but a
+party of French officers and ourselves. We all sat together. I never saw
+anything more amazing than the performance--altogether only an hour
+long, but managed by as many as ten people, for we saw them all go
+behind, at the ringing of a bell. The saving of a young lady by a good
+fairy from the machinations of an enchanter, coupled with the comic
+business of her servant Pulcinella (the Roman Punch) formed the plot of
+the first piece. A scolding old peasant woman, who always leaned forward
+to scold and put her hands in the pockets of her apron, was incredibly
+natural. Pulcinella, so airy, so merry, so life-like, so graceful, he
+was irresistible. To see him carrying an umbrella over his mistress's
+head in a storm, talking to a prodigious giant whom he met in the
+forest, and going to bed with a pony, were things never to be forgotten.
+And so delicate are the hands of the people who move them, that every
+puppet was an Italian, and did exactly what an Italian does. If he
+pointed at any object, if he saluted anybody, if he laughed, if he
+cried, he did it as never Englishman did it since Britain first at
+Heaven's command arose--arose--arose, &c. There was a ballet afterwards,
+on the same scale, and we really came away quite enchanted with the
+delicate drollery of the thing. French officers more than ditto."
+
+Of the great enemy to the health of the now capital of the kingdom of
+Italy, Dickens remarked in the same letter. "I have been led into some
+curious speculations by the existence and progress of the Malaria about
+Rome. Isn't it very extraordinary to think of its encroaching and
+encroaching on the Eternal City as if it were commissioned to swallow it
+up. This year it has been extremely bad, and has long outstayed its
+usual time. Rome has been very unhealthy, and is not free now. Few
+people care to be out at the bad times of sunset and sunrise, and the
+streets are like a desert at night. There is a church, a very little way
+outside the walls, destroyed by fire some 16 or 18 years ago, and now
+restored and re-created at an enormous expense. It stands in a
+wilderness. For any human creature who goes near it, or can sleep near
+it, after nightfall, it might as well be at the bottom of the uppermost
+cataract of the Nile. Along the whole extent of the Pontine Marshes
+(which we came across the other day), no creature in Adam's likeness
+lives, except the sallow people at the lonely posting-stations. I walk
+out from the Coliseum through the Street of Tombs to the ruins of the
+old Appian Way--pass no human being, and see no human habitation but
+ruined houses from which the people have fled, and where it is Death to
+sleep: these houses being three miles outside a gate of Rome at its
+farthest extent. Leaving Rome by the opposite side, we travel for many
+many hours over the dreary Campagna, shunned and avoided by all but the
+wretched shepherds. Thirteen hours' good posting brings us to Bolsena (I
+slept there once before), on the margin of a stagnant lake whence the
+workpeople fly as the sun goes down--where it is a risk to go; where
+from a distance we saw a mist hang on the place; where, in the
+inconceivably wretched inn, no window can be opened; where our dinner
+was a pale ghost of a fish with an oily omelette, and we slept in great
+mouldering rooms tainted with ruined arches and heaps of dung--and
+coming from which we saw no colour in the cheek of man, woman, or child
+for another twenty miles. Imagine this phantom knocking at the gates of
+Rome; passing them; creeping along the streets; haunting the aisles and
+pillars of the churches; year by year more encroaching, and more
+impossible of avoidance."
+
+From Rome they posted to Florence, reaching it in three days and a half,
+on the morning of the 20th of November; having then been out six weeks,
+with only three days' rain; and in another week they were at Venice.
+"The fine weather has accompanied us here," Dickens wrote on the 28th of
+November, "the place of all others where it is necessary, and the city
+has been a blaze of sunlight and blue sky (with an extremely clear cold
+air) ever since we have been in it. If you could see it at this moment
+you would never forget it. We live in the same house that I lived in
+nine years ago, and have the same sitting-room--close to the Bridge of
+Sighs and the Palace of the Doges. The room is at the corner of the
+house, and there is a narrow street of water running round the side: so
+that we have the Grand Canal before the two front windows, and this wild
+little street at the corner window: into which, too, our three bedrooms
+look. We established a gondola as soon as we arrived, and we slide out
+of the hall on to the water twenty times a day. The gondoliers have
+queer old customs that belong to their class, and some are sufficiently
+disconcerting. . . . It is a point of honour with them, while they are
+engaged, to be always at your disposal. Hence it is no use telling them
+they may go home for an hour or two--for they won't go. They roll
+themselves in shaggy capuccins, great coats with hoods, and lie down on
+the stone or marble pavement until they are wanted again. So that when I
+come in or go out, on foot--which can be done from this house for some
+miles, over little bridges and by narrow ways--I usually walk over the
+principal of my vassals, whose custom it is to snore immediately across
+the doorway. Conceive the oddity of the most familiar things in this
+place, from one instance: Last night we go downstairs at half-past
+eight, step into the gondola, slide away on the black water, ripple and
+plash swiftly along for a mile or two, land at a broad flight of steps,
+and instantly walk into the most brilliant and beautiful theatre
+conceivable--all silver and blue, and precious little fringes made of
+glittering prisms of glass. There we sit until half-past eleven, come
+out again (gondolier asleep outside the box-door), and in a moment are
+on the black silent water, floating away as if there were no dry
+building in the world. It stops, and in a moment we are out again, upon
+the broad solid Piazza of St. Mark, brilliantly lighted with gas, very
+like the Palais Royal at Paris, only far more handsome, and shining with
+no end of caffes. The two old pillars and the enormous bell-tower are as
+gruff and solid against the exquisite starlight as if they were a
+thousand miles from the sea or any undermining water: and the front of
+the cathedral, overlaid with golden mosaics and beautiful colours, is
+like a thousand rainbows even in the night."
+
+His formerly expressed notions as to art and pictures in Italy received
+confirmation at this visit. "I am more than ever confirmed in my
+conviction that one of the great uses of travelling is to encourage a
+man to think for himself, to be bold enough always to declare without
+offence that he _does_ think for himself, and to overcome the villainous
+meanness of professing what other people have professed when he knows
+(if he has capacity to originate an opinion) that his profession is
+untrue. The intolerable nonsense against which genteel taste and
+subserviency are afraid to rise, in connection with art, is astounding.
+Egg's honest amazement and consternation when he saw some of the most
+trumpeted things was what the Americans call 'a caution.' In the very
+same hour and minute there were scores of people falling into
+conventional raptures with that very poor Apollo, and passing over the
+most beautiful little figures and heads in the whole Vatican because
+they were not expressly set up to be worshipped. So in this place. There
+are pictures by Tintoretto in Venice, more delightful and masterly than
+it is possible sufficiently to express. His Assembly of the Blest I do
+believe to be, take it all in all, the most wonderful and charming
+picture ever painted. Your guide-book writer, representing the general
+swarming of humbugs, rather patronizes Tintoretto as a man of some sort
+of merit; and (bound to follow Eustace, Forsyth, and all the rest of
+them) directs you, on pain of being broke for want of gentility in
+appreciation, to go into ecstacies with things that have neither
+imagination, nature, proportion, possibility, nor anything else in them.
+You immediately obey, and tell your son to obey. He tells his son, and
+he tells his, and so the world gets at three-fourths of its frauds and
+miseries."
+
+The last place visited was Turin, where the travellers arrived on the
+5th of December, finding it, with a brightly shining sun, intensely cold
+and freezing hard. "There are double windows to all the rooms, but the
+Alpine air comes down and numbs my feet as I write (in a cap and shawl)
+within six feet of the fire." There was yet something better than this
+to report of that bracing Alpine air. To Dickens's remarks on the
+Sardinian race, and to what he says of the exile of the noblest
+Italians, the momentous events of the few following years gave striking
+comment; nor could better proof be afforded of the judgment he brought
+to the observation of what passed before him. The letter had in all
+respects much interest and attractiveness. "This is a remarkably
+agreeable place. A beautiful town, prosperous, thriving, growing
+prodigiously, as Genoa is; crowded with busy inhabitants; full of noble
+streets and squares. The Alps, now covered deep with snow, are close
+upon it, and here and there seem almost ready to tumble into the houses.
+The contrast this part of Italy presents to the rest, is amazing.
+Beautifully made railroads, admirably managed; cheerful, active people;
+spirit, energy, life, progress. In Milan, in every street, the noble
+palace of some exile is a barrack, and dirty soldiers are lolling out of
+the magnificent windows--it seems as if the whole place were being
+gradually absorbed into soldiers. In Naples, something like a hundred
+thousand troops. 'I knew,' I said to a certain Neapolitan Marchese there
+whom I had known before, and who came to see me the night after I
+arrived, 'I knew a very remarkable gentleman when I was last here; who
+had never been out of his own country, but was perfectly acquainted with
+English literature, and had taught himself to speak English in that
+wonderful manner that no one could have known him for a foreigner; I am
+very anxious to see him again, but I forget his name.'--He named him,
+and his face fell directly. 'Dead?' said I.--'In exile.'--'O dear me!'
+said I, 'I had looked forward to seeing him again, more than any one I
+was acquainted with in the country!'--'What would you have!' says the
+Marchese in a low-voice. 'He was a remarkable man--full of knowledge,
+full of spirit, full of generosity. Where should he be but in exile!
+Where could he be!' We said not another word about it, but I shall
+always remember the short dialogue."
+
+On the other hand there were incidents of the Austrian occupation as to
+which Dickens thought the ordinary style of comment unfair; and his
+closing remark on their police is well worth preserving. "I am strongly
+inclined to think that our countrymen are to blame in the matter of the
+Austrian vexations to travellers that have been complained of. Their
+manner is so very bad, they are so extraordinarily suspicious, so
+determined to be done by everybody, and give so much offence. Now, the
+Austrian police are very strict, but they really know how to do
+business, and they do it. And if you treat them like gentlemen, they
+will always respond. When we first crossed the Austrian frontier, and
+were ushered into the police office, I took off my hat. The officer
+immediately took off his, and was as polite--still doing his duty,
+without any compromise--as it was possible to be. When we came to
+Venice, the arrangements were very strict, but were so business-like
+that the smallest possible amount of inconvenience consistent with
+strictness ensued. Here is the scene. A soldier has come into the
+railway carriage (a saloon on the American plan) some miles off, has
+touched his hat, and asked for my passport. I have given it. Soldier has
+touched his hat again, and retired as from the presence of superior
+officer. Alighted from carriage, we pass into a place like a
+banking-house, lighted up with gas. Nobody bullies us or drives us
+there, but we must go, because the road ends there. Several soldierly
+clerks. One very sharp chief. My passport is brought out of an inner
+room, certified to be en regle. Very sharp chief takes it, looks at it
+(it is rather longer, now, than _Hamlet_), calls out--'Signor Carlo
+Dickens!' 'Here I am sir.' 'Do you intend remaining long in Venice sir?'
+'Probably four days sir!' 'Italian is known to you sir. You have been
+in Venice before?' 'Once before sir.' 'Perhaps you remained longer then
+sir?' 'No indeed; I merely came to see, and went as I came.' 'Truly sir?
+Do I infer that you are going by Trieste?' 'No. I am going to Parma, and
+Turin, and by Paris home.' 'A cold journey sir, I hope it may be a
+pleasant one.' 'Thank you.'--He gives me one very sharp look all over,
+and wishes me a very happy night. I wish _him_ a very happy night and
+it's done. The thing being done at all, could not be better done, or
+more politely--though I dare say if I had been sucking a gentish cane
+all the time, or talking in English to my compatriots, it might not
+unnaturally have been different. At Turin and at Genoa there are no such
+stoppages at all; but in any other part of Italy, give me an Austrian in
+preference to a native functionary. At Naples it is done in a beggarly,
+shambling, bungling, tardy, vulgar way; but I am strengthened in my old
+impression that Naples is one of the most odious places on the face of
+the earth. The general degradation oppresses me like foul air."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THREE SUMMERS AT BOULOGNE.
+
+1853, 1854, and 1856.
+
+ Boulogne--Visits to France--His First
+ Residence--Fishermen's Quarter--Villa des
+ Moulineaux--M. Beaucourt--Tenant and
+ Landlord--French Prices--Beaucourt's Visit to
+ England--Preparations for the Fair--English
+ Friends--Northern Camp--Visit of Prince
+ Albert--Grand Review--Beaucourt's
+ Excitement--Emperor, Prince, and
+ Dickens--Jack-Tars--Legerdemain in
+ Perfection--Conjuring by Dickens--Making Demons
+ of Cards--Old Residence resumed--Last of the
+ Camp--A Household War--Feline Foes--State of
+ Siege--Preparing for Christmas--Gilbert
+ A'Becket.
+
+
+DICKENS was in Boulogne, in 1853, from the middle of June to the end of
+September, and for the next three months, as we have seen, was in
+Switzerland and Italy. In the following year he went again to Boulogne
+in June, and stayed, after finishing _Hard Times_, until far into
+October. In February of 1855 he was for a fortnight in Paris with Mr.
+Wilkie Collins; not taking up his more prolonged residence there until
+the winter. From November 1855 to the end of April 1856 he made the
+French capital his home, working at _Little Dorrit_ during all those
+months. Then, after a month's interval in Dover and London, he took up
+his third summer residence in Boulogne, whither his younger children had
+gone direct from Paris; and stayed until September, finishing _Little
+Dorrit_ in London in the spring of 1857.
+
+Of the first of these visits, a few lively notes of humour and character
+out of his letters will tell the story sufficiently. The second and
+third had points of more attractiveness. Those were the years of the
+French-English alliance, of the great exposition of English paintings,
+of the return of the troops from the Crimea, and of the visit of the
+Prince Consort to the Emperor; such interest as Dickens took in these
+several matters appearing in his letters with the usual vividness, and
+the story of his continental life coming out with amusing distinctness
+in the successive pictures they paint with so much warmth and colour.
+Another chapter will be given to Paris. This deals only with Boulogne.
+
+For his first summer residence, in June 1853, he had taken a house on
+the high ground near the Calais road; an odd French place with the
+strangest little rooms and halls, but standing in the midst of a large
+garden, with wood and waterfall, a conservatory opening on a great bank
+of roses, and paths and gates on one side to the ramparts, on the other
+to the sea. Above all there was a capital proprietor and landlord, by
+whom the cost of keeping up gardens and wood (which he called a forest)
+was defrayed, while he gave his tenant the whole range of both and all
+the flowers for nothing, sold him the garden produce as it was wanted,
+and kept a cow on the estate to supply the family milk. "If this were
+but 300 miles farther off," wrote Dickens, "how the English would rave
+about it! I do assure you that there are picturesque people, and town,
+and country, about this place, that quite fill up the eye and fancy. As
+to the fishing people (whose dress can have changed neither in colour
+nor in form for many many years), and their quarter of the town
+cobweb-hung with great brown nets across the narrow up-hill streets,
+they are as good as Naples, every bit." His description both of house
+and landlord, of which I tested the exactness when I visited him, was in
+the old pleasant vein; requiring no connection with himself to give it
+interest, but, by the charm and ease with which everything picturesque
+or characteristic was disclosed, placed in the domain of art.
+
+"O the rain here yesterday!" (26th of June.) "A great sea-fog rolling
+in, a strong wind blowing, and the rain coming down in torrents all day
+long. . . . This house is on a great hill-side, backed up by woods of young
+trees. It faces the Haute Ville with the ramparts and the unfinished
+cathedral--which capital object is exactly opposite the windows. On the
+slope in front, going steep down to the right, all Boulogne is piled and
+jumbled about in a very picturesque manner. The view is charming--closed
+in at last by the tops of swelling hills; and the door is within ten
+minutes of the post-office, and within quarter of an hour of the sea.
+The garden is made in terraces up the hill-side, like an Italian garden;
+the top walks being in the before-mentioned woods. The best part of it
+begins at the level of the house, and goes up at the back, a couple of
+hundred feet perhaps. There are at present thousands of roses all about
+the house, and no end of other flowers. There are five great
+summer-houses, and (I think) fifteen fountains--not one of which
+(according to the invariable French custom) ever plays. The house is a
+doll's house of many rooms. It is one story high, with eight and thirty
+steps up and down--tribune wise--to the front door: the noblest French
+demonstration I have ever seen I think. It is a double house; and as
+there are only four windows and a pigeon-hole to be beheld in front, you
+would suppose it to contain about four rooms. Being built on the
+hill-side, the top story of the house at the back--there are two stories
+there--opens on the level of another garden. On the ground floor there
+is a very pretty hall, almost all glass; a little dining-room opening on
+a beautiful conservatory, which is also looked into through a great
+transparent glass in a mirror-frame over the chimney-piece, just as in
+Paxton's room at Chatsworth; a spare bed-room, two little drawing-rooms
+opening into one another, the family bed-rooms, a bath-room, a glass
+corridor, an open yard, and a kind of kitchen with a machinery of stoves
+and boilers. Above, there are eight tiny bed-rooms all opening on one
+great room in the roof, originally intended for a billiard-room. In the
+basement there is an admirable kitchen with every conceivable requisite
+in it, a noble cellar, first-rate man's room and pantry; coach-house,
+stable, coal-store and wood-store; and in the garden is a pavilion,
+containing an excellent spare bed-room on the ground floor. The
+getting-up of these places, the looking-glasses, clocks, little stoves,
+all manner of fittings, must be seen to be appreciated. The conservatory
+is full of choice flowers and perfectly beautiful."
+
+Then came the charm of the letter, his description of his landlord,
+lightly sketched by him in print as M. Loyal-Devasseur, but here filled
+in with the most attractive touches his loving hand could give. "But the
+landlord--M. Beaucourt--is wonderful. Everybody here has two surnames (I
+cannot conceive why), and M. Beaucourt, as he is always called, is by
+rights M. Beaucourt-Mutuel. He is a portly jolly fellow with a fine open
+face; lives on the hill behind, just outside the top of the garden; and
+was a linen draper in the town, where he still has a shop, but is
+supposed to have mortgaged his business and to be in difficulties--all
+along of this place, which he has planted with his own hands; which he
+cultivates all day; and which he never on any consideration speaks of
+but as 'the Property.' He is extraordinarily popular in Boulogne (the
+people in the shops invariably brightening up at the mention of his
+name, and congratulating us on being his tenants), and really seems to
+deserve it. He is such a liberal fellow that I can't bear to ask him for
+anything, since he instantly supplies it whatever it is. The things he
+has done in respect of unreasonable bedsteads and washing-stands, I
+blush to think of. I observed the other day in one of the side
+gardens--there are gardens at each side of the house too--a place where
+I thought the Comic Countryman" (a name he was giving just then to his
+youngest boy) "must infallibly trip over, and make a little descent of a
+dozen feet. So I said, 'M. Beaucourt'--who instantly pulled off his cap
+and stood bareheaded--'there are some spare pieces of wood lying by the
+cow-house, if you would have the kindness to have one laid across here I
+think it would be safer.' 'Ah, mon dieu sir,' said M. Beaucourt, 'it
+must be iron. This is not a portion of the property where you would like
+to see wood.' 'But iron is so expensive,' said I, 'and it really is not
+worth while----' 'Sir, pardon me a thousand times,' said M. Beaucourt,
+'it shall be iron. Assuredly and perfectly it shall be iron.' 'Then M.
+Beaucourt,' said I, 'I shall be glad to pay a moiety of the cost.'
+'Sir,' said M. Beaucourt, 'Never!' Then to change the subject, he slided
+from his firmness and gravity into a graceful conversational tone, and
+said, 'In the moonlight last night, the flowers on the property
+appeared, O Heaven, to be _bathing themselves in the sky_. You like the
+property?' 'M. Beaucourt,' said I, 'I am enchanted with it; I am more
+than satisfied with everything.' 'And I sir,' said M. Beaucourt, laying
+his cap upon his breast, and kissing his hand--'I equally!' Yesterday
+two blacksmiths came for a day's work, and put up a good solid handsome
+bit of iron-railing, morticed into the stone parapet. . . . If the
+extraordinary things in the house defy description, the amazing
+phenomena in the gardens never could have been dreamed of by anybody but
+a Frenchman bent upon one idea. Besides a portrait of the house in the
+dining-room, there is a plan of the property in the hall. It looks about
+the size of Ireland; and to every one of the extraordinary objects,
+there is a reference with some portentous name. There are fifty-one such
+references, including the Cottage of Tom Thumb, the Bridge of
+Austerlitz, the Bridge of Jena, the Hermitage, the Bower of the Old
+Guard, the Labyrinth (I have no idea which is which); and there is
+guidance to every room in the house, as if it were a place on that
+stupendous scale that without such a clue you must infallibly lose your
+way, and perhaps perish of starvation between bedroom and bedroom."[188]
+
+On the 3rd of July there came a fresh trait of the good fellow of a
+landlord. "Fancy what Beaucourt told me last night. When he 'conceived
+the inspiration' of planting the property ten years ago, he went over to
+England to buy the trees, took a small cottage in the market-gardens at
+Putney, lived there three months, held a symposium every night attended
+by the principal gardeners of Fulham, Putney, Kew, and Hammersmith
+(which he calls Hamsterdam), and wound up with a supper at which the
+market-gardeners rose, clinked their glasses, and exclaimed with one
+accord (I quote him exactly) VIVE BEAUCOURT! He was a captain in the
+National Guard, and Cavaignac his general. Brave Capitaine Beaucourt!
+said Cavaignac, you must receive a decoration. My General, said
+Beaucourt, No! It is enough for me that I have done my duty. I go to lay
+the first stone of a house upon a Property I have--that house shall be
+my decoration. (Regard that house!)" Addition to the picture came in a
+letter of the 24th of July: with a droll glimpse of Shakespeare at the
+theatre, and of the Saturday's pig-market.
+
+"I may mention that the great Beaucourt daily changes the orthography of
+this place. He has now fixed it, by having painted up outside the garden
+gate, 'Entree particuliere de la Villa des Moulineaux.' On another gate
+a little higher up, he has had painted 'Entree des Ecuries de la Villa
+des Moulineaux.' On another gate a little lower down (applicable to one
+of the innumerable buildings in the garden), 'Entree du Tom Pouce.' On
+the highest gate of the lot, leading to his own house, 'Entree du
+Chateau Napoleonienne.' All of which inscriptions you will behold in
+black and white when you come. I see little of him now, as, all things
+being 'bien arrangees,' he is delicate of appearing. His wife has been
+making a trip in the country during the last three weeks, but (as he
+mentioned to me with his hat in his hand) it was necessary that he
+should remain here, to be continually at the disposition of the tenant
+of the Property. (The better to do this, he has had roaring dinner
+parties of fifteen daily; and the old woman who milks the cows has been
+fainting up the hill under vast burdens of champagne.)
+
+"We went to the theatre last night, to see the _Midsummer Night's
+Dream_--of the Opera Comique. It is a beautiful little theatre now, with
+a very good company; and the nonsense of the piece was done with a sense
+quite confounding in that connexion. Willy Am Shay Kes Peer; Sirzhon
+Foll Stayffe; Lor Lattimeer; and that celebrated Maid of Honour to Queen
+Elizabeth, Meees Oleeveeir--were the principal characters.
+
+"Outside the old town, an army of workmen are (and have been for a week
+or so, already) employed upon an immense building which I supposed might
+be a Fort, or a Monastery, or a Barrack, or other something designed to
+last for ages. I find it is for the annual fair, which begins on the
+fifth of August and lasts a fortnight. Almost every Sunday we have a
+fete, where there is dancing in the open air, and where immense men with
+prodigious beards revolve on little wooden horses like Italian irons, in
+what we islanders call a roundabout, by the hour together. But really
+the good humour and cheerfulness are very delightful. Among the other
+sights of the place, there is a pig-market every Saturday, perfectly
+insupportable in its absurdity. An excited French peasant, male or
+female, with a determined young pig, is the most amazing spectacle. I
+saw a little Drama enacted yesterday week, the drollery of which was
+perfect. _Dram. Pers._ 1. A pretty young woman with short petticoats and
+trim blue stockings, riding a donkey with two baskets and a pig in each.
+2. An ancient farmer in a blouse, driving four pigs, his four in hand,
+with an enormous whip--and being drawn against walls and into smoking
+shops by any one of the four. 3. A cart, with an old pig (manacled)
+looking out of it, and terrifying six hundred and fifty young pigs in
+the market by his terrific grunts. 4. Collector of Octroi in an immense
+cocked hat, with a stream of young pigs running, night and day, between
+his military boots and rendering accounts impossible. 5. Inimitable,
+confronted by a radiation of elderly pigs, fastened each by one leg to a
+bunch of stakes in the ground. 6. John Edmund Reade, poet, expressing
+eternal devotion to and admiration of Landor, unconscious of approaching
+pig recently escaped from barrow. 7. Priests, peasants, soldiers, &c.
+&c."
+
+He had meanwhile gathered friendly faces round him. Frank Stone went
+over with his family to a house taken for him on the St. Omer road by
+Dickens, who was joined in the chateau by Mr. and Mrs. Leech and Mr.
+Wilkie Collins. "Leech says that when he stepped from the boat after
+their stormy passage, he was received by the congregated spectators with
+a distinct round of applause as by far the most intensely and
+unutterably miserable looking object that had yet appeared. The laughter
+was tumultuous, and he wishes his friends to know that altogether he
+made an immense hit." So passed the summer months: excursions with these
+friends to Amiens and Beauvais relieving the work upon his novel, and
+the trip to Italy, already described, following on its completion.
+
+In June, 1854, M. Beaucourt had again received his famous tenant, but in
+another cottage or chateau (to him convertible terms) on the much
+cherished property, placed on the very summit of the hill with a private
+road leading out to the Column, a really pretty place, rooms larger than
+in the other house, a noble sea view, everywhere nice prospects, good
+garden, and plenty of sloping turf.[189] It was called the Villa du
+Camp de Droite, and here Dickens stayed, as I have intimated, until the
+eve of his winter residence in Paris.
+
+The formation of the Northern Camp at Boulogne began the week after he
+had finished _Hard Times_, and he watched its progress, as it increased
+and extended itself along the cliffs towards Calais, with the liveliest
+amusement. At first he was startled by the suddenness with which
+soldiers overran the roads, became billeted in every house, made the
+bridges red with their trowsers, and "sprang upon the pier like
+fantastic mustard and cress when boats were expected, many of them never
+having seen the sea before." But the good behaviour of the men had a
+reconciling effect, and their ingenuity delighted him. The quickness
+with which they raised whole streets of mud-huts, less picturesque than
+the tents,[190] but (like most unpicturesque things) more comfortable,
+was like an Arabian Nights' tale. "Each little street holds 144 men, and
+every corner-door has the number of the street upon it as soon as it is
+put up; and the postmen can fall to work as easily as in the Rue de
+Rivoli at Paris." His patience was again a little tried when he found
+baggage-wagons ploughing up his favourite walks, and trumpeters in twos
+and threes teaching newly-recruited trumpeters in all the sylvan places,
+and making the echoes hideous. But this had its amusement too. "I met
+to-day a weazen sun-burnt youth from the south with such an immense
+regimental shako on, that he looked like a sort of lucifer match-box,
+evidently blowing his life rapidly out, under the auspices of two
+magnificent creatures all hair and lungs, of such breadth across the
+shoulders that I couldn't see their breast-buttons when I stood in front
+of them."
+
+The interest culminated as the visit of the Prince Consort approached
+with its attendant glories of illuminations and reviews. Beaucourt's
+excitement became intense. The Villa du Camp de Droite was to be a blaze
+of triumph on the night of the arrival; Dickens, who had carried over
+with him the meteor flag of England and set it streaming over a haystack
+in his field,[191] now hoisted the French colours over the British Jack
+in honour of the national alliance; the Emperor was to subside to the
+station of a general officer, so that all the rejoicings should be in
+honour of the Prince; and there was to be a review in the open country
+near Wimereux, when "at one stage of the maneuvres (I am too excited to
+spell the word but you know what I mean)" the whole hundred thousand men
+in the camp of the North were to be placed before the Prince's eyes, to
+show him what a division of the French army might be. "I believe
+everything I hear," said Dickens. It was the state of mind of Hood's
+country gentleman after the fire at the Houses of Parliament.
+"Beaucourt, as one of the town council, receives summonses to turn out
+and debate about something, or receive somebody, every five minutes.
+Whenever I look out of window, or go to the door, I see an immense black
+object at Beaucourt's porch like a boat set up on end in the air with a
+pair of white trowsers below it. This is the cocked hat of an official
+Huissier, newly arrived with a summons, whose head is thrown back as he
+is in the act of drinking Beaucourt's wine." The day came at last, and
+all Boulogne turned out for its holiday; "but I" Dickens wrote, "had by
+this cooled down a little, and, reserving myself for the illuminations,
+I abandoned the great men and set off upon my usual country walk. See my
+reward. Coming home by the Calais road, covered with dust, I suddenly
+find myself face to face with Albert and Napoleon, jogging along in the
+pleasantest way, a little in front, talking extremely loud about the
+view, and attended by a brilliant staff of some sixty or seventy
+horsemen, with a couple of our royal grooms with their red coats riding
+oddly enough in the midst of the magnates. I took off my wide-awake
+without stopping to stare, whereupon the Emperor pulled off his cocked
+hat; and Albert (seeing, I suppose, that it was an Englishman) pulled
+off his. Then we went our several ways. The Emperor is broader across
+the chest than in the old times when we used to see him so often at
+Gore-house, and stoops more in the shoulders. Indeed his carriage
+thereabouts is like Fonblanque's."[192] The town he described as "one
+great flag" for the rest of the visit; and to the success of the
+illuminations he contributed largely himself by leading off splendidly
+with a hundred and twenty wax candles blazing in his seventeen front
+windows, and visible from that great height over all the place. "On the
+first eruption Beaucourt _danced and screamed_ on the grass before the
+door; and when he was more composed, set off with Madame Beaucourt to
+look at the house from every possible quarter, and, he said, collect the
+suffrages of his compatriots."
+
+Their suffrages seem to have gone, however, mainly in another direction.
+"It was wonderful," Dickens wrote, "to behold about the streets the
+small French soldiers of the line seizing our Guards by the hand and
+embracing them. It was wonderful, too, to behold the English sailors in
+the town, shaking hands with everybody and generally patronizing
+everything. When the people could not get hold of either a soldier or a
+sailor, they rejoiced in the royal grooms, and embraced _them_. I don't
+think the Boulogne people were surprised by anything so much, as by the
+three cheers the crew of the yacht gave when the Emperor went aboard to
+lunch. The prodigious volume of them, and the precision, and the
+circumstance that no man was left straggling on his own account either
+before or afterwards, seemed to strike the general mind with amazement.
+Beaucourt said it was _like boxing_." That was written on the 10th of
+September; but in a very few days Dickens was unwillingly convinced
+that whatever the friendly disposition to England might be, the war with
+Russia was decidedly unpopular. He was present when the false report of
+the taking of Sebastopol reached the Emperor and Empress. "I was at the
+Review" (8th of October) "yesterday week, very near the Emperor and
+Empress, when the taking of Sebastopol was announced. It was a
+magnificent show on a magnificent day; and if any circumstance could
+make it special, the arrival of the telegraphic despatch would be the
+culminating point one might suppose. It quite disturbed and mortified me
+to find how faintly, feebly, miserably, the men responded to the call of
+the officers to cheer, as each regiment passed by. Fifty excited
+Englishmen would make a greater sign and sound than a thousand of these
+men do. . . . The Empress was very pretty, and her slight figure sat
+capitally on her grey horse. When the Emperor gave her the despatch to
+read, she flushed and fired up in a very pleasant way, and kissed it
+with as natural an impulse as one could desire to see."
+
+On the night of that day Dickens went up to see a play acted at a cafe
+at the camp, and found himself one of an audience composed wholly of
+officers and men, with only four ladies among them, officers' wives. The
+steady, working, sensible faces all about him told their own story; "and
+as to kindness and consideration towards the poor actors, it was real
+benevolence." Another attraction at the camp was a conjuror, who had
+been called to exhibit twice before the imperial party, and whom Dickens
+always afterwards referred to as the most consummate master of
+legerdemain he had seen. Nor was he a mean authority as to this, being
+himself, with his tools at hand, a capital conjuror;[193] but the
+Frenchman scorned help, stood among the company without any sort of
+apparatus, and, by the mere force of sleight of hand and an astonishing
+memory, performed feats having no likeness to anything Dickens had ever
+seen done, and totally inexplicable to his most vigilant reflection. "So
+far as I know, a perfectly original genius, and that puts any sort of
+knowledge of legerdemain, such as I supposed that I possessed, at utter
+defiance." The account he gave dealt with two exploits only, the easiest
+to describe, and, not being with cards, not the most remarkable; for he
+would also say of this Frenchman that he transformed cards into very
+demons. He never saw a human hand touch them in the same way, fling them
+about so amazingly, or change them in his, one's own, or another's hand,
+with a skill so impossible to follow.
+
+"You are to observe that he was _with the company_, not in the least
+removed from them; and that we occupied the front row. He brought in
+some writing paper with him when he entered, and a black-lead pencil;
+and he wrote some words on half-sheets of paper. One of these
+half-sheets he folded into two, and gave to Catherine to hold. Madame,
+he says aloud, will you think of any class of objects? I have done
+so.--Of what class, Madame? Animals.--Will you think of a particular
+animal, Madame? I have done so.--Of what animal? The Lion.--Will you
+think of another class of objects, Madame? I have done so.--Of what
+class? Flowers.--The particular flower? The Rose.--Will you open the
+paper you hold in your hand? She opened it, and there was neatly and
+plainly written in pencil--_The Lion._ _The Rose._ Nothing whatever had
+led up to these words, and they were the most distant conceivable from
+Catherine's thoughts when she entered the room. He had several common
+school-slates about a foot square. He took one of these to a
+field-officer from the camp, decore and what not, who sat about six from
+us, with a grave saturnine friend next him. My General, says he, will
+you write a name on this slate, after your friend has done so? Don't
+show it to me. The friend wrote a name, and the General wrote a name.
+The conjuror took the slate rapidly from the officer, threw it violently
+down on the ground with its written side to the floor, and asked the
+officer to put his foot upon it and keep it there: which he did. The
+conjuror considered for about a minute, looking devilish hard at the
+General.--My General, says he, your friend wrote Dagobert, upon the
+slate under your foot. The friend admits it.--And you, my General, wrote
+Nicholas. General admits it, and everybody laughs and applauds.--My
+General, will you excuse me, if I change that name into a name
+expressive of the power of a great nation, which, in happy alliance
+with the gallantry and spirit of France will shake that name to its
+centre? Certainly I will excuse it.--My General, take up the slate and
+read. General reads: DAGOBERT, VICTORIA. The first in his friend's
+writing; the second in a new hand. I never saw anything in the least
+like this; or at all approaching to the absolute certainty, the
+familiarity, quickness, absence of all machinery, and actual
+face-to-face, hand-to-hand fairness between the conjuror and the
+audience, with which it was done. I have not the slightest idea of the
+secret.--One more. He was blinded with several table napkins, and then a
+great cloth was bodily thrown over them and his head too, so that his
+voice sounded as if he were under a bed. Perhaps half a dozen dates were
+written on a slate. He takes the slate in his hand, and throws it
+violently down on the floor as before, remains silent a minute, seems to
+become agitated, and bursts out thus: 'What is this I see? A great city,
+but of narrow streets and old-fashioned houses, many of which are of
+wood, resolving itself into ruins! How is it falling into ruins? Hark! I
+hear the crackling of a great conflagration, and, looking up, I behold a
+vast cloud of flame and smoke. The ground is covered with hot cinders
+too, and people are flying into the fields and endeavouring to save
+their goods. This great fire, this great wind, this roaring noise! This
+is the great fire of London, and the first date upon the slate must be
+one, six, six, six--the year in which it happened!' And so on with all
+the other dates. There! Now, if you will take a cab and impart these
+mysteries to Rogers, I shall be very glad to have his opinion of them."
+Rogers had taxed our credulity with some wonderful clairvoyant
+experiences of his own in Paris to which here was a parallel at last!
+
+When leaving Paris for his third visit to Boulogne, at the beginning of
+June 1856, he had not written a word of the ninth number of his new
+book, and did not expect for another month to "see land from the running
+sea of _Little Dorrit_." He had resumed the house he first occupied, the
+cottage or villa "des Moulineaux," and after dawdling about his garden
+for a few days with surprising industry in a French farmer garb of blue
+blouse, leathern belt, and military cap, which he had mounted as "the
+only one for complete comfort," he wrote to me that he was getting "Now
+to work again--to work! The story lies before me, I hope, strong and
+clear. Not to be easily told; but nothing of that sort IS to be easily
+done that _I_ know of." At work it became his habit to sit late, and
+then, putting off his usual walk until night, to lie down among the
+roses reading until after tea ("middle-aged Love in a blouse and belt"),
+when he went down to the pier. "The said pier at evening is a phase of
+the place we never see, and which I hardly knew. But I never did behold
+such specimens of the youth of my country, male and female, as pervade
+that place. They are really, in their vulgarity and insolence, quite
+disheartening. One is so fearfully ashamed of them, and they contrast so
+very unfavourably with the natives." Mr. Wilkie Collins was again his
+companion in the summer weeks, and the presence of Jerrold for the
+greater part of the time added much to his enjoyment.
+
+The last of the camp was now at hand. It had only a battalion of men in
+it, and a few days would see them out. At first there was horrible
+weather, "storms of wind, rushes of rain, heavy squalls, cold airs, sea
+fogs, banging shutters, flapping doors, and beaten down rose-trees by
+the hundred; but then came a delightful week among the corn fields and
+bean fields, and afterwards the end. It looks very singular and very
+miserable. The soil being sand, and the grass having been trodden away
+these two years, the wind from the sea carries the sand into the chinks
+and ledges of all the doors and windows, and chokes them;--just as if
+they belonged to Arab huts in the desert. A number of the
+non-commissioned officers made turf-couches outside their huts, and
+there were turf orchestras for the bands to play in; all of which are
+fast getting sanded over in a most Egyptian manner. The Fair is on,
+under the walls of the haute ville over the way. At one popular show,
+the Malakhoff is taken every half-hour between 4 and 11. Bouncing
+explosions announce every triumph of the French arms (the English have
+nothing to do with it); and in the intervals a man outside blows a
+railway whistle--straight into the dining-room. Do you know that the
+French soldiers call the English medal 'The Salvage Medal'--meaning that
+they got it for saving the English army? I don't suppose there are a
+thousand people in all France who believe that we did anything but get
+rescued by the French. And I am confident that the no-result of our
+precious Chelsea enquiry has wonderfully strengthened this conviction.
+Nobody at home has yet any adequate idea, I am deplorably sure, of what
+the Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office have done for us. But
+whenever we get into war again, the people will begin to find out."
+
+His own household had got into a small war already, of which the
+commander-in-chief was his man-servant "French," the bulk of the forces
+engaged being his children, and the invaders two cats. Business brought
+him to London on the hostilities breaking out, and on his return after a
+few days the story of the war was told. "Dick," it should be said, was a
+canary very dear both to Dickens and his eldest daughter, who had so
+tamed to her loving hand its wild little heart that it was become the
+most docile of companions.[194] "The only thing new in this garden is
+that war is raging against two particularly tigerish and fearful cats
+(from the mill, I suppose), which are always glaring in dark corners,
+after our wonderful little Dick. Keeping the house open at all points,
+it is impossible to shut them out, and they hide themselves in the most
+terrific manner: hanging themselves up behind draperies, like bats, and
+tumbling out in the dead of night with frightful caterwaulings.
+Hereupon, French borrows Beaucourt's gun, loads the same to the muzzle,
+discharges it twice in vain and throws himself over with the recoil,
+exactly like a clown. But at last (while I was in town) he aims at the
+more amiable cat of the two, and shoots that animal dead. Insufferably
+elated by this victory, he is now engaged from morning to night in
+hiding behind bushes to get aim at the other. He does nothing else
+whatever. All the boys encourage him and watch for the enemy--on whose
+appearance they give an alarm which immediately serves as a warning to
+the creature, who runs away. They are at this moment (ready dressed for
+church) all lying on their stomachs in various parts of the garden.
+Horrible whistles give notice to the gun what point it is to approach. I
+am afraid to go out, lest I should be shot. Mr. Plornish says his
+prayers at night in a whisper, lest the cat should overhear him and take
+offence. The tradesmen cry out as they come up the avenue, 'Me voici!
+C'est moi--boulanger--ne tirez pas, Monsieur Franche!' It is like living
+in a state of siege; and the wonderful manner in which the cat preserves
+the character of being the only person not much put out by the intensity
+of this monomania, is most ridiculous." (6th of July.) . . . "About four
+pounds of powder and half a ton of shot have been (13th of July) fired
+off at the cat (and the public in general) during the week. The finest
+thing is that immediately after I have heard the noble sportsman blazing
+away at her in the garden in front, I look out of my room door into the
+drawing-room, and am pretty sure to see her coming in after the birds,
+in the calmest manner, by the back window. Intelligence has been brought
+to me from a source on which I can rely, that French has newly conceived
+the atrocious project of tempting her into the coach-house by meat and
+kindness, and there, from an elevated portmanteau, blowing her head off.
+This I mean sternly to interdict, and to do so to-day as a work of
+piety."
+
+Besides the graver work which Mr. Wilkie Collins and himself were busy
+with, in these months, and by which _Household Words_ mainly was to
+profit, some lighter matters occupied the leisure of both. There were
+to be, at Christmas, theatricals again at Tavistock House; in which the
+children, with the help of their father and other friends, were to
+follow up the success of the _Lighthouse_ by again acquitting themselves
+as grown-up actors; and Mr. Collins was busy preparing for them a new
+drama to be called _The Frozen Deep_, while Dickens was sketching a
+farce for Mr. Lemon to fill in. But this pleasant employment had sudden
+and sad interruption.
+
+An epidemic broke out in the town, affecting the children of several
+families known to Dickens, among them that of his friend Mr. Gilbert
+A'Becket; who, upon arriving from Paris, and finding a favourite little
+son stricken dangerously, sank himself under an illness from which he
+had been suffering, and died two days after the boy. "He had for three
+days shown symptoms of rallying, and we had some hope of his recovery;
+but he sank and died, and never even knew that the child had gone before
+him. A sad, sad story." Dickens meanwhile had sent his own children home
+with his wife, and the rest soon followed. Poor M. Beaucourt was
+inconsolable. "The desolation of the place is wretched. When Mamey and
+Katey went, Beaucourt came in and wept. He really is almost
+broken-hearted about it. He had planted all manner of flowers for next
+month, and has thrown down the spade and left off weeding the garden, so
+that it looks something like a dreary bird-cage with all manner of
+grasses and chickweeds sticking through the bars and lying in the sand.
+'Such a loss too,' he says, 'for Monsieur Dickens!' Then he looks in at
+the kitchen window (which seems to be his only relief), and sighs
+himself up the hill home."[195]
+
+The interval of residence in Paris between these two last visits to
+Boulogne is now to be described.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[188] Prices are reported in one of the letters; and, considering what
+they have been since, the touch of disappointment hinted at may raise a
+smile. "Provisions are scarcely as cheap as I expected, though very
+different from London: besides which, a pound weight here, is a pound
+and a quarter English. So that meat at 7_d._ a pound, is actually a
+fourth less. A capital dish of asparagus costs us about fivepence; a
+fowl, one and threepence; a duck, a few halfpence more; a dish of fish,
+about a shilling. The very best wine at tenpence that I ever drank--I
+used to get it very good for the same money in Genoa, but not so good.
+The common people very engaging and obliging."
+
+[189] Besides the old friends before named, Thackeray and his family
+were here in the early weeks, living "in a melancholy but very good
+chateau on the Paris road, where their landlord (a Baron) has supplied
+them, T. tells me, with one milk-jug as the entire crockery of the
+establishment." Our friend soon tired of this, going off to Spa, and on
+his return, after ascending the hill to smoke a farewell cigar with
+Dickens, left for London and Scotland in October.
+
+[190] Another of his letters questioned even the picturesqueness a
+little, for he discovered that on a sunny day the white tents, seen from
+a distance, looked exactly like an immense washing establishment with
+all the linen put out to dry.
+
+[191] "Whence it can be seen for miles and miles, to the glory of
+England and the joy of Beaucourt."
+
+[192] The picture had changed drearily in less than a year and a half,
+when (17th of Feb. 1856) Dickens thus wrote from Paris. "I suppose
+mortal man out of bed never looked so ill and worn as the Emperor does
+just now. He passed close by me on horseback, as I was coming in at the
+door on Friday, and I never saw so haggard a face. Some English saluted
+him, and he lifted his hand to his hat as slowly, painfully, and
+laboriously, as if his arm were made of lead. I think he _must_ be in
+pain."
+
+[193] I permit myself to quote from the bill of one of his
+entertainments in the old merry days at Bonchurch (ii. 425-434), of
+course drawn up by himself, whom it describes as "The Unparalleled
+Necromancer RHIA RHAMA RHOOS, educated cabalistically in the Orange
+Groves of Salamanca and the Ocean Caves of Alum Bay," some of whose
+proposed wonders it thus prefigures:
+
+ THE LEAPING CARD WONDER.
+
+ Two Cards being drawn from the Pack by two of
+ the company, and placed, with the Pack, in the
+ Necromancer's box, will leap forth at the
+ command of any lady of not less than eight, or
+ more than eighty, years of age.
+
+ *** _This wonder is the result of nine years'
+ seclusion in the mines of Russia._
+
+
+ THE PYRAMID WONDER.
+
+ A shilling being lent to the Necromancer by any
+ gentleman of not less than twelve months, or
+ more than one hundred years, of age, and
+ carefully marked by the said gentleman, will
+ disappear from within a brazen box at the word
+ of command, and pass through the hearts of an
+ infinity of boxes, which will afterwards build
+ themselves into pyramids and sink into a small
+ mahogany box, at the Necromancer's bidding.
+
+ *** _Five thousand guineas were paid for the
+ acquisition of this wonder, to a Chinese
+ Mandarin, who died of grief immediately after
+ parting with the secret._
+
+
+ THE CONFLAGRATION WONDER.
+
+ A Card being drawn from the Pack by any lady,
+ not under a direct and positive promise of
+ marriage, will be immediately named by the
+ Necromancer, destroyed by fire, and reproduced
+ from its own ashes.
+
+ *** _An annuity of one thousand pounds has been
+ offered to the Necromancer by the Directors of
+ the Sun Fire Office for the secret of this
+ wonder--and refused!!!_
+
+
+ THE LOAF OF BREAD WONDER.
+
+ The watch of any truly prepossessing lady, of
+ any age, single or married, being locked by the
+ Necromancer in a strong box, will fly at the
+ word of command from within that box into the
+ heart of an ordinary half-quartern loaf, whence
+ it shall be cut out in the presence of the
+ whole company, whose cries of astonishment will
+ be audible at a distance of some miles.
+
+ *** _Ten years in the Plains of Tartary were
+ devoted to the study of this wonder._
+
+
+ THE TRAVELLING DOLL WONDER.
+
+ The travelling doll is composed of solid wood
+ throughout, but, by putting on a travelling
+ dress of the simplest construction, becomes
+ invisible, performs enormous journeys in half a
+ minute, and passes from visibility to
+ invisibility with an expedition so astonishing
+ that no eye can follow its transformations.
+
+ *** _The Necromancer's attendant usually faints
+ on beholding this wonder, and is only to be
+ revived by the administration of brandy and
+ water._
+
+
+ THE PUDDING WONDER.
+
+ The company having agreed among themselves to
+ offer to the Necromancer, by way of loan, the
+ hat of any gentleman whose head has arrived at
+ maturity of size, the Necromancer, without
+ removing that hat for an instant from before
+ the eyes of the delighted company, will light a
+ fire in it, make a plum pudding in his magic
+ saucepan, boil it over the said fire, produce
+ it in two minutes, thoroughly done, cut it, and
+ dispense it in portions to the whole company,
+ for their consumption then and there; returning
+ the hat at last, wholly uninjured by fire, to
+ its lawful owner.
+
+ *** _The extreme liberality of this wonder
+ awakening the jealousy of the beneficent
+ Austrian Government, when exhibited in Milan,
+ the Necromancer had the honour to be seized,
+ and confined for five years in the fortress of
+ that city._
+
+[194] Dick died at Gadshill in 1866, in the sixteenth year of his age,
+and was honoured with a small tomb and epitaph.
+
+[195] I cannot take leave of M. Beaucourt without saying that I am
+necessarily silent as to the most touching traits recorded of him by
+Dickens, because they refer to the generosity shown by him to an English
+family in occupation of another of his houses, in connection with whom
+his losses must have been considerable, but for whom he had nothing but
+help and sympathy. Replying to some questions about them, put by Dickens
+one day, he had only enlarged on their sacrifices and self-denials. "Ah
+that family, unfortunate! 'And you, Monsieur Beaucourt,' I said to him,
+'you are unfortunate too, God knows!' Upon which he said in the
+pleasantest way in the world, Ah, Monsieur Dickens, thank you, don't
+speak of it!--And backed himself down the avenue with his cap in his
+hand, as if he were going to back himself straight into the evening
+star, without the ceremony of dying first. I never did see such a
+gentle, kind heart."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+RESIDENCE IN PARIS.
+
+1855-1856.
+
+ Actors and Dramas--Criticism of Frederic
+ Lemaitre--Increase of Celebrity--French
+ Translation of Dickens--Conventionalities of
+ the Theatre Francais--_Paradise Lost_ at the
+ Ambigu--Profane Nonsense--French _As You Like
+ It_--Story of a French Drama--Auber and Queen
+ Victoria--Robinson Crusoe--A Compliment and its
+ Result--Madame Scribe--Ristori--Viardot in
+ Orphee--Madame Dudevant at the
+ Viardots--Banquet at Girardin's--National and
+ Personal Compliment--Second Banquet--The Bourse
+ and its Victims--Entry of Troops from
+ Crimea--Paris illuminated--Streets on New
+ Year's Day--Results of Imperial
+ Improvement--English and French Art--French and
+ English Nature--Sitting to Ary Scheffer--A
+ Reading in Scheffer's Studio--Scheffer's
+ Opinion of the Likeness--A Duchess murdered--A
+ Chance Encounter, and what came of it.
+
+
+IN Paris Dickens's life was passed among artists, and in the exercise of
+his own art. His associates were writers, painters, actors, or
+musicians, and when he wanted relief from any strain of work he found it
+at the theatre. The years since his last residence in the great city had
+made him better known, and the increased attentions pleased him. He had
+to help in preparing for a translation of his books into French; and
+this, with continued labour at the story he had in hand, occupied him as
+long as he remained. It will be all best told by extracts from his
+letters; in which the people he met, the theatres he visited, and the
+incidents, public or private, that seemed to him worthy of mention,
+reappear with the old force and liveliness.
+
+Nor is anything better worth preserving from them than choice bits of
+description of an actor or a drama, for this perishable enjoyment has
+only so much as may survive out of such recollections to witness for
+itself to another generation; and an unusually high place may be
+challenged for the subtlety and delicacy of what is said in these
+letters of things theatrical, when the writer was especially attracted
+by a performer or a play. Frederic Lemaitre has never had a higher
+tribute than Dickens paid to him during his few days' earlier stay at
+Paris in the spring.
+
+"Incomparably the finest acting I ever saw, I saw last night at the
+Ambigu. They have revived that old piece, once immensely popular in
+London under the name of _Thirty Years of a Gambler's Life_. Old
+Lemaitre plays his famous character,[196] and never did I see anything,
+in art, so exaltedly horrible and awful. In the earlier acts he was so
+well made up, and so light and active, that he really looked
+sufficiently young. But in the last two, when he had grown old and
+miserable, he did the finest things, I really believe, that are within
+the power of acting. Two or three times, a great cry of horror went all
+round the house. When he met, in the inn yard, the traveller whom he
+murders, and first saw his money, the manner in which the crime came
+into his head--and eyes--was as truthful as it was terrific. This
+traveller, being a good fellow, gives him wine. You should see the dim
+remembrance of his better days that comes over him as he takes the
+glass, and in a strange dazed way makes as if he were going to touch the
+other man's, or do some airy thing with it; and then stops and flings
+the contents down his hot throat, as if he were pouring it into a
+lime-kiln. But this was nothing to what follows after he has done the
+murder, and comes home, with a basket of provisions, a ragged pocket
+full of money, and a badly-washed bloody right hand--which his little
+girl finds out. After the child asked him if he had hurt his hand, his
+going aside, turning himself round, and looking over all his clothes for
+spots, was so inexpressibly dreadful that it really scared one. He
+called for wine, and the sickness that came upon him when he saw the
+colour, was one of the things that brought out the curious cry I have
+spoken of, from the audience. Then he fell into a sort of bloody mist,
+and went on to the end groping about, with no mind for anything, except
+making his fortune by staking this money, and a faint dull kind of love
+for the child. It is quite impossible to satisfy one's-self by saying
+enough of such a magnificent performance. I have never seen him come
+near its finest points, in anything else. He said two things in a way
+that alone would put him far apart from all other actors. One to his
+wife, when he has exultingly shewn her the money and she has asked him
+how he got it--'I found it'--and the other to his old companion and
+tempter, when he charged him with having killed that traveller, and he
+suddenly went headlong mad and took him by the throat and howled out,
+'It wasn't I who murdered him--it was Misery!' And such a dress; such a
+face; and, above all, such an extraordinary guilty wicked thing as he
+made of a knotted branch of a tree which was his walking-stick, from the
+moment when the idea of the murder came into his head! I could write
+pages about him. It is an impression quite ineffaceable. He got
+half-boastful of that walking-staff to himself, and half-afraid of it;
+and didn't know whether to be grimly pleased that it had the jagged end,
+or to hate it and be horrified at it. He sat at a little table in the
+inn-yard, drinking with the traveller; and this horrible stick got
+between them like the Devil, while he counted on his fingers the uses he
+could put the money to."
+
+That was at the close of February. In October, Dickens's longer
+residence began. He betook himself with his family, after two
+unsuccessful attempts in the new region of the Rue Balzac and Rue Lord
+Byron, to an apartment in the Avenue des Champs Elysees. Over him was an
+English bachelor with an establishment consisting of an English groom
+and five English horses. "The concierge and his wife told us that his
+name was _Six_, which drove me nearly mad until we discovered it to be
+_Sykes_." The situation was a good one, very cheerful for himself and
+with amusement for his children. It was a quarter of a mile above
+Franconi's on the other side of the way, and within a door or two of the
+Jardin d'Hiver. The Exposition was just below; the Barriere de l'Etoile
+from a quarter to half a mile below; and all Paris, including Emperor
+and Empress coming from and returning to St. Cloud, thronged past the
+windows in open carriages or on horseback, all day long. Now it was he
+found himself more of a celebrity than when he had wintered in the city
+nine years before;[197] the feuilleton of the _Moniteur_ was filled
+daily with a translation of _Chuzzlewit_; and he had soon to consider
+the proposal I have named, to publish in French his collected novels and
+tales.[198] Before he had been a week in his new abode, Ary Scheffer,
+"a frank and noble fellow," had made his acquaintance; introduced him to
+several distinguished Frenchmen; and expressed the wish to paint him. To
+Scheffer was also due an advantage obtained for my friend's two little
+daughters of which they may always keep the memory with pride. "Mamey
+and Katey are learning Italian, and their master is Manin of Venetian
+fame, the best and the noblest of those unhappy gentlemen. He came here
+with a wife and a beloved daughter, and they are both dead. Scheffer
+made him known to me, and has been, I understand, wonderfully generous
+and good to him." Nor may I omit to state the enjoyment afforded him,
+not only by the presence in Paris during the winter of Mr. Wilkie
+Collins and of Mr. and Mrs. White of Bonchurch, but by the many friends
+from England whom the Art Exposition brought over. Sir Alexander
+Cockburn was one of these; Edwin Landseer, Charles Robert Leslie, and
+William Boxall, were others. Macready left his retreat at Sherborne to
+make him a visit of several days. Thackeray went to and fro all the
+time between London and his mother's house, also in the Champs Elysees,
+where his daughters were. And Paris for the time was the home of Robert
+Lytton, who belonged to the Embassy, of the Sartorises, of the
+Brownings, and of others whom Dickens liked and cared for.
+
+At the first play he went to, the performance was stopped while the news
+of the last Crimean engagement, just issued in a supplement to the
+_Moniteur_, was read from the stage. "It made not the faintest effect
+upon the audience; and even the hired claqueurs, who had been absurdly
+loud during the piece, seemed to consider the war not at all within
+their contract, and were as stagnant as ditch-water. The theatre was
+full. It is quite impossible to see such apathy, and suppose the war to
+be popular, whatever may be asserted to the contrary." The day before,
+he had met the Emperor and the King of Sardinia in the streets, "and, as
+usual, no man touching his hat, and very very few so much as looking
+round."
+
+The success of a most agreeable little piece by our old friend Regnier
+took him next to the Francais, where Plessy's acting enchanted him. "Of
+course the interest of it turns upon a flawed piece of living china
+(_that_ seems to be positively essential), but, as in most of these
+cases, if you will accept the position in which you find the people, you
+have nothing more to bother your morality about." The theatre in the Rue
+Richelieu, however, was not generally his favourite resort. He used to
+talk of it whimsically as a kind of tomb, where you went, as the Eastern
+people did in the stories, to think of your unsuccessful loves and dead
+relations. "There is a dreary classicality at that establishment
+calculated to freeze the marrow. Between ourselves, even one's best
+friends there are at times very aggravating. One tires of seeing a man,
+through any number of acts, remembering everything by patting his
+forehead with the flat of his hand, jerking out sentences by shaking
+himself, and piling them up in pyramids over his head with his right
+forefinger. And they have a generic small comedy-piece, where you see
+two sofas and three little tables, to which a man enters with his hat
+on, to talk to another man--and in respect of which you know exactly
+when he will get up from one sofa to sit on the other, and take his hat
+off one table to put it upon the other--which strikes one quite as
+ludicrously as a good farce.[199]. . . There seems to be a good piece at
+the Vaudeville, on the idea of the _Town and Country Mouse_. It is too
+respectable and inoffensive for me to-night, but I hope to see it before
+I leave . . . I have a horrible idea of making friends with Franconi, and
+sauntering when I am at work into their sawdust green-room."
+
+At a theatre of a yet heavier school than the Francais he had a drearier
+experience. "On Wednesday we went to the Odeon to see a new piece, in
+four acts and in verse, called _Michel Cervantes_. I suppose such an
+infernal dose of ditch water never was concocted. But there were certain
+passages, describing the suppression of public opinion in Madrid, which
+were received with a shout of savage application to France that made one
+stare again! And once more, here again, at every pause, steady, compact,
+regular as military drums, the Ca Ira!" On another night, even at the
+Porte St. Martin, drawn there doubtless by the attraction of repulsion,
+he supped full with the horrors of classicality at a performance of
+_Orestes_ versified by Alexandre Dumas. "Nothing have I ever seen so
+weighty and so ridiculous. If I had not already learnt to tremble at the
+sight of classic drapery on the human form, I should have plumbed the
+utmost depths of terrified boredom in this achievement. The chorus is
+not preserved otherwise than that bits of it are taken out for
+characters to speak. It is really so bad as to be almost good. Some of
+the Frenchified classical anguish struck me as so unspeakably ridiculous
+that it puts me on the broad grin as I write."
+
+At the same theatre, in the early spring, he had a somewhat livelier
+entertainment. "I was at the Porte St. Martin last night, where there is
+a rather good melodrama called _Sang Mele_, in which one of the
+characters is an English Lord--Lord William Falkland--who is called
+throughout the piece Milor Williams Fack Lorn, and is a hundred times
+described by others and described by himself as Williams. He is
+admirably played; but two English travelling ladies are beyond
+expression ridiculous, and there is something positively vicious in
+their utter want of truth. One 'set,' where the action of a whole act is
+supposed to take place in the great wooden verandah of a Swiss hotel
+overhanging a mountain ravine, is the best piece of stage carpentering I
+have seen in France. Next week we are to have at the Ambigu _Paradise
+Lost_, with the murder of Abel, and the Deluge. The wildest rumours are
+afloat as to the un-dressing of our first parents." Anticipation far
+outdoes a reality of this kind; and at the fever-pitch to which rumours
+raised it here, Dickens might vainly have attempted to get admission on
+the first night, if Mr. Webster, the English manager and comedian, had
+not obtained a ticket for him. He went with Mr. Wilkie Collins. "We were
+rung in (out of the cafe below the Ambigu) at 8, and the play was over
+at half-past 1; the waits between the acts being very much longer than
+the acts themselves. The house was crammed to excess in every part, and
+the galleries awful with Blouses, who again, during the whole of the
+waits, beat with the regularity of military drums the revolutionary tune
+of famous memory--Ca Ira! The play is a compound of _Paradise Lost_ and
+Byron's _Cain_; and some of the controversies between the archangel and
+the devil, when the celestial power argues with the infernal in
+conversational French, as 'Eh bien! Satan, crois-tu donc que notre
+Seigneur t'aurait expose aux tourments que t'endures a present, sans
+avoir prevu,' &c. &c. are very ridiculous. All the supernatural
+personages are alarmingly natural (as theatre nature goes), and walk
+about in the stupidest way. Which has occasioned Collins and myself to
+institute a perquisition whether the French ever have shown any kind of
+idea of the supernatural; and to decide this rather in the negative. The
+people are very well dressed, and Eve very modestly. All Paris and the
+provinces had been ransacked for a woman who had brown hair that would
+fall to the calves of her legs--and she was found at last at the Odeon.
+There was nothing attractive until the 4th act, when there was a pretty
+good scene of the children of Cain dancing in, and desecrating, a
+temple, while Abel and his family were hammering hard at the Ark,
+outside; in all the pauses of the revel. The Deluge in the fifth act was
+up to about the mark of a drowning scene at the Adelphi; but it had one
+new feature. When the rain ceased, and the ark drove in on the great
+expanse of water, then lying waveless as the mists cleared and the sun
+broke out, numbers of bodies drifted up and down. These were all real
+men and boys, each separate, on a new kind of horizontal sloat. They
+looked horrible and real. Altogether, a merely dull business; but I dare
+say it will go for a long while."
+
+A piece of honest farce is a relief from these profane absurdities. "An
+uncommonly droll piece with an original comic idea in it has been in
+course of representation here. It is called _Les Cheveux de ma Femme_. A
+man who is dotingly fond of his wife, and who wishes to know whether she
+loved anybody else before they were married, cuts off a lock of her hair
+by stealth, and takes it to a great mesmeriser, who submits it to a
+clairvoyante who never was wrong. It is discovered that the owner of
+this hair has been up to the most frightful dissipations, insomuch that
+the clairvoyante can't mention half of them. The distracted husband goes
+home to reproach his wife, and she then reveals that she wears a wig,
+and takes it off."
+
+The last piece he went to see before leaving Paris was a French version
+of _As You Like It_; but he found two acts of it to be more than enough.
+"In _Comme il vous Plaira_ nobody had anything to do but to sit down as
+often as possible on as many stones and trunks of trees as possible.
+When I had seen Jacques seat himself on 17 roots of trees, and 25 grey
+stones, which was at the end of the second act, I came away." Only one
+more sketch taken in a theatre, and perhaps the best, I will give from
+these letters. It simply tells us what is necessary to understand a
+particular "tag" to a play, but it is related so prettily that the thing
+it celebrates could not have a nicer effect than is produced by this
+account of it. The play in question, _Memoires du Diable_, and another
+piece of enchanting interest, the _Medecin des Enfants_,[200] were his
+favourites among all he saw at this time. "As I have no news, I may as
+well tell you about the tag that I thought so pretty to the _Memoires
+du Diable_; in which piece by the way, there is a most admirable part,
+most admirably played, in which a man says merely 'Yes' or 'No' all
+through the piece, until the last scene. A certain M. Robin has got hold
+of the papers of a deceased lawyer, concerning a certain estate which
+has been swindled away from its rightful owner, a Baron's widow, into
+other hands. They disclose so much roguery that he binds them up into a
+volume lettered 'Memoires du Diable.' The knowledge he derives from
+these papers not only enables him to unmask the hypocrites all through
+the piece (in an excellent manner), but induces him to propose to the
+Baroness that if he restores to her her estate and good name--for even
+her marriage to the deceased Baron is denied--she shall give him her
+daughter in marriage. The daughter herself, on hearing the offer,
+accepts it; and a part of the plot is, her going to a masked ball, to
+which he goes as the Devil, to see how she likes him (when she finds, of
+course, that she likes him very much). The country people about the
+Chateau in dispute, suppose him to be really the Devil, because of his
+strange knowledge, and his strange comings and goings; and he, being
+with this girl in one of its old rooms, in the beginning of the 3rd act,
+shews her a little coffer on the table with a bell in it. 'They
+suppose,' he tells her, 'that whenever this bell is rung, I appear and
+obey the summons. Very ignorant, isn't it? But, if you ever want me
+particularly--very particularly--ring the little bell and try.' The plot
+proceeds to its development. The wrong-doers are exposed; the missing
+document, proving the marriage, is found; everything is finished; they
+are all on the stage; and M. Robin hands the paper to the Baroness. 'You
+are reinstated in your rights, Madame; you are happy; I will not hold
+you to a compact made when you didn't know me; I release you and your
+fair daughter; the pleasure of doing what I have done, is my sufficient
+reward; I kiss your hand and take my leave. Farewell!' He backs himself
+courteously out; the piece seems concluded, everybody wonders, the girl
+(little Mdlle. Luther) stands amazed; when she suddenly remembers the
+little bell. In the prettiest way possible, she runs to the coffer on
+the table, takes out the little bell, rings it, and he comes rushing
+back and folds her to his heart. I never saw a prettier thing in my
+life. It made me laugh in that most delightful of ways, with the tears
+in my eyes; so that I can never forget it, and must go and see it
+again."
+
+But great as was the pleasure thus derived from the theatre, he was, in
+the matter of social intercourse, even more indebted to distinguished
+men connected with it by authorship or acting. At Scribe's he was
+entertained frequently; and "very handsome and pleasant" was his account
+of the dinners, as of all the belongings, of the prolific dramatist--a
+charming place in Paris, a fine estate in the country, capital carriage,
+handsome pair of horses, "all made, as he says, by his pen." One of the
+guests the first evening was Auber, "a stolid little elderly man, rather
+petulant in manner," who told Dickens he had once lived "at Stock
+Noonton" (Stoke Newington) to study English, but had forgotten it all.
+"Louis Philippe had invited him to meet the Queen of England, and when
+L. P. presented him, the Queen said, 'We are such old acquaintances
+through M. Auber's works, that an introduction is quite unnecessary.'"
+They met again a few nights later, with the author of the _History of
+the Girondins_, at the hospitable table of M. Pichot, to whom Lamartine
+had expressed a strong desire again to meet Dickens as "un des grands
+amis de son imagination." "He continues to be precisely as we formerly
+knew him, both in appearance and manner; highly prepossessing, and with
+a sort of calm passion about him, very taking indeed. We talked of De
+Foe[201] and Richardson, and of that wonderful genius for the minutest
+details in a narrative, which has given them so much fame in France. I
+found him frank and unaffected, and full of curious knowledge of the
+French common people. He informed the company at dinner that he had
+rarely met a foreigner who spoke French so easily as your inimitable
+correspondent, whereat your correspondent blushed modestly, and almost
+immediately afterwards so nearly choked himself with the bone of a fowl
+(which is still in his throat), that he sat in torture for ten minutes
+with a strong apprehension that he was going to make the good Pichot
+famous by dying like the little Hunchback at his table. Scribe and his
+wife were of the party, but had to go away at the ice-time because it
+was the first representation at the Opera Comique of a new opera by
+Auber and himself, of which very great expectations have been formed. It
+was very curious to see him--the author of 400 pieces--getting nervous
+as the time approached, and pulling out his watch every minute. At last
+he dashed out as if he were going into what a friend of mine calls a
+plunge-bath. Whereat she rose and followed. She is the most
+extraordinary woman I ever beheld; for her eldest son must be thirty,
+and she has the figure of five-and-twenty, and is strikingly handsome.
+So graceful too, that her manner of rising, curtseying, laughing, and
+going out after him, was pleasanter than the pleasantest thing I have
+ever seen done on the stage." The opera Dickens himself saw a week
+later, and wrote of it as "most charming. Delightful music, an excellent
+story, immense stage tact, capital scenic arrangements, and the most
+delightful little prima donna ever seen or heard, in the person of Marie
+Cabel. It is called _Manon Lescaut_--from the old romance--and is
+charming throughout. She sings a laughing song in it which is received
+with madness, and which is the only real laughing song that ever was
+written. Auber told me that when it was first rehearsed, it made a
+great effect upon the orchestra; and that he could not have had a better
+compliment upon its freshness than the musical director paid him, in
+coming and clapping him on the shoulder with 'Bravo, jeune homme! Cela
+promet bien!'"
+
+At dinner at Regnier's he met M. Legouvet, in whose tragedy Rachel,
+after its acceptance, had refused to act Medea; a caprice which had led
+not only to her condemnation in costs of so much a night until she did
+act it, but to a quasi rivalry against her by Ristori, who was now on
+her way to Paris to play it in Italian. To this performance Dickens and
+Macready subsequently went together, and pronounced it to be hopelessly
+bad. "In the day entertainments, and little melodrama theatres, of
+Italy, I have seen the same thing fifty times, only not at once so
+conventional and so exaggerated. The papers have all been in fits
+respecting the sublimity of the performance, and the genuineness of the
+applause--particularly of the bouquets; which were thrown on at the most
+preposterous times in the midst of agonizing scenes, so that the
+characters had to pick their way among them, and a certain stout
+gentleman who played King Creon was obliged to keep a wary eye, all
+night, on the proscenium boxes, and dodge them as they came down. Now
+Scribe, who dined here next day (and who follows on the Ristori side,
+being offended, as everybody has been, by the insolence of Rachel),
+could not resist the temptation of telling us, that, going round at the
+end of the first act to offer his congratulations, he met all the
+bouquets coming back in men's arms to be thrown on again in the second
+act. . . . By the bye, I see a fine actor lost in Scribe. In all his
+pieces he has everything done in his own way; and on that same night he
+was showing what Rachel did not do, and wouldn't do, in the last scene
+of Adrienne Lecouvreur, with extraordinary force and intensity."
+
+At the house of another great artist, Madame Viardot,[202] the sister of
+Malibran, Dickens dined to meet Georges Sands, that lady having
+appointed the day and hour for the interesting festival, which came off
+duly on the 10th of January. "I suppose it to be impossible to imagine
+anybody more unlike my preconceptions than the illustrious Sand. Just
+the kind of woman in appearance whom you might suppose to be the Queen's
+monthly nurse. Chubby, matronly, swarthy, black-eyed. Nothing of the
+blue-stocking about her, except a little final way of settling all your
+opinions with hers, which I take to have been acquired in the country
+where she lives, and in the domination of a small circle. A singularly
+ordinary woman in appearance and manner. The dinner was very good and
+remarkably unpretending. Ourselves, Madame and her son, the Scheffers,
+the Sartorises, and some Lady somebody (from the Crimea last) who wore a
+species of paletot, and smoked. The Viardots have a house away in the
+new part of Paris, which looks exactly as if they had moved into it last
+week and were going away next. Notwithstanding which, they have lived in
+it eight years. The opera the very last thing on earth you would
+associate with the family. Piano not even opened. Her husband is an
+extremely good fellow, and she is as natural as it is possible to be."
+
+Dickens was hardly the man to take fair measure of Madame Dudevant in
+meeting her thus. He was not familiar with her writings, and had no very
+special liking for such of them as he knew. But no disappointment,
+nothing but amazement, awaited him at a dinner that followed soon after.
+Emile de Girardin gave a banquet in his honour. His description of it,
+which he declares to be strictly prosaic, sounds a little Oriental, but
+not inappropriately so. "No man unacquainted with my determination never
+to embellish or fancify such accounts, could believe in the description
+I shall let off when we meet of dining at Emile Girardin's--of the three
+gorgeous drawing rooms with ten thousand wax candles in golden sconces,
+terminating in a dining-room of unprecedented magnificence with two
+enormous transparent plate-glass doors in it, looking (across an
+ante-chamber full of clean plates) straight into the kitchen, with the
+cooks in their white paper caps dishing the dinner. From his seat in the
+midst of the table, the host (like a Giant in a Fairy story) beholds the
+kitchen, and the snow-white tables, and the profound order and silence
+there prevailing. Forth from the plate-glass doors issues the
+Banquet--the most wonderful feast ever tasted by mortal: at the present
+price of Truffles, that article alone costing (for eight people) at
+least five pounds. On the table are ground glass jugs of peculiar
+construction, laden with the finest growth of Champagne and the coolest
+ice. With the third course is issued Port Wine (previously unheard of in
+a good state on this continent), which would fetch two guineas a bottle
+at any sale. The dinner done, Oriental flowers in vases of golden cobweb
+are placed upon the board. With the ice is issued Brandy, buried for 100
+years. To that succeeds Coffee, brought by the brother of one of the
+convives from the remotest East, in exchange for an equal quantity of
+California gold dust. The company being returned to the
+drawing-room--tables roll in by unseen agency, laden with Cigarettes
+from the Hareem of the Sultan, and with cool drinks in which the flavour
+of the Lemon arrived yesterday from Algeria, struggles voluptuously with
+the delicate Orange arrived this morning from Lisbon. That period past,
+and the guests reposing on Divans worked with many-coloured blossoms,
+big table rolls in, heavy with massive furniture of silver, and
+breathing incense in the form of a little present of Tea direct from
+China--table and all, I believe; but cannot swear to it, and am resolved
+to be prosaic. All this time the host perpetually repeats 'Ce petit
+diner-ci n'est que pour faire la connaissance de Monsieur Dickens; il ne
+compte pas; ce n'est rien.' And even now I have forgotten to set down
+half of it--in particular the item of a far larger plum pudding than
+ever was seen in England at Christmas time, served with a celestial
+sauce in colour like the orange blossom, and in substance like the
+blossom powdered and bathed in dew, and called in the carte (carte in a
+gold frame like a little fish-slice to be handed about) 'Hommage a
+l'illustre ecrivain d'Angleterre.' That illustrious man staggered out at
+the last drawing-room door, speechless with wonder, finally; and even at
+that moment his host, holding to his lips a chalice set with precious
+stones and containing nectar distilled from the air that blew over the
+fields of beans in bloom for fifteen summers, remarked 'Le diner que
+nous avons eu, mon cher, n'est rien--il ne compte pas--il a ete
+tout-a-fait en famille--il faut diner (en verite, diner) bientot. Au
+plaisir! Au revoir! Au diner!'"
+
+The second dinner came, wonderful as the first; among the company were
+Regnier, Jules Sandeau, and the new Director of the Francais; and his
+host again played Lucullus in the same style, with success even more
+consummate. The only absolutely new incident however was that "After
+dinner he asked me if I would come into another room and smoke a cigar?
+and on my saying Yes, coolly opened a drawer, containing about 5000
+inestimable cigars in prodigious bundles--just as the Captain of the
+Robbers in _Ali Baba_ might have gone to a corner of the cave for bales
+of brocade. A little man dined who was blacking shoes 8 years ago, and
+is now enormously rich--the richest man in Paris--having ascended with
+rapidity up the usual ladder of the Bourse. By merely observing that
+perhaps he might come down again, I clouded so many faces as to render
+it very clear to me that _everybody present_ was at the same game for
+some stake or other!" He returned to that subject in a letter a few days
+later. "If you were to see the steps of the Bourse at about 4 in the
+afternoon, and the crowd of blouses and patches among the speculators
+there assembled, all howling and haggard with speculation, you would
+stand aghast at the consideration of what must be going on. Concierges
+and people like that perpetually blow their brains out, or fly into the
+Seine, 'a cause des pertes sur la Bourse.' I hardly ever take up a
+French paper without lighting on such a paragraph. On the other hand,
+thoroughbred horses without end, and red velvet carriages with white kid
+harness on jet black horses, go by here all day long; and the
+pedestrians who turn to look at them, laugh, and say 'C'est la Bourse!'
+Such crashes must be staved off every week as have not been seen since
+Law's time."
+
+Another picture connects itself with this, and throws light on the
+speculation thus raging. The French loans connected with the war, so
+much puffed and praised in England at the time for the supposed spirit
+in which they were taken up, had in fact only ministered to the
+commonest and lowest gambling; and the war had never in the least been
+popular. "Emile Girardin," wrote Dickens on the 23rd of March, "was here
+yesterday, and he says that Peace is to be formally announced at Paris
+to-morrow amid general apathy." But the French are never wholly
+apathetic to their own exploits; and a display with a touch of
+excitement in it had been witnessed a couple of months before on the
+entry of the troops from the Crimea,[203] when the Zouaves, as they
+marched past, pleased Dickens most. "A remarkable body of men," he
+wrote, "wild, dangerous, and picturesque. Close-cropped head, red skull
+cap, Greek jacket, full red petticoat trowsers trimmed with yellow, and
+high white gaiters--the most sensible things for the purpose I know, and
+coming into use in the line. A man with such things on his legs is
+always free there, and ready for a muddy march; and might flounder
+through roads two feet deep in mud, and, simply by changing his gaiters
+(he has another pair in his haversack), be clean and comfortable and
+wholesome again, directly. Plenty of beard and moustache, and the
+musket carried reverse-wise with the stock over the shoulder, make up
+the sunburnt Zouave. He strides like Bobadil, smoking as he goes; and
+when he laughs (they were under my window for half-an-hour or so),
+plunges backward in the wildest way, as if he were going to throw a
+sommersault. They have a black dog belonging to the regiment, and, when
+they now marched along with their medals, this dog marched after the one
+non-commissioned officer he invariably follows with a profound
+conviction that he was decorated. I couldn't see whether he had a medal,
+his hair being long; but he was perfectly up to what had befallen his
+regiment; and I never saw anything so capital as his way of regarding
+the public. Whatever the regiment does, he is always in his place; and
+it was impossible to mistake the air of modest triumph which was now
+upon him. A small dog corporeally, but of a great mind."[204] On that
+night there was an illumination in honour of the army, when the "whole
+of Paris, bye streets and lanes and all sorts of out of the way places,
+was most brilliantly illuminated. It looked in the dark like Venice and
+Genoa rolled into one, and split up through the middle by the Corso at
+Rome in the carnival time. The French people certainly do know how to
+honour their own countrymen, in a most marvellous way." It was the
+festival time of the New Year, and Dickens was fairly lost in a mystery
+of amazement at where the money could come from that everybody was
+spending on the etrennes they were giving to everybody else. All the
+famous shops on the Boulevards had been blockaded for more than a week.
+"There is now a line of wooden stalls, three miles long, on each side of
+that immense thoroughfare; and wherever a retiring house or two admits
+of a double line, there it is. All sorts of objects from shoes and
+sabots, through porcelain and crystal, up to live fowls and rabbits
+which are played for at a sort of dwarf skittles (to their immense
+disturbance, as the ball rolls under them and shakes them off their
+shelves and perches whenever it is delivered by a vigorous hand), are on
+sale in this great Fair. And what you may get in the way of ornament for
+two-pence, is astounding." Unhappily there came dark and rainy weather,
+and one of the improvements of the Empire ended, as so many others did,
+in slush and misery.[205]
+
+Some sketches connected with the Art Exposition in the winter of 1855,
+and with the fulfilment of Ary Scheffer's design to paint the portrait
+of Dickens, may close these Paris pictures. He did not think that
+English art showed to advantage beside the French. It seemed to him
+small, shrunken, insignificant, "niggling." He thought the general
+absence of ideas horribly apparent; "and even when one comes to
+Mulready, and sees two old men talking over a much-too-prominent
+table-cloth, and reads the French explanation of their proceedings, 'La
+discussion sur les principes de Docteur Whiston,' one is dissatisfied.
+Somehow or other they don't tell. Even Leslie's Sancho wants go, and
+Stanny is too much like a set-scene. It is of no use disguising the fact
+that what we know to be wanting in the men is wanting in their
+works--character, fire, purpose, and the power of using the vehicle and
+the model as mere means to an end. There is a horrible respectability
+about most of the best of them--a little, finite, systematic routine in
+them, strangely expressive to me of the state of England itself. As a
+mere fact, Frith, Ward, and Egg, come out the best in such pictures as
+are here, and attract to the greatest extent. The first, in the picture
+from the Good-natured Man; the second, in the Royal Family in the
+Temple; the third, in the Peter the Great first seeing Catherine--which
+I always thought a good picture, and in which foreigners evidently
+descry a sudden dramatic touch that pleases them. There are no end of
+bad pictures among the French, but, Lord! the goodness also!--the
+fearlessness of them; the bold drawing; the dashing conception; the
+passion and action in them![206] The Belgian department is full of
+merit. It has the best landscape in it, the best portrait, and the best
+scene of homely life, to be found in the building. Don't think it a part
+of my despondency about public affairs, and my fear that our national
+glory is on the decline, when I say that mere form and conventionalities
+usurp, in English art, as in English government and social relations,
+the place of living force and truth. I tried to resist the impression
+yesterday, and went to the English gallery first, and praised and
+admired with great diligence; but it was of no use. I could not make
+anything better of it than what I tell you. Of course this is between
+ourselves. Friendship is better than criticism, and I shall steadily
+hold my tongue. Discussion is worse than useless when you cannot agree
+about what you are going to discuss." French nature is all wrong, said
+the English artists whom Dickens talked to; but surely not because it is
+French, was his reply. The English point of view is not the only one to
+take men and women from. The French pictures are "theatrical," was the
+rejoinder. But the French themselves are a demonstrative and
+gesticulating people, was Dickens's retort; and what thus is rendered by
+their artists is the truth through an immense part of the world. "I
+never saw anything so strange. They seem to me to have got a fixed idea
+that there is no natural manner but the English manner (in itself so
+exceptional that it is a thing apart, in all countries); and that unless
+a Frenchman--represented as going to the guillotine for example--is as
+calm as Clapham, or as respectable as Richmond-hill, he cannot be
+right."
+
+To the sittings at Ary Scheffer's some troubles as well as many
+pleasures were incident, and both had mention in his letters. "You may
+faintly imagine what I have suffered from sitting to Scheffer every day
+since I came back. He is a most noble fellow, and I have the greatest
+pleasure in his society, and have made all sorts of acquaintances at his
+house; but I can scarcely express how uneasy and unsettled it makes me
+to have to sit, sit, sit, with _Little Dorrit_ on my mind, and the
+Christmas business too--though that is now happily dismissed. On Monday
+afternoon, _and all day on Wednesday_, I am going to sit again. And the
+crowning feature is, that I do not discern the slightest resemblance,
+either in his portrait or his brother's! They both peg away at me at the
+same time." The sittings were varied by a special entertainment, when
+Scheffer received some sixty people in his "long atelier"--"including a
+lot of French who _say_ (but I don't believe it) that they know
+English"--to whom Dickens, by special entreaty, read his _Cricket on
+the Hearth_.
+
+That was at the close of November. January came, and the end of the
+sittings was supposed to be at hand. "The nightmare portrait is nearly
+done; and Scheffer promises that an interminable sitting next Saturday,
+beginning at 10 o'clock in the morning, shall finish it. It is a fine
+spirited head, painted at his very best, and with a very easy and
+natural appearance in it. But it does not look to me at all like, nor
+does it strike me that if I saw it in a gallery I should suppose myself
+to be the original. It is always possible that I don't know my own face.
+It is going to be engraved here, in two sizes and ways--the mere head
+and the whole thing." A fortnight later, the interminable sitting came.
+"Imagine me if you please with No. 5 on my head and hands, sitting to
+Scheffer yesterday four hours! At this stage of a story, no one can
+conceive how it distresses me." Still this was not the last. March had
+come before the portrait was done. "Scheffer finished yesterday; and
+Collins, who has a good eye for pictures, says that there is no man
+living who could do the painting about the eyes. As a work of art I see
+in it spirit combined with perfect ease, and yet I don't see myself. So
+I come to the conclusion that I never _do_ see myself. I shall be very
+curious to know the effect of it upon you." March had then begun; and at
+its close Dickens, who had meanwhile been in England, thus wrote: "I
+have not seen Scheffer since I came back, but he told Catherine a few
+days ago that he was not satisfied with the likeness after all, and
+thought he must do more to it. My own impression of it, you remember?"
+In these few words he anticipated the impression made upon myself. I was
+not satisfied with it. The picture had much merit, but not as a
+portrait. From its very resemblance in the eyes and mouth one derived
+the sense of a general unlikeness. But the work of the artist's brother,
+Henri Scheffer, painted from the same sittings, was in all ways greatly
+inferior.
+
+Before Dickens left Paris in May he had sent over two descriptions that
+the reader most anxious to follow him to a new scene would perhaps be
+sorry to lose. A Duchess was murdered in the Champs Elysees. "The murder
+over the way (the third or fourth event of that nature in the Champs
+Elysees since we have been here) seems to disclose the strangest state
+of things. The Duchess who is murdered lived alone in a great house
+which was always shut up, and passed her time entirely in the dark. In a
+little lodge outside lived a coachman (the murderer), and there had been
+a long succession of coachmen who had been unable to stay there, and
+upon whom, whenever they asked for their wages, she plunged out with an
+immense knife, by way of an immediate settlement. The coachman never had
+anything to do, for the coach hadn't been driven out for years; neither
+would she ever allow the horses to be taken out for exercise. Between
+the lodge and the house, is a miserable bit of garden, all overgrown
+with long rank grass, weeds, and nettles; and in this, the horses used
+to be taken out to swim--in a dead green vegetable sea, up to their
+haunches. On the day of the murder, there was a great crowd, of course;
+and in the midst of it up comes the Duke her husband (from whom she was
+separated), and rings at the gate. The police open the grate. 'C'est
+vrai donc,' says the Duke, 'que Madame la Duchesse n'est plus?'--'C'est
+trop vrai, Monseigneur.'--'Tant mieux,' says the Duke, and walks off
+deliberately, to the great satisfaction of the assemblage."
+
+The second description relates an occurrence in England of only three
+years previous date, belonging to that wildly improbable class of
+realities which Dickens always held, with Fielding, to be (properly)
+closed to fiction. Only, he would add, critics should not be so eager to
+assume that what had never happened to themselves could not, by any
+human possibility, ever be supposed to have happened to anybody else.
+"B. was with me the other day, and, among other things that he told me,
+described an extraordinary adventure in his life, at a place not a
+thousand miles from my 'property' at Gadshill, three years ago. He lived
+at the tavern and was sketching one day when an open carriage came by
+with a gentleman and lady in it. He was sitting in the same place
+working at the same sketch, next day, when it came by again. So, another
+day, when the gentleman got out and introduced himself. Fond of art;
+lived at the great house yonder, which perhaps he knew; was an Oxford
+man and a Devonshire squire, but not resident on his estate, for
+domestic reasons; would be glad to see him to dinner to-morrow. He went,
+and found among other things a very fine library. 'At your disposition,'
+said the Squire, to whom he had now described himself and his pursuits.
+'Use it for your writing and drawing. Nobody else uses it.' He stayed in
+the house _six months_. The lady was a mistress, aged five-and-twenty,
+and very beautiful, drinking her life away. The Squire was drunken, and
+utterly depraved and wicked; but an excellent scholar, an admirable
+linguist, and a great theologian. Two other mad visitors stayed the six
+months. One, a man well known in Paris here, who goes about the world
+with a crimson silk stocking in his breast pocket, containing a
+tooth-brush and an immense quantity of ready money. The other, a college
+chum of the Squire's, now ruined; with an insatiate thirst for drink;
+who constantly got up in the middle of the night, crept down to the
+dining-room, and emptied all the decanters. . . . B. stayed on in the
+place, under a sort of devilish fascination to discover what might come
+of it. . . . Tea or coffee never seen in the house, and very seldom water.
+Beer, champagne, and brandy, were the three drinkables. Breakfast: leg
+of mutton, champagne, beer, and brandy. Lunch: shoulder of mutton,
+champagne, beer, and brandy. Dinner: every conceivable dish (Squire's
+income, L7,000 a-year), champagne, beer, and brandy. The Squire had
+married a woman of the town from whom he was now separated, but by whom
+he had a daughter. The mother, to spite the father, had bred the
+daughter in every conceivable vice. Daughter, then 13, came from school
+once a month. Intensely coarse in talk, and always drunk. As they drove
+about the country in two open carriages, the drunken mistress would be
+perpetually tumbling out of one, and the drunken daughter perpetually
+tumbling out of the other. At last the drunken mistress drank her
+stomach away, and began to die on the sofa. Got worse and worse, and was
+always raving about Somebody's where she had once been a lodger, and
+perpetually shrieking that she would cut somebody else's heart out. At
+last she died on the sofa, and, after the funeral, the party broke up. A
+few months ago, B. met the man with the crimson silk stocking at
+Brighton, who told him that the Squire was dead 'of a broken heart';
+that the chum was dead of delirium tremens; and that the daughter was
+heiress to the fortune. He told me all this, which I fully believe to be
+true, without any embellishment--just in the off-hand way in which I
+have told it to you."
+
+Dickens left Paris at the end of April, and, after the summer in
+Boulogne which has been described, passed the winter in London, giving
+to his theatrical enterprise nearly all the time that _Little Dorrit_
+did not claim from him. His book was finished in the following spring;
+was inscribed to Clarkson Stanfield; and now claims to have something
+said about it.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[196] Twenty-one years before this date, in this same part, Lemaitre had
+made a deep impression in London; and now, eighteen years later, he is
+appearing in one of the revivals of Victor Hugo in Paris (1873.)
+
+[197] "It is surprising what a change nine years have made in my
+notoriety here. So many of the rising French generation now read English
+(and _Chuzzlewit_ is now being translated daily in the _Moniteur_), that
+I can't go into a shop and give my card without being acknowledged in
+the pleasantest way possible. A curiosity-dealer brought home some
+little knick-knacks I had bought, the other night, and knew all about my
+books from beginning to end of 'em. There is much of the personal
+friendliness in my readers, here, that is so delightful at home; and I
+have been greatly surprised and pleased by the unexpected discovery." To
+this I may add a line from one of his letters six years later. "I see my
+books in French at every railway station great and small."--13th of Oct.
+1862.
+
+[198] "I forget whether" (6th of Jan. 1856) "I have already told you
+that I have received a proposal from a responsible bookselling house
+here, for a complete edition, authorized by myself, of a French
+translation of all my books. The terms involve questions of space and
+amount of matter; but I should say, at a rough calculation, that I shall
+get about L300 by it--perhaps L50 more." "I have arranged" (30th of
+Jan.) "with the French bookselling house to receive, by monthly payments
+of L40, the sum of L440 for the right to translate all my books: that
+is, what they call my Romances, and what I call my Stories. This does
+not include the Christmas Books, _American Notes_, _Pictures from
+Italy_, or the _Sketches_; but they are to have the right to translate
+them for extra payments if they choose. In consideration of this venture
+as to the unprotected property, I cede them the right of translating all
+future Romances at a thousand francs (L40) each. Considering that I get
+so much for what is otherwise worth nothing, and get my books before so
+clever and important a people, I think this is not a bad move?" The
+first friend with whom he advised about it, I should mention, was the
+famous Leipzig publisher, M. Tauchnitz, in whose judgment, as well as in
+his honour and good faith, he had implicit reliance, and who thought the
+offer fair. On the 17th of April he wrote: "On Monday I am going to dine
+with all my translators at Hachette's, the bookseller who has made the
+bargain for the complete edition, and who began this week to pay his
+monthly L40 for a year. I don't mean to go out any more. Please to
+imagine me in the midst of my French dressers." He wrote an address for
+the Edition in which he praised the liberality of his publishers and
+expressed his pride in being so presented to the French people whom he
+sincerely loved and honoured. Another word may be added. "It is rather
+appropriate that the French translation edition will pay my rent for the
+whole year, and travelling charges to boot."--24th of Feb. 1856.
+
+[199] He wrote a short and very comical account of one of these stock
+performances at the Francais in which he brought out into strong relief
+all their conventionalities and formal habits, their regular surprises
+surprising nobody, and their mysterious disclosures of immense secrets
+known to everybody beforehand, which he meant for _Household Words_; but
+it occurred to him that it might give pain to Regnier, and he destroyed
+it.
+
+[200] Before he saw this he wrote: "That piece you spoke of (the
+_Medecin des Enfants_) is one of the very best melodramas I have ever
+read. Situations, admirable. I will send it to you by Landseer. I am
+very curious indeed to go and see it; and it is an instance to me of the
+powerful emotions from which art is shut out in England by the
+conventionalities." After seeing it he writes: "The low cry of
+excitement and expectation that goes round the house when any one of the
+great situations is felt to be coming is very remarkable indeed. I
+suppose there has not been so great a success of the genuine and worthy
+kind (for the authors have really taken the French dramatic bull by the
+horns, and put the adulterous wife in the right position), for many
+years. When you come over and see it, you will say you never saw
+anything so admirably done. There is one actor, Bignon (M. Delormel),
+who has a good deal of Macready in him; sometimes looks very like him;
+and who seems to me the perfection of manly good sense." 17th of April
+1856.
+
+[201] I subjoin from another of these French letters of later date a
+remark on _Robinson Crusoe_. "You remember my saying to you some time
+ago how curious I thought it that _Robinson Crusoe_ should be the only
+instance of an universally popular book that could make no one laugh and
+could make no one cry. I have been reading it again just now, in the
+course of my numerous refreshings at those English wells, and I will
+venture to say that there is not in literature a more surprising
+instance of an utter want of tenderness and sentiment, than the death of
+Friday. It is as heartless as _Gil Blas_, in a very different and far
+more serious way. But the second part altogether will not bear enquiry.
+In the second part of _Don Quixote_ are some of the finest things. But
+the second part of _Robinson Crusoe_ is perfectly contemptible, in the
+glaring defect that it exhibits the man who was 30 years on that desert
+island with no visible effect made on his character by that experience.
+De Foe's women too--Robinson Crusoe's wife for instance--are terrible
+dull commonplace fellows without breeches; and I have no doubt he was a
+precious dry and disagreeable article himself--I mean De Foe: not
+Robinson. Poor dear Goldsmith (I remember as I write) derived the same
+impression."
+
+[202] When in Paris six years later Dickens saw this fine singer in an
+opera by Gluck, and the reader will not be sorry to have his description
+of it. "Last night I saw Madame Viardot do Gluck's Orphee. It is a most
+extraordinary performance--pathetic in the highest degree, and full of
+quite sublime acting. Though it is unapproachably fine from first to
+last, the beginning of it, at the tomb of Eurydice, is a thing that I
+cannot remember at this moment of writing, without emotion. It is the
+finest presentation of grief that I can imagine. And when she has
+received hope from the Gods, and encouragement to go into the other
+world and seek Eurydice, Viardot's manner of taking the relinquished
+lyre from the tomb and becoming radiant again, is most noble. Also she
+recognizes Eurydice's touch, when at length the hand is put in hers from
+behind, like a most transcendant genius. And when, yielding to
+Eurydice's entreaties she has turned round and slain her with a look,
+her despair over the body is grand in the extreme. It is worth a journey
+to Paris to see, for there is no such Art to be otherwise looked upon.
+Her husband stumbled over me by mere chance, and took me to her
+dressing-room. Nothing could have happened better as a genuine homage to
+the performance, for I was disfigured with crying."--30th of November
+1862.
+
+[203] Here is another picture of Regiments in the Streets of which the
+date is the 30th of January. "It was cold this afternoon, as bright as
+Italy, and these Elysian Fields crowded with carriages, riders, and foot
+passengers. All the fountains were playing, all the Heavens shining.
+Just as I went out at 4 o'clock, several regiments that had passed out
+at the Barriere in the morning to exercise in the country, came marching
+back, in the straggling French manner, which is far more picturesque and
+real than anything you can imagine in that way. Alternately great storms
+of drums played, and then the most delicious and skilful bands,
+'Trovatore' music, 'Barber of Seville' music, all sorts of music with
+well-marked melody and time. All bloused Paris (led by the Inimitable,
+and a poor cripple who works himself up and down all day in a big
+wheeled car) went at quick march down the avenue, in a sort of hilarious
+dance. If the colours with the golden eagle on the top had only been
+unfurled, we should have followed them anywhere, in any cause--much as
+the children follow Punches in the better cause of Comedy. Napoleon on
+the top of the Column seemed up to the whole thing, I thought."
+
+[204] Apropos of this, I may mention that the little shaggy white
+terrier who came with him from America, so long a favourite in his
+household, had died of old age a few weeks before (5th of Oct. 1855) in
+Boulogne.
+
+[205] "We have wet weather here--and dark too for these latitudes--and
+oceans of mud. Although numbers of men are perpetually scooping and
+sweeping it away in this thoroughfare, it accumulates under the windows
+so fast, and in such sludgy masses, that to get across the road is to
+get half over one's shoes in the first outset of a walk." . . . "It is
+difficult," he added (20th of Jan.) "to picture the change made in this
+place by the removal of the paving stones (too ready for barricades),
+and macadamization. It suits neither the climate nor the soil. We are
+again in a sea of mud. One cannot cross the road of the Champs Elysees
+here, without being half over one's boots." A few more days brought a
+welcome change. "Three days ago the weather changed here in an hour, and
+we have had bright weather and hard frost ever since. All the mud
+disappeared with marvellous rapidity, and the sky became Italian. Taking
+advantage of such a happy change, I started off yesterday morning (for
+exercise and meditation) on a scheme I have taken into my head, to walk
+round the walls of Paris. It is a very odd walk, and will make a good
+description. Yesterday I turned to the right when I got outside the
+Barriere de l'Etoile, walked round the wall till I came to the river,
+and then entered Paris beyond the site of the Bastille. To-day I mean to
+turn to the left when I get outside the Barriere, and see what comes of
+that."
+
+[206] This was much the tone of Edwin Landseer also, whose praise of
+Horace Vernet was nothing short of rapture; and how well I remember the
+humour of his description of the Emperor on the day when the prizes were
+given, and, as his old friend the great painter came up, the comical
+expression in his face that said plainly "What a devilish odd thing this
+is altogether, isn't it?" composing itself to gravity as he took Edwin
+by the hand, and said in cordial English "I am very glad to see you." He
+stood, Landseer told us, in a recess so arranged as to produce a clear
+echo of every word he said, and this had a startling effect. In the
+evening of that day Dickens, Landseer, Boxall, Leslie "and three others"
+dined together in the Palais Royal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+LITTLE DORRIT, AND A LAZY TOUR.
+
+1855-1857.
+
+ Little Dorrit--A Proposed Opening--How the
+ Story grew--Sale of the Book--Circumlocution
+ Office--Flora and her Surroundings--Weak Points
+ in the Book--Remains of Marshalsea
+ visited--Reception of the Novel--Christmas
+ Theatricals--Theatre-making--At Gadshill--Last
+ Meeting of Jerrold and Dickens--Proposed
+ Memorial Tribute--At the Zoological
+ Gardens--Lazy Tour projected--Visit to
+ Cumberland--Accident to Wilkie Collins--At
+ Allonby--At Doncaster--Racing Prophecy--A
+ Performance of _Money_.
+
+
+BETWEEN _Hard Times_ and _Little Dorrit_, Dickens's principal literary
+work had been the contribution to _Household Words_ of two tales for
+Christmas (1854 and 1855) which his readings afterwards made widely
+popular, the Story of Richard Doubledick,[207] and Boots at the
+Holly-Tree Inn. In the latter was related, with a charming naturalness
+and spirit, the elopement, to get married at Gretna Green, of two little
+children of the mature respective ages of eight and seven. At Christmas
+1855 came out the first number of _Little Dorrit_, and in April 1857 the
+last.
+
+The book took its origin from the notion he had of a leading man for a
+story who should bring about all the mischief in it, lay it all on
+Providence, and say at every fresh calamity, "Well it's a mercy,
+however, nobody was to blame you know!" The title first chosen, out of
+many suggested, was _Nobody's Fault_; and four numbers had been written,
+of which the first was on the eve of appearance, before this was
+changed. When about to fall to work he excused himself from an
+engagement he should have kept because "the story is breaking out all
+round me, and I am going off down the railroad to humour it." The
+humouring was a little difficult, however; and such indications of a
+droop in his invention as presented themselves in portions of _Bleak
+House_, were noticeable again. "As to the story I am in the second
+number, and last night and this morning had half a mind to begin again,
+and work in what I have done, afterwards." It had occurred to him, that,
+by making the fellow-travellers at once known to each other, as the
+opening of the story stands, he had missed an effect. "It struck me that
+it would be a new thing to show people coming together, in a chance way,
+as fellow-travellers, and being in the same place, ignorant of one
+another, as happens in life; and to connect them afterwards, and to make
+the waiting for that connection a part of the interest." The change was
+not made; but the mention of it was one of several intimations to me of
+the altered conditions under which he was writing, and that the old,
+unstinted, irrepressible flow of fancy had received temporary check. In
+this view I have found it very interesting to compare the original
+notes, which as usual he prepared for each number of the tale, and which
+with the rest are in my possession, with those of _Chuzzlewit_ or
+_Copperfield_; observing in the former the labour and pains, and in the
+latter the lightness and confidence of handling.[208] "I am just now
+getting to work on number three: sometimes enthusiastic, more often dull
+enough. There is an enormous outlay in the Father of the Marshalsea
+chapter, in the way of getting a great lot of matter into a small space.
+I am not quite resolved, but I have a great idea of overwhelming that
+family with wealth. Their condition would be very curious. I can make
+Dorrit very strong in the story, I hope." The Marshalsea part of the
+tale undoubtedly was excellent, and there was masterly treatment of
+character in the contrasts of the brothers Dorrit; but of the family
+generally it may be said that its least important members had most of
+his genius in them. The younger of the brothers, the scapegrace son, and
+"Fanny dear," are perfectly real people in what makes them unattractive;
+but what is meant for attractiveness in the heroine becomes often
+tiresome by want of reality.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The first number appeared in December 1855, and on the 2nd there was
+an exultant note. "_Little Dorrit_ has beaten even _Bleak House_ out of
+the field. It is a most tremendous start, and I am overjoyed at it;" to
+which he added, writing from Paris on the 6th of the month following,
+"You know that they had sold 35,000 of number two on new year's day." He
+was still in Paris on the day of the appearance of that portion of the
+tale by which it will always be most vividly remembered, and thus wrote
+on the 30th of January 1856: "I have a grim pleasure upon me to-night in
+thinking that the Circumlocution Office sees the light, and in wondering
+what effect it will make. But my head really stings with the visions of
+the book, and I am going, as we French say, to disembarrass it by
+plunging out into some of the strange places I glide into of nights in
+these latitudes." The Circumlocution heroes led to the Society scenes,
+the Hampton-court dowager-sketches, and Mr. Gowan; all parts of one
+satire levelled against prevailing political and social vices. Aim had
+been taken, in the course of it, at some living originals, disguised
+sufficiently from recognition to enable him to make his thrust more
+sure; but there was one exception self-revealed. "I had the general
+idea," he wrote while engaged on the sixth number, "of the Society
+business before the Sadleir affair, but I shaped Mr. Merdle himself out
+of that precious rascality. Society, the Circumlocution Office, and Mr.
+Gowan, are of course three parts of one idea and design. Mr. Merdle's
+complaint, which you will find in the end to be fraud and forgery, came
+into my mind as the last drop in the silver cream-jug on
+Hampstead-heath. I shall beg, when you have read the present number, to
+enquire whether you consider 'Bar' an instance, in reference to K F, of
+a suggested likeness in not many touches!" The likeness no one could
+mistake; and, though that particular Bar has since been moved into a
+higher and happier sphere, Westminster-hall is in no danger of losing
+"the insinuating Jury-droop, and persuasive double-eyeglass," by which
+this keen observer could express a type of character in half a dozen
+words.
+
+Of the other portions of the book that had a strong personal interest
+for him I have spoken on a former page, and I will now only add an
+allusion of his own. "There are some things in Flora in number seven
+that seem to me to be extraordinarily droll, with something serious at
+the bottom of them after all. Ah, well! was there _not_ something very
+serious in it once? I am glad to think of being in the country with the
+long summer mornings as I approach number ten, where I have finally
+resolved to make Dorrit rich. It should be a very fine point in the
+story. . . . Nothing in Flora made me laugh so much as the confusion of
+ideas between gout flying upwards, and its soaring with Mr. F---- to
+another sphere." He had himself no inconsiderable enjoyment also of Mr.
+F.'s aunt; and in the old rascal of a patriarch, the smooth-surfaced
+Casby, and other surroundings of poor Flora, there was fun enough to
+float an argosy of second-rates, assuming such to have formed the staple
+of the tale. It would be far from fair to say they did. The defect in
+the book was less the absence of excellent character or keen
+observation, than the want of ease and coherence among the figures of
+the story, and of a central interest in the plan of it. The agencies
+that bring about its catastrophe, too, are less agreeable even than in
+_Bleak House_; and, most unlike that well-constructed story, some of the
+most deeply considered things that occur in it have really little to do
+with the tale itself. The surface-painting of both Miss Wade and
+Tattycoram, to take an instance, is anything but attractive, yet there
+is under it a rare force of likeness in the unlikeness between the two
+which has much subtlety of intention; and they must both have had, as
+well as Mr. Gowan himself, a striking effect in the novel, if they had
+been made to contribute in a more essential way to its interest or
+development. The failure nevertheless had not been for want of care and
+study, as well of his own design as of models by masters in his art. A
+happier hint of apology, for example, could hardly be given for
+Fielding's introduction of such an episode as the Man of the Hill
+between the youth and manhood of Blifil and Tom Jones, than is suggested
+by what Dickens wrote of the least interesting part of _Little Dorrit_.
+In the mere form, Fielding of course was only following the lead of
+Cervantes and Le Sage; but Dickens rightly judged his purpose also to
+have been, to supply a kind of connection between the episode and the
+story. "I don't see the practicability of making the History of a
+Self-Tormentor, with which I took great pains, a written narrative. But
+I do see the possibility" (he saw the other practicability before the
+number was published) "of making it a chapter by itself, which might
+enable me to dispense with the necessity of the turned commas. Do you
+think that would be better? I have no doubt that a great part of
+Fielding's reason for the introduced story, and Smollett's also, was,
+that it is sometimes really impossible to present, in a full book, the
+idea it contains (which yet it may be on all accounts desirable to
+present), without supposing the reader to be possessed of almost as much
+romantic allowance as would put him on a level with the writer. In Miss
+Wade I had an idea, which I thought a new one, of making the introduced
+story so fit into surroundings impossible of separation from the main
+story, as to make the blood of the book circulate through both. But I
+can only suppose, from what you say, that I have not exactly succeeded
+in this."
+
+Shortly after the date of his letter he was in London on business
+connected with the purchase of Gadshill Place, and he went over to the
+Borough to see what traces were left of the prison of which his first
+impression was taken in his boyhood, which had played so important a
+part in this latest novel, and every brick and stone of which he had
+been able to rebuild in his book by the mere vividness of his marvellous
+memory. "Went to the Borough yesterday morning before going to Gadshill,
+to see if I could find any ruins of the Marshalsea. Found a great part
+of the original building--now 'Marshalsea Place.' Found the rooms that
+have been in my mind's eye in the story. Found, nursing a very big boy,
+a very small boy, who, seeing me standing on the Marshalsea pavement,
+looking about, told me how it all used to be. God knows how he learned
+it (for he was a world too young to know anything about it), but he was
+right enough. . . . There is a room there--still standing, to my
+amazement--that I think of taking! It is the room through which the
+ever-memorable signers of Captain Porter's petition filed off in my
+boyhood. The spikes are gone, and the wall is lowered, and anybody can
+go out now who likes to go, and is not bedridden; and I said to the boy
+'Who lives there?' and he said, 'Jack Pithick.' 'Who is Jack Pithick?' I
+asked him. And he said, 'Joe Pithick's uncle.'"
+
+Mention was made of this visit in the preface that appeared with the
+last number; and all it is necessary to add of the completed book will
+be, that, though in the humour and satire of its finer parts not
+unworthy of him, and though it had the clear design, worthy of him in an
+especial degree, of contrasting, both in private and in public life, and
+in poverty equally as in wealth, duty done and duty not done, it made no
+material addition to his reputation. His public, however, showed no
+falling-off in its enormous numbers; and what is said in one of his
+letters, noticeable for this touch of character, illustrates his anxiety
+to avoid any set-off from the disquiet that critical discourtesies might
+give. "I was ludicrously foiled here the other night in a resolution I
+have kept for twenty years not to know of any attack upon myself, by
+stumbling, before I could pick myself up, on a short extract in the
+_Globe_ from _Blackwood's Magazine_, informing me that _Little Dorrit_
+is 'Twaddle.' I was sufficiently put out by it to be angry with myself
+for being such a fool, and then pleased with myself for having so long
+been constant to a good resolution." There was a scene that made itself
+part of history not four months after his death, which, if he could have
+lived to hear of it, might have more than consoled him. It was the
+meeting of Bismarck and Jules Favre under the walls of Paris. The
+Prussian was waiting to open fire on the city; the Frenchman was engaged
+in the arduous task of showing the wisdom of not doing it; and "we
+learn," say the papers of the day, "that while the two eminent statesmen
+were trying to find a basis of negotiation, Von Moltke was seated in a
+corner reading _Little Dorrit_." Who will doubt that the chapter on HOW
+NOT TO DO IT was then absorbing the old soldier's attention?
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Preparations for the private play had gone on incessantly up to
+Christmas, and, in turning the school-room into a theatre, sawing and
+hammering worthy of Babel continued for weeks. The priceless help of
+Stanfield had again been secured, and I remember finding him one day at
+Tavistock House in the act of upsetting some elaborate arrangements by
+Dickens, with a proscenium before him made up of chairs, and the scenery
+planned out with walking-sticks. But Dickens's art in a matter of this
+kind was to know how to take advice; and no suggestion came to him that
+he was not ready to act upon, if it presented the remotest likelihood.
+In one of his great difficulties of obtaining more space, for audience
+as well as actors, he was told that Mr. Cooke of Astley's was a man of
+much resource in that way; and to Mr. Cooke he applied, with the
+following result. "One of the finest things" (18th of October 1856) "I
+have ever seen in my life of that kind was the arrival of my friend Mr.
+Cooke one morning this week, in an open phaeton drawn by two white
+ponies with black spots all over them (evidently stencilled), who came
+in at the gate with a little jolt and a rattle, exactly as they come
+into the Ring when they draw anything, and went round and round the
+centre bed of the front court, apparently looking for the clown. A
+multitude of boys who felt them to be no common ponies rushed up in a
+breathless state--twined themselves like ivy about the railings--and
+were only deterred from storming the enclosure by the glare of the
+Inimitable's eye. Some of these boys had evidently followed from
+Astley's. I grieve to add that my friend, being taken to the point of
+difficulty, had no sort of suggestion in him; no gleam of an idea; and
+might just as well have been the popular minister from the Tabernacle in
+Tottenham Court Road. All he could say was--answering me, posed in the
+garden, precisely as if I were the clown asking him a riddle at
+night--that two of their stable tents would be home in November, and
+that they were '20 foot square,' and I was heartily welcome to 'em.
+Also, he said, 'You might have half a dozen of my trapezes, or my
+middle-distance-tables, but they're all 6 foot and all too low sir.'
+Since then, I have arranged to do it in my own way, and with my own
+carpenter. You will be surprised by the look of the place. It is no more
+like the school-room than it is like the sign of the Salutation Inn at
+Ambleside in Westmoreland. The sounds in the house remind me, as to the
+present time, of Chatham Dockyard--as to a remote epoch, of the building
+of Noah's ark. Joiners are never out of the house, and the carpenter
+appears to be unsettled (or settled) for life."
+
+Of course time did not mend matters, and as Christmas approached the
+house was in a state of siege. "All day long, a labourer heats size over
+the fire in a great crucible. We eat it, drink it, breathe it, and smell
+it. Seventy paint-pots (which came in a van) adorn the stage; and
+thereon may be beheld, Stanny, and three Dansons (from the Surrey
+Zoological Gardens), all painting at once!! Meanwhile, Telbin, in a
+secluded bower in Brewer-street, Golden-square, plies _his_ part of the
+little undertaking." How worthily it turned out in the end, the
+excellence of the performances and the delight of the audiences, became
+known to all London; and the pressure for admittance at last took the
+form of a tragi-comedy, composed of ludicrous makeshifts and gloomy
+disappointments, with which even Dickens's resources could not deal. "My
+audience is now 93," he wrote one day in despair, "and at least 10 will
+neither hear nor see." There was nothing for it but to increase the
+number of nights; and it was not until the 20th of January he described
+"the workmen smashing the last atoms of the theatre."
+
+His book was finished soon after at Gadshill Place, to be presently
+described, which he had purchased the previous year, and taken
+possession of in February; subscribing himself, in the letter announcing
+the fact, as "the Kentish Freeholder on his native heath, his name
+Protection."[209] The new abode occupied him in various ways in the
+early part of the summer; and Hans Andersen the Dane had just arrived
+upon a visit to him there, when Douglas Jerrold's unexpected death
+befell. It was a shock to every one, and an especial grief to Dickens.
+Jerrold's wit, and the bright shrewd intellect that had so many
+triumphs, need no celebration from me; but the keenest of satirists was
+one of the kindliest of men, and Dickens had a fondness for Jerrold as
+genuine as his admiration for him. "I chance to know a good deal about
+the poor fellow's illness, for I was with him on the last day he was
+out. It was ten days ago, when we dined at a dinner given by Russell at
+Greenwich. He was complaining much when we met, said he had been sick
+three days, and attributed it to the inhaling of white paint from his
+study window. I did not think much of it at the moment, as we were very
+social; but while we walked through Leicester-square he suddenly fell
+into a white, hot, sick perspiration, and had to lean against the
+railings. Then, at my urgent request, he was to let me put him in a cab
+and send him home; but he rallied a little after that, and, on our
+meeting Russell, determined to come with us. We three went down by
+steamboat that we might see the great ship, and then got an open fly and
+rode about Blackheath: poor Jerrold mightily enjoying the air, and
+constantly saying that it set him up. He was rather quiet at dinner--sat
+next Delane--but was very humorous and good, and in spirits, though he
+took hardly anything. We parted with references to coming down here"
+(Gadshill) "and I never saw him again. Next morning he was taken very
+ill when he tried to get up. On the Wednesday and Thursday he was very
+bad, but rallied on the Friday, and was quite confident of getting well.
+On the Sunday he was very ill again, and on the Monday forenoon died;
+'at peace with all the world' he said, and asking to be remembered to
+friends. He had become indistinct and insensible, until for but a few
+minutes at the end. I knew nothing about it, except that he had been ill
+and was better, until, going up by railway yesterday morning, I heard a
+man in the carriage, unfolding his newspaper, say to another 'Douglas
+Jerrold is dead.' I immediately went up there, and then to Whitefriars
+. . . I propose that there shall be a night at a theatre when the actors
+(with old Cooke) shall play the _Rent Day_ and _Black-ey'd Susan_;
+another night elsewhere, with a lecture from Thackeray; a day reading by
+me; a night reading by me; a lecture by Russell; and a subscription
+performance of the _Frozen Deep_, as at Tavistock House. I don't mean to
+do it beggingly; but merely to announce the whole series, the day after
+the funeral, 'In memory of the late Mr. Douglas Jerrold,' or some such
+phrase. I have got hold of Arthur Smith as the best man of business I
+know, and go to work with him to-morrow morning--inquiries being made in
+the meantime as to the likeliest places to be had for these various
+purposes. My confident hope is that we shall get close upon two thousand
+pounds."
+
+The friendly enterprise was carried to the close with a vigour,
+promptitude, and success, that well corresponded with this opening. In
+addition to the performances named, there were others in the country
+also organized by Dickens, in which he took active personal part; and
+the result did not fall short of his expectations. The sum was invested
+ultimately for our friend's unmarried daughter, who still receives the
+income from myself, the last surviving trustee.
+
+So passed the greater part of the summer,[210] and when the country
+performances were over at the end of August I had this intimation. "I
+have arranged with Collins that he and I will start next Monday on a
+ten or twelve days' expedition to out-of-the-way places, to do (in inns
+and coast-corners) a little tour in search of an article and in
+avoidance of railroads. I must get a good name for it, and I propose it
+in five articles, one for the beginning of every number in the October
+part." Next day: "Our decision is for a foray upon the fells of
+Cumberland; I having discovered in the books some promising moors and
+bleak places thereabout." Into the lake-country they went accordingly;
+and The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, contributed to _Household
+Words_, was a narrative of the trip. But his letters had descriptive
+touches, and some whimsical personal experiences, not in the published
+account.
+
+Looking over the _Beauties of England and Wales_ before he left London,
+his ambition was fired by mention of Carrick Fell, "a gloomy old
+mountain 1500 feet high," which he secretly resolved to go up. "We came
+straight to it yesterday" (9th of September). "Nobody goes up. Guides
+have forgotten it. Master of a little inn, excellent north-countryman,
+volunteered. Went up, in a tremendous rain. C. D. beat Mr. Porter (name
+of landlord) in half a mile. Mr. P. done up in no time. Three
+nevertheless went on. Mr. P. again leading; C. D. and C." (Mr. Wilkie
+Collins) "following. Rain terrific, black mists, darkness of night. Mr.
+P. agitated. C. D. confident. C. (a long way down in perspective)
+submissive. All wet through. No poles. Not so much as a walking-stick in
+the party. Reach the summit, at about one in the day. Dead darkness as
+of night. Mr. P. (excellent fellow to the last) uneasy. C. D. produces
+compass from pocket. Mr. P. reassured. Farm-house where dog-cart was
+left, N.N.W. Mr. P. complimentary. Descent commenced. C. D. with
+compass triumphant, until compass, with the heat and wet of C. D.'s
+pocket, breaks. Mr. P. (who never had a compass), inconsolable,
+confesses he has not been on Carrick Fell for twenty years, and he don't
+know the way down. Darker and darker. Nobody discernible, two yards off,
+by the other two. Mr. P. makes suggestions, but no way. It becomes clear
+to C. D. and to C. that Mr. P. is going round and round the mountain,
+and never coming down. Mr. P. sits on angular granite, and says he is
+'just fairly doon.' C. D. revives Mr. P. with laughter, the only
+restorative in the company. Mr. P. again complimentary. Descent tried
+once more. Mr. P. worse and worse. Council of war. Proposals from C. D.
+to go 'slap down.' Seconded by C. Mr. P. objects, on account of
+precipice called The Black Arches, and terror of the country-side. More
+wandering. Mr. P. terror-stricken, but game. Watercourse, thundering and
+roaring, reached. C. D. suggests that it must run to the river, and had
+best be followed, subject to all gymnastic hazards. Mr. P. opposes, but
+gives in. Watercourse followed accordingly. Leaps, splashes, and
+tumbles, for two hours. C. lost. C. D. whoops. Cries for assistance from
+behind. C. D. returns. C. with horribly sprained ankle, lying in
+rivulet!"
+
+All the danger was over when Dickens sent his description; but great had
+been the trouble in binding up the sufferer's ankle and getting him
+painfully on, shoving, shouldering, carrying alternately, till terra
+firma was reached. "We got down at last in the wildest place,
+preposterously out of the course; and, propping up C. against stones,
+sent Mr. P. to the other side of Cumberland for dog-cart, so got back to
+his inn, and changed. Shoe or stocking on the bad foot, out of the
+question. Foot tumbled up in a flannel waistcoat. C. D. carrying C.
+melo-dramatically (Wardour to the life!)[211] everywhere; into and out
+of carriages; up and down stairs; to bed; every step. And so to Wigton,
+got doctor, and here we are!! A pretty business, we flatter ourselves!"
+
+Wigton, Dickens described as a place of little houses all in
+half-mourning, yellow stone or white stone and black, with the wonderful
+peculiarity that though it had no population, no business, and no
+streets to speak of, it had five linendrapers within range of their
+single window, one linendraper's next door, and five more linendrapers
+round the corner. "I ordered a night light in my bed-room. A queer
+little old woman brought me one of the common Child's night lights, and,
+seeming to think that I looked at it with interest, said, 'It's joost a
+vara keeyourious thing, sir, and joost new coom oop. It'll burn awt
+hoors a' end, and no gootther, nor no waste, nor ony sike a thing, if
+you can creedit what I say, seein' the airticle.'" In these primitive
+quarters there befell a difficulty about letters, which Dickens solved
+in a fashion especially his own. "The day after Carrick there was a mess
+about our letters, through our not going to a place called Mayport. So,
+while the landlord was planning how to get them (they were only twelve
+miles off), I walked off, to his great astonishment, and brought them
+over." The night after leaving Wigton they were at the Ship-hotel in
+Allonby.
+
+Allonby his letters presented as a small untidy outlandish place; rough
+stone houses in half mourning, a few coarse yellow-stone lodging houses
+with black roofs (bills in all the windows), five bathing-machines, five
+girls in straw hats, five men in straw hats (wishing they had not come);
+very much what Broadstairs would have been if it had been born Irish,
+and had not inherited a cliff. "But this is a capital little homely inn,
+looking out upon the sea; with the coast of Scotland, mountainous and
+romantic, over against the windows; and though I can just stand upright
+in my bedroom, we are really well lodged. It is a clean nice place in a
+rough wild country, and we have a very obliging and comfortable
+landlady." He had found indeed, in the latter, an acquaintance of old
+date. "The landlady at the little inn at Allonby, lived at Greta-Bridge
+in Yorkshire when I went down there before _Nickleby_; and was smuggled
+into the room to see me, after I was secretly found out. She is an
+immensely fat woman now. 'But I could tuck my arm round her waist then,
+Mr. Dickens,' the landlord said when she told me the story as I was
+going to bed the night before last. 'And can't you do it now?' I said.
+'You insensible dog! Look at me! Here's a picture!' Accordingly I got
+round as much of her as I could; and this gallant action was the most
+successful I have ever performed, on the whole."
+
+On their way home the friends were at Doncaster, and this was Dickens's
+first experience of the St. Leger and its saturnalia. His companion had
+by this time so far recovered as to be able, doubled-up, to walk with a
+thick stick; in which condition, "being exactly like the gouty admiral
+in a comedy I have given him that name." The impressions received from
+the race-week were not favourable. It was noise and turmoil all day
+long, and a gathering of vagabonds from all parts of the racing earth.
+Every bad face that had ever caught wickedness from an innocent horse
+had its representative in the streets; and as Dickens, like Gulliver
+looking down upon his fellow-men after coming from the horse-country,
+looked down into Doncaster High-street from his inn-window, he seemed to
+see everywhere a then notorious personage who had just poisoned his
+betting-companion. "Everywhere I see the late Mr. Palmer with his
+betting-book in his hand. Mr. Palmer sits next me at the theatre; Mr.
+Palmer goes before me down the street; Mr. Palmer follows me into the
+chemist's shop where I go to buy rose water after breakfast, and says to
+the chemist 'Give us soom sal volatile or soom damned thing o' that
+soort, in wather--my head's bad!' And I look at the back of his bad head
+repeated in long, long lines on the race course, and in the betting
+stand and outside the betting rooms in the town, and I vow to God that I
+can see nothing in it but cruelty, covetousness, calculation,
+insensibility, and low wickedness."
+
+Even a half-appalling kind of luck was not absent from my friend's
+experiences at the race course, when, what he called a "wonderful,
+paralysing, coincidence" befell him. He bought the card; facetiously
+wrote down three names for the winners of the three chief races (never
+in his life having heard or thought of any of the horses, except that
+the winner of the Derby, who proved to be nowhere, had been mentioned to
+him); "and, if you can believe it without your hair standing on end,
+those three races were won, one after another, by those three horses!!!"
+That was the St. Leger-day, of which he also thought it noticeable,
+that, though the losses were enormous, nobody had won, for there was
+nothing but grinding of teeth and blaspheming of ill-luck. Nor had
+matters mended on the Cup-day, after which celebration "a groaning
+phantom" lay in the doorway of his bed-room and howled all night. The
+landlord came up in the morning to apologise, "and said it was a
+gentleman who had lost L1500 or L2000; and he had drunk a deal
+afterwards; and then they put him to bed, and then he--took the 'orrors,
+and got up, and yelled till morning."[212] Dickens might well believe,
+as he declared at the end of his letter, that if a boy with any good in
+him, but with a dawning propensity to sporting and betting, were but
+brought to the Doncaster races soon enough, it would cure him.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[207] The framework for this sketch was a graphic description, also done
+by Dickens, of the celebrated Charity at Rochester founded in the
+sixteenth century by Richard Watts, "for six poor travellers, who, not
+being Rogues or Proctors, may receive gratis for one night, lodging,
+entertainment, and fourpence each." A quaint monument to Watts is the
+most prominent object on the wall of the south-west transept of the
+cathedral, and underneath it is now placed a brass thus inscribed:
+"CHARLES DICKENS. Born at Portsmouth, seventh of February 1812. Died at
+Gadshill Place by Rochester, ninth of June 1870. Buried in Westminster
+Abbey. To connect his memory with the scenes in which his earliest and
+his latest years were passed, and with the associations of Rochester
+Cathedral and its neighbourhood which extended over all his life, this
+Tablet, with the sanction of the Dean and Chapter, is placed by his
+Executors."
+
+[208] So curious a contrast, taking _Copperfield_ for the purpose, I
+have thought worth giving in fac-simile; and can assure the reader that
+the examples taken express very fairly the general character of the
+Notes to the two books respectively.
+
+[209] In the same letter was an illustration of the ruling passion in
+death, which, even in so undignified a subject, might have interested
+Pope. "You remember little Wieland who did grotesque demons so well. Did
+you ever hear how he died? He lay very still in bed with the life fading
+out of him--suddenly sprung out of it, threw what is professionally
+called a flip-flap, and fell dead on the floor."
+
+[210] One of its incidents made such an impression on him that it will
+be worth while to preserve his description of it. "I have been (by mere
+accident) seeing the serpents fed to-day, with the live birds, rabbits,
+and guinea pigs--a sight so very horrible that I cannot get rid of the
+impression, and am, at this present, imagining serpents coming up the
+legs of the table, with their infernal flat heads, and their tongues
+like the Devil's tail (evidently taken from that model, in the magic
+lanterns and other such popular representations), elongated for dinner.
+I saw one small serpent, whose father was asleep, go up to a guinea pig
+(white and yellow, and with a gentle eye--every hair upon him erect with
+horror); corkscrew himself on the tip of his tail; open a mouth which
+couldn't have swallowed the guinea pig's nose; dilate a throat which
+wouldn't have made him a stocking; and show him what his father meant to
+do with him when he came out of that ill-looking Hookah into which he
+had resolved himself. The guinea pig backed against the side of the
+cage--said 'I know it, I know it!'--and his eye glared and his coat
+turned wiry, as he made the remark. Five small sparrows crouching
+together in a little trench at the back of the cage, peeped over the
+brim of it, all the time; and when they saw the guinea pig give it up,
+and the young serpent go away looking at him over about two yards and a
+quarter of shoulder, struggled which should get into the innermost angle
+and be seized last. Everyone of them then hid his eyes in another's
+breast, and then they all shook together like dry leaves--as I daresay
+they may be doing now, for old Hookah was as dull as laudanum. . . . Please
+to imagine two small serpents, one beginning on the tail of a white
+mouse, and one on the head, and each pulling his own way, and the mouse
+very much alive all the time, with the middle of him madly writhing."
+
+[211] There was a situation in the _Frozen Deep_ where Richard Wardour,
+played by Dickens, had thus to carry about Frank Aldersley in the person
+of Wilkie Collins.
+
+[212] The mention of a performance of Lord Lytton's _Money_ at the
+theatre will supply the farce to this tragedy. "I have rarely seen
+anything finer than Lord Glossmore, a chorus-singer in bluchers, drab
+trowsers, and a brown sack; and Dudley Smooth, in somebody else's wig,
+hindside before. Stout also, in anything he could lay hold of. The
+waiter at the club had an immense moustache, white trowsers, and a
+striped jacket; and he brought everybody who came in, a vinegar-cruet.
+The man who read the will began thus: 'I so-and-so, being of unsound
+mind but firm in body . . . ' In spite of all this, however, the real
+character, humour, wit, and good writing of the comedy, made themselves
+apparent; and the applause was loud and repeated, and really seemed
+genuine. Its capital things were not lost altogether. It was succeeded
+by a Jockey Dance by five ladies, who put their whips in their mouths
+and worked imaginary winners up to the float--an immense success."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+WHAT HAPPENED AT THIS TIME.
+
+1857-1858.
+
+ Disappointments and Distastes--Compensations of
+ Art--Misgivings--Restlessness and
+ Impatience--Reply to a Remonstrance--Visions of
+ Places to write Books in--Fruitless
+ Aspirations--What lay behind--Sorrowful
+ Convictions--No Desire for Immunity from
+ Blame--Counteracting Influences weakened--Old
+ Project revived--Disadvantages of Public
+ Reading--Speech for Children's
+ Hospital--Unsolved Mysteries--Hospital
+ described--Appeal for Sick Children--Reasons
+ for and against Paid Readings--A Proposal from
+ Mr. Beale--Question of the Plunge--Mr. Arthur
+ Smith--Change in Home--Unwise Printed
+ Statement--A "Violated Letter."
+
+
+AN unsettled feeling greatly in excess of what was usual with Dickens,
+more or less observable since his first residence at Boulogne, became at
+this time almost habitual, and the satisfactions which home should have
+supplied, and which indeed were essential requirements of his nature, he
+had failed to find in his home. He had not the alternative that under
+this disappointment some can discover in what is called society. It did
+not suit him, and he set no store by it. No man was better fitted to
+adorn any circle he entered, but beyond that of friends and equals he
+rarely passed. He would take as much pains to keep out of the houses of
+the great as others take to get into them. Not always wisely, it may be
+admitted. Mere contempt for toadyism and flunkeyism was not at all times
+the prevailing motive with him which he supposed it to be. Beneath his
+horror of those vices of Englishmen in his own rank of life, there was a
+still stronger resentment at the social inequalities that engender them,
+of which he was not so conscious and to which he owned less freely. Not
+the less it served secretly to justify what he might otherwise have had
+no mind to. To say he was not a gentleman would be as true as to say he
+was not a writer; but if any one should assert his occasional preference
+for what was even beneath his level over that which was above it, this
+would be difficult of disproof. It was among those defects of
+temperament for which his early trials and his early successes were
+accountable in perhaps equal measure. He was sensitive in a passionate
+degree to praise and blame, which yet he made it for the most part a
+point of pride to assume indifference to; the inequalities of rank which
+he secretly resented took more galling as well as glaring prominence
+from the contrast of the necessities he had gone through with the fame
+that had come to him; and when the forces he most affected to despise
+assumed the form of barriers he could not easily overleap, he was led to
+appear frequently intolerant (for he very seldom was really so) in
+opinions and language. His early sufferings brought with them the
+healing powers of energy, will, and persistence, and taught him the
+inexpressible value of a determined resolve to live down difficulties;
+but the habit, in small as in great things, of renunciation and
+self-sacrifice, they did not teach; and, by his sudden leap into a
+world-wide popularity and influence, he became master of everything that
+might seem to be attainable in life, before he had mastered what a man
+must undergo to be equal to its hardest trials.
+
+Nothing of all this has yet presented itself to notice, except in
+occasional forms of restlessness and desire of change of place, which
+were themselves, when his books were in progress, so incident as well to
+the active requirements of his fancy as to call, thus far, for no other
+explanation. Up to the date of the completion of _Copperfield_ he had
+felt himself to be in possession of an all-sufficient resource. Against
+whatever might befall he had a set-off in his imaginative creations, a
+compensation derived from his art that never failed him, because there
+he was supreme. It was the world he could bend to his will, and make
+subserve to all his desires. He had otherwise, underneath his exterior
+of a singular precision, method, and strictly orderly arrangement in all
+things, and notwithstanding a temperament to which home and home
+interests were really a necessity, something in common with those eager,
+impetuous, somewhat overbearing natures, that rush at existence without
+heeding the cost of it, and are not more ready to accept and make the
+most of its enjoyments than to be easily and quickly overthrown by its
+burdens.[213] But the world he had called into being had thus far borne
+him safely through these perils. He had his own creations always by his
+side. They were living, speaking companions. With them only he was
+everywhere thoroughly identified. He laughed and wept with them; was as
+much elated by their fun as cast down by their grief; and brought to the
+consideration of them a belief in their reality as well as in the
+influences they were meant to exercise, which in every circumstance
+sustained him.
+
+It was during the composition of _Little Dorrit_ that I think he first
+felt a certain strain upon his invention which brought with it other
+misgivings. In a modified form this was present during the latter
+portions of _Bleak House_, of which not a few of the defects might be
+traced to the acting excitements amid which it was written; but the
+succeeding book made it plainer to him; and it is remarkable that in the
+interval between them he resorted for the first and only time in his
+life to a practice, which he abandoned at the close of his next and last
+story published in the twenty-number form, of putting down written
+"Memoranda" of suggestions for characters or incidents by way of
+resource to him in his writing. Never before had his teeming fancy
+seemed to want such help; the need being less to contribute to its
+fullness than to check its overflowing; but it is another proof that he
+had been secretly bringing before himself, at least, the possibility
+that what had ever been his great support might some day desert him. It
+was strange that he should have had such doubt, and he would hardly have
+confessed it openly; but apart from that wonderful world of his books,
+the range of his thoughts was not always proportioned to the width and
+largeness of his nature. His ordinary circle of activity, whether in
+likings or thinkings, was full of such surprising animation, that one
+was apt to believe it more comprehensive than it really was; and again
+and again, when a wide horizon might seem to be ahead of him, he would
+pull up suddenly and stop short, as though nothing lay beyond. For the
+time, though each had its term and change, he was very much a man of one
+idea, each having its turn of absolute predominance; and this was one of
+the secrets of the thoroughness with which everything he took in hand
+was done. As to the matter of his writings, the actual truth was that
+his creative genius never really failed him. Not a few of his inventions
+of character and humour, up to the very close of his life, his
+Marigolds, Lirripers, Gargerys, Pips, Sapseas and many others, were as
+fresh and fine as in his greatest day. He had however lost the free and
+fertile method of the earlier time. He could no longer fill a
+wide-spread canvas with the same facility and certainty as of old; and
+he had frequently a quite unfounded apprehension of some possible
+break-down, of which the end might be at any moment beginning. There
+came accordingly, from time to time, intervals of unusual impatience and
+restlessness, strange to me in connection with his home; his old
+pursuits were too often laid aside for other excitements and
+occupations; he joined a public political agitation, set on foot by
+administrative reformers; he got up various quasi-public private
+theatricals, in which he took the leading place; and though it was but
+part of his always generous devotion in any friendly duty to organize
+the series of performances on his friend Jerrold's death, yet the
+eagerness with which he flung himself into them, so arranging them as to
+assume an amount of labour in acting and travelling that might have
+appalled an experienced comedian, and carrying them on week after week
+unceasingly in London and the provinces, expressed but the craving which
+still had possession of him to get by some means at some change that
+should make existence easier. What was highest in his nature had ceased
+for the time to be highest in his life, and he had put himself at the
+mercy of lower accidents and conditions. The mere effect of the
+strolling wandering ways into which this acting led him could not be
+other than unfavourable. But remonstrance as yet was unavailing.
+
+To one very earnestly made in the early autumn of 1857, in which
+opportunity was taken to compare his recent rush up Carrick Fell to his
+rush into other difficulties, here was the reply. "Too late to say, put
+the curb on, and don't rush at hills--the wrong man to say it to. I have
+now no relief but in action. 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. I must accept the drawback--since
+it is one--with the powers I have; and I must hold upon the tenure
+prescribed to me." Something of the same sad feeling, it is right to
+say, had been expressed from time to time, in connection also with home
+dissatisfactions and misgivings, through the three years preceding; but
+I attributed it to other causes, and gave little attention to it. During
+his absences abroad for the greater part of 1854, '55, and '56, while
+the elder of his children were growing out of childhood, and his books
+were less easy to him than in his earlier manhood, evidences presented
+themselves in his letters of the old "unhappy loss or want of something"
+to which he had given a pervading prominence in _Copperfield_. In the
+first of those years he made express allusion to the kind of experience
+which had been one of his descriptions in that favourite book, and,
+mentioning the drawbacks of his present life, had first identified it
+with his own: "the so happy and yet so unhappy existence which seeks its
+realities in unrealities, and finds its dangerous comfort in a perpetual
+escape from the disappointment of heart around it."
+
+Later in the same year he thus wrote from Boulogne: "I have had dreadful
+thoughts of getting away somewhere altogether by myself. If I could have
+managed it, I think possibly I might have gone to the Pyreennees (you
+know what I mean that word for, so I won't re-write it) for six months!
+I have put the idea into the perspective of six months, but have not
+abandoned it. I have visions of living for half a year or so, in all
+sorts of inaccessible places, and opening a new book therein. A floating
+idea of going up above the snow-line in Switzerland, and living in some
+astonishing convent, hovers about me. If _Household Words_ could be got
+into a good train, in short, I don't know in what strange place, or at
+what remote elevation above the level of the sea, I might fall to work
+next. _Restlessness_, you will say. Whatever it is, it is always driving
+me, and I cannot help it. I have rested nine or ten weeks, and sometimes
+feel as if it had been a year--though I had the strangest nervous
+miseries before I stopped. If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should
+just explode and perish." Again, four months later he wrote: "You will
+hear of me in Paris, probably next Sunday, and I _may_ go on to
+Bordeaux. Have general ideas of emigrating in the summer to the
+mountain-ground between France and Spain. Am altogether in a dishevelled
+state of mind--motes of new books in the dirty air, miseries of older
+growth threatening to close upon me. Why is it, that as with poor David,
+a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits,
+as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion
+I have never made?"
+
+Early in 1856 (20th of January) the notion revisited him of writing a
+book in solitude. "Again I am beset by my former notions of a book
+whereof the whole story shall be on the top of the Great St. Bernard. As
+I accept and reject ideas for _Little Dorrit_, it perpetually comes back
+to me. Two or three years hence, perhaps you'll find me living with the
+Monks and the Dogs a whole winter--among the blinding snows that fall
+about that monastery. I have a serious idea that I shall do it, if I
+live." He was at this date in Paris; and during the visit to him of
+Macready in the following April, the self-revelations were resumed. The
+great actor was then living in retirement at Sherborne, to which he had
+gone on quitting the stage; and Dickens gave favourable report of his
+enjoyment of the change to his little holiday at Paris. Then, after
+recurring to his own old notion of having some slight idea of going to
+settle in Australia, only he could not do it until he should have
+finished _Little Dorrit_, he went on to say that perhaps Macready, if he
+could get into harness again, would not be the worse for some such
+troubles as were worrying himself. "It fills me with pity to think of
+him away in that lonely Sherborne place. I have always felt of myself
+that I must, please God, die in harness, but I have never felt it more
+strongly than in looking at, and thinking of, him. However strange it is
+to be never at rest, and never satisfied, and ever trying after
+something that is never reached, and to be always laden with plot and
+plan and care and worry, how clear it is that it must be, and that one
+is driven by an irresistible might until the journey is worked out! It
+is much better to go on and fret, than to stop and fret. As to
+repose--for some men there's no such thing in this life. The foregoing
+has the appearance of a small sermon; but it is so often in my head in
+these days that it cannot help coming out. The old days--the old days!
+Shall I ever, I wonder, get the frame of mind back as it used to be
+then? Something of it perhaps--but never quite as it used to be. I find
+that the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty big one."
+
+It would be unjust and uncandid not to admit that these and other
+similar passages in the letters that extended over the years while he
+lived abroad, had served in some degree as a preparation for what came
+after his return to England in the following year. It came with a great
+shock nevertheless; because it told plainly what before had never been
+avowed, but only hinted at more or less obscurely. The opening reference
+is to the reply which had been made to a previous expression of his wish
+for some confidences as in the old time. I give only what is strictly
+necessary to account for what followed, and even this with deep
+reluctance. "Your letter of yesterday was so kind and hearty, and
+sounded so gently the many chords we have touched together, that I
+cannot leave it unanswered, though I have not much (to any purpose) to
+say. My reference to 'confidences' was merely to the relief of saying a
+word of what has long been pent up in my mind. Poor Catherine and I are
+not made for each other, and there is no help for it. It is not only
+that she makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that I make her so too--and
+much more so. She is exactly what you know, in the way of being amiable
+and complying; but we are strangely ill-assorted for the bond there is
+between us. God knows she would have been a thousand times happier if
+she had married another kind of man, and that her avoidance of this
+destiny would have been at least equally good for us both. I am often
+cut to the heart by thinking what a pity it is, for her own sake, that I
+ever fell in her way; and if I were sick or disabled to-morrow, I know
+how sorry she would be, and how deeply grieved myself, to think how we
+had lost each other. But exactly the same incompatibility would arise,
+the moment I was well again; and nothing on earth could make her
+understand me, or suit us to each other. Her temperament will not go
+with mine. It mattered not so much when we had only ourselves to
+consider, but reasons have been growing since which make it all but
+hopeless that we should even try to struggle on. What is now befalling
+me I have seen steadily coming, ever since the days you remember when
+Mary was born; and I know too well that you cannot, and no one can, help
+me. Why I have even written I hardly know; but it is a miserable sort of
+comfort that you should be clearly aware how matters stand. The mere
+mention of the fact, without any complaint or blame of any sort, is a
+relief to my present state of spirits--and I can get this only from you,
+because I can speak of it to no one else." In the same tone was his
+rejoinder to my reply. "To the most part of what you say--Amen! You are
+not so tolerant as perhaps you might be of the wayward and unsettled
+feeling which is part (I suppose) of the tenure on which one holds an
+imaginative life, and which I have, as you ought to know well, often
+only kept down by riding over it like a dragoon--but let that go by. I
+make no maudlin complaint. I agree with you as to the very possible
+incidents, even not less bearable than mine, that might and must often
+occur to the married condition when it is entered into very young. I am
+always deeply sensible of the wonderful exercise I have of life and its
+highest sensations, and have said to myself for years, and have honestly
+and truly felt, This is the drawback to such a career, and is not to be
+complained of. I say it and feel it now as strongly as ever I did; and,
+as I told you in my last, I do not with that view put all this forward.
+But the years have not made it easier to bear for either of us; and, for
+her sake as well as mine, the wish will force itself upon me that
+something might be done. I know too well it is impossible. There is the
+fact, and that is all one can say. Nor are you to suppose that I
+disguise from myself what might be urged on the other side. I claim no
+immunity from blame. There is plenty of fault on my side, I dare say, in
+the way of a thousand uncertainties, caprices, and difficulties of
+disposition; but only one thing will alter all that, and that is, the
+end which alters everything."
+
+It will not seem to most people that there was anything here which in
+happier circumstances might not have been susceptible of considerate
+adjustment; but all the circumstances were unfavourable, and the
+moderate middle course which the admissions in that letter might wisely
+have prompted and wholly justified, was unfortunately not taken. Compare
+what before was said of his temperament, with what is there said by
+himself of its defects, and the explanation will not be difficult. Every
+counteracting influence against the one idea which now predominated over
+him had been so weakened as to be almost powerless. His elder children
+were no longer children; his books had lost for the time the importance
+they formerly had over every other consideration in his life; and he had
+not in himself the resource that such a man, judging him from the
+surface, might be expected to have had. Not his genius only, but his
+whole nature, was too exclusively made up of sympathy for, and with, the
+real in its most intense form, to be sufficiently provided against
+failure in the realities around him. There was for him no "city of the
+mind" against outward ills, for inner consolation and shelter. It was in
+and from the actual he still stretched forward to find the freedom and
+satisfactions of an ideal, and by his very attempts to escape the world
+he was driven back into the thick of it. But what he would have sought
+there, it supplies to none; and to get the infinite out of anything so
+finite, has broken many a stout heart.
+
+At the close of that last letter from Gadshill (5th of September) was
+this question--"What do you think of my paying for this place, by
+reviving that old idea of some Readings from my books. I am very
+strongly tempted. Think of it." The reasons against it had great force,
+and took, in my judgment, greater from the time at which it was again
+proposed. The old ground of opposition remained. It was a substitution
+of lower for higher aims; a change to commonplace from more elevated
+pursuits; and it had so much of the character of a public exhibition for
+money as to raise, in the question of respect for his calling as a
+writer, a question also of respect for himself as a gentleman. This
+opinion, now strongly reiterated, was referred ultimately to two
+distinguished ladies of his acquaintance, who decided against it.[214]
+Yet not without such momentary misgiving in the direction of "the
+stage," as pointed strongly to the danger, which, by those who took the
+opposite view, was most of all thought incident to the particular time
+of the proposal. It might be a wild exaggeration to fear that he was in
+danger of being led to adopt the stage as a calling, but he was
+certainly about to place himself within reach of not a few of its
+drawbacks and disadvantages. To the full extent he perhaps did not
+himself know, how much his eager present wish to become a public reader
+was but the outcome of the restless domestic discontents of the last
+four years; and that to indulge it, and the unsettled habits inseparable
+from it, was to abandon every hope of resettling his disordered home.
+There is nothing, in its application to so divine a genius as
+Shakespeare, more affecting than his expressed dislike to a profession,
+which, in the jealous self-watchfulness of his noble nature, he feared
+might hurt his mind.[215] The long subsequent line of actors admirable
+in private as in public life, and all the gentle and generous
+associations of the histrionic art, have not weakened the testimony of
+its greatest name against its less favourable influences; against the
+laxity of habits it may encourage; and its public manners, bred of
+public means, not always compatible with home felicities and duties.
+But, freely open as Dickens was to counsel in regard of his books, he
+was, for reasons formerly stated,[216] less accessible to it on points
+of personal conduct; and when he had neither self-distrust nor
+self-denial to hold him back, he would push persistently forward to
+whatever object he had in view.
+
+An occurrence of the time hastened the decision in this case. An
+enterprise had been set on foot for establishment of a hospital for sick
+children;[217] a large old-fashioned mansion in Great Ormond-street,
+with spacious garden, had been fitted up with more than thirty beds;
+during the four or five years of its existence, outdoor and indoor
+relief had been afforded by it to nearly fifty thousand children, of
+whom thirty thousand were under five years of age; but, want of funds
+having threatened to arrest the merciful work, it was resolved to try a
+public dinner by way of charitable appeal, and for president the happy
+choice was made of one who had enchanted everybody with the joys and
+sorrows of little children. Dickens threw himself into the service heart
+and soul. There was a simple pathos in his address from the chair quite
+startling in its effect at such a meeting; and he probably never moved
+any audience so much as by the strong personal feeling with which he
+referred to the sacrifices made for the Hospital by the very poor
+themselves: from whom a subscription of fifty pounds, contributed in
+single pennies, had come to the treasurer during almost every year it
+had been open. The whole speech, indeed, is the best of the kind spoken
+by him; and two little pictures from it, one of the misery he had
+witnessed, the other of the remedy he had found, should not be absent
+from the picture of his own life.
+
+"Some years ago, being in Scotland, I went with one of the most humane
+members of the most humane of professions, on a morning tour among some
+of the worst lodged inhabitants of the old town of Edinburgh. In the
+closes and wynds of that picturesque place (I am sorry to remind you
+what fast friends picturesqueness and typhus often are), we saw more
+poverty and sickness in an hour than many people would believe in, in a
+life. Our way lay from one to another of the most wretched dwellings,
+reeking with horrible odours; shut out from the sky and from the air,
+mere pits and dens. In a room in one of these places, where there was an
+empty porridge-pot on the cold hearth, a ragged woman and some ragged
+children crouching on the bare ground near it,--and, I remember as I
+speak, where the very light, refracted from a high damp-stained wall
+outside, came in trembling, as if the fever which had shaken everything
+else had shaken even it,--there lay, in an old egg-box which the mother
+had begged from a shop, a little, feeble, wan, sick child. With his
+little wasted face, and his little hot worn hands folded over his
+breast, and his little bright attentive eyes, I can see him now, as I
+have seen him for several years, looking steadily at us. There he lay in
+his small frail box, which was not at all a bad emblem of the small body
+from which he was slowly parting--there he lay, quite quiet, quite
+patient, saying never a word. He seldom cried, the mother said; he
+seldom complained; 'he lay there, seemin' to woonder what it was a'
+aboot.' God knows, I thought, as I stood looking at him, he had his
+reasons for wondering. . . . Many a poor child, sick and neglected, I have
+seen since that time in London; many have I also seen most
+affectionately tended, in unwholesome houses and hard circumstances
+where recovery was impossible: but at all such times I have seen my
+little drooping friend in his egg-box, and he has always addressed his
+dumb wonder to me what it meant, and why, in the name of a gracious God,
+such things should be! . . . But, ladies and gentlemen," Dickens added,
+"such things need NOT be, and will not be, if this company, which is a
+drop of the life-blood of the great compassionate public heart, will
+only accept the means of rescue and prevention which it is mine to
+offer. Within a quarter of a mile of this place where I speak, stands a
+once courtly old house, where blooming children were born, and grew up
+to be men and women, and married, and brought their own blooming
+children back to patter up the old oak staircase which stood but the
+other day, and to wonder at the old oak carvings on the chimney-pieces.
+In the airy wards into which the old state drawing-rooms and family
+bedchambers of that house are now converted, are lodged such small
+patients that the attendant nurses look like reclaimed giantesses, and
+the kind medical practitioner like an amiable Christian ogre. Grouped
+about the little low tables in the centre of the rooms, are such tiny
+convalescents that they seem to be playing at having been ill. On the
+doll's beds are such diminutive creatures that each poor sufferer is
+supplied with its tray of toys: and, looking round, you may see how the
+little tired flushed cheek has toppled over half the brute creation on
+its way into the ark; or how one little dimpled arm has mowed down (as
+I saw myself) the whole tin soldiery of Europe. On the walls of these
+rooms are graceful, pleasant, bright, childish pictures. At the beds'
+heads, hang representations of the figure which is the universal
+embodiment of all mercy and compassion, the figure of Him who was once a
+child Himself, and a poor one. But alas! reckoning up the number of beds
+that are there, the visitor to this Child's Hospital will find himself
+perforce obliged to stop at very little over thirty; and will learn,
+with sorrow and surprise, that even that small number, so forlornly, so
+miserably diminutive compared with this vast London, cannot possibly be
+maintained unless the Hospital be made better known. I limit myself to
+saying better known, because I will not believe that in a Christian
+community of fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, it can fail,
+being better known, to be well and richly-endowed." It was a brave and
+true prediction. The Child's Hospital has never since known want. That
+night alone added greatly more than three thousand pounds to its funds,
+and Dickens put the crown to his good work by reading on its behalf,
+shortly afterwards, his _Christmas Carol_; when the sum realized, and
+the urgent demand that followed for a repetition of the pleasure given
+by the reading, bore down farther opposition to the project of his
+engaging publicly in such readings for himself.
+
+The Child's Hospital night was the 9th of February, its Reading was
+appointed for the 15th of April, and, nearly a month before, renewed
+efforts at remonstrance had been made. "Your view of the reading
+matter," Dickens replied, "I still think is unconsciously taken from
+your own particular point. You don't seem to me to get out of yourself
+in considering it. A word more upon it. You are not to think I have made
+up my mind. If I had, why should I not say so? I find very great
+difficulty in doing so because of what you urge, because I know the
+question to be a balance of doubts, and because I most honestly feel in
+my innermost heart, in this matter (as in all others for years and
+years), the honour of the calling by which I have always stood most
+conscientiously. But do you quite consider that the public exhibition of
+oneself takes place equally, whosoever may get the money? And have you
+any idea that at this moment--this very time--half the public at least
+supposes me to be paid? My dear F, out of the twenty or five-and-twenty
+letters a week that I get about Readings, twenty will ask at what price,
+or on what terms, it can be done. The only exceptions, in truth, are
+when the correspondent is a clergyman, or a banker, or the member for
+the place in question. Why, at this very time half Scotland believes
+that I am paid for going to Edinburgh!--Here is Greenock writes to me,
+and asks could it be done for a hundred pounds? There is Aberdeen
+writes, and states the capacity of its hall, and says, though far less
+profitable than the very large hall in Edinburgh, is it not enough to
+come on for? W. answers such letters continually. (--At this place,
+enter Beale. He called here yesterday morning, and then wrote to ask if
+I would see him to-day. I replied 'Yes,' so here he came in. With long
+preface called to know whether it was possible to arrange anything in
+the way of Readings for this autumn--say, six months. Large capital at
+command. Could produce partners, in such an enterprise, also with large
+capital. Represented such. Returns would be enormous. Would I name a
+sum? a minimum sum that I required to have, in any case? Would I look at
+it as a Fortune, and in no other point of view? I shook my head, and
+said, my tongue was tied on the subject for the present; I might be more
+communicative at another time. Exit Beale in confusion and
+disappointment.)--You will be happy to hear that at one on Friday, the
+Lord Provost, Dean of Guild, Magistrates, and Council of the ancient
+city of Edinburgh will wait (in procession) on their brother freeman, at
+the Music Hall, to give him hospitable welcome. Their brother freeman
+has been cursing their stars and his own, ever since the receipt of
+solemn notification to this effect." But very grateful, when it came,
+was the enthusiasm of the greeting, and welcome the gift of the silver
+wassail-bowl which followed the reading of the _Carol_. "I had no
+opportunity of asking any one's advice in Edinburgh," he wrote on his
+return. "The crowd was too enormous, and the excitement in it much too
+great. But my determination is all but taken. I must do _something_, or
+I shall wear my heart away. I can see no better thing to do that is half
+so hopeful in itself, or half so well suited to my restless state."
+
+What is pointed at in those last words had been taken as a ground of
+objection, and thus he turned it into an argument the other way. During
+all these months many sorrowful misunderstandings had continued in his
+home, and the relief sought from the misery had but the effect of making
+desperate any hope of a better understanding. "It becomes necessary,"
+he wrote at the end of March, "with a view to the arrangements that
+would have to be begun next month if I decided on the Readings, to
+consider and settle the question of the Plunge. Quite dismiss from your
+mind any reference whatever to present circumstances at home. Nothing
+can put _them_ right, until we are all dead and buried and risen. It is
+not, with me, a matter of will, or trial, or sufferance, or good humour,
+or making the best of it, or making the worst of it, any longer. It is
+all despairingly over. Have no lingering hope of, or for, me in this
+association. A dismal failure has to be borne, and there an end. Will
+you then try to think of this reading project (as I do) apart from all
+personal likings and dislikings, and solely with a view to its effect on
+that peculiar relation (personally affectionate, and like no other
+man's) which subsists between me and the public? I want your most
+careful consideration. If you would like, when you have gone over it in
+your mind, to discuss the matter with me and Arthur Smith (who would
+manage the whole of the business, which I should never touch); we will
+make an appointment. But I ought to add that Arthur Smith plainly says,
+'Of the immense return in money, I have no doubt. Of the Dash into the
+new position, however, I am not so good a judge.' I enclose you a rough
+note[218] of my project, as it stands in my mind."
+
+Mr. Arthur Smith, a man possessed of many qualities that justified the
+confidence Dickens placed in him, might not have been a good judge of
+the "Dash" into the new position, but no man knew better every
+disadvantage incident to it, or was less likely to be disconcerted by
+any. His exact fitness to manage the scheme successfully, made him an
+unsafe counsellor respecting it. Within a week from this time the
+reading for the Charity was to be given. "They have let," Dickens wrote
+on the 9th of April, "five hundred stalls for the Hospital night; and
+as people come every day for more, and it is out of the question to make
+more, they cannot be restrained at St. Martin's Hall from taking down
+names for other readings." This closed the attempt at further objection.
+Exactly a fortnight after the reading for the children's hospital, on
+Thursday the 29th April, came the first public reading for his own
+benefit; and before the next month was over, this launch into a new life
+had been followed by a change in his old home. Thenceforward he and his
+wife lived apart. The eldest son went with his mother, Dickens at once
+giving effect to her expressed wish in this respect; and the other
+children remained with himself, their intercourse with Mrs. Dickens
+being left entirely to themselves. It was thus far an arrangement of a
+strictly private nature, and no decent person could have had excuse for
+regarding it in any other light, if public attention had not been
+unexpectedly invited to it by a printed statement in _Household Words_.
+Dickens was stung into this by some miserable gossip at which in
+ordinary circumstances no man would more determinedly have been silent;
+but he had now publicly to show himself, at stated times, as a public
+entertainer, and this, with his name even so aspersed, he found to be
+impossible. All he would concede to my strenuous resistance against such
+a publication, was an offer to suppress it, if, upon reference to the
+opinion of a certain distinguished man (still living), that opinion
+should prove to be in agreement with mine. Unhappily it fell in with his
+own, and the publication went on. It was followed by another statement,
+a letter subscribed with his name, which got into print without his
+sanction; nothing publicly being known of it (I was not among those who
+had read it privately) until it appeared in the _New York Tribune_. It
+had been addressed and given to Mr. Arthur Smith as an authority for
+correction of false rumours and scandals, and Mr. Smith had given a copy
+of it, with like intention, to the _Tribune_ correspondent in London.
+Its writer referred to it always afterwards as his "violated letter."
+
+The course taken by the author of this book at the time of these
+occurrences, will not be departed from here. Such illustration of grave
+defects in Dickens's character as the passage in his life affords, I
+have not shrunk from placing side by side with such excuses in regard to
+it as he had unquestionable right to claim should be put forward also.
+How far what remained of his story took tone or colour from it, and
+especially from the altered career on which at the same time he entered,
+will thus be sufficiently explained; and with anything else the public
+have nothing to do.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[213] Anything more completely opposed to the Micawber type could hardly
+be conceived, and yet there were moments (really and truly only moments)
+when the fancy would arise that if the conditions of his life had been
+reversed, something of a vagabond existence (using the word in
+Goldsmith's meaning) might have supervened. It would have been an
+unspeakable misery to him, but it might have come nevertheless. The
+question of hereditary transmission had a curious attraction for him,
+and considerations connected with it were frequently present to his
+mind. Of a youth who had fallen into a father's weaknesses without the
+possibility of having himself observed them for imitation, he thus wrote
+on one occasion: "It suggests the strangest consideration as to which of
+our own failings we are really responsible, and as to which of them we
+cannot quite reasonably hold ourselves to be so. What A. evidently
+derived from his father cannot in his case be derived from association
+and observation, but must be in the very principles of his individuality
+as a living creature."
+
+[214] "You may as well know" (20th of March 1858) "that I went on" (I
+designate the ladies by A and B respectively) "and propounded the matter
+to A, without any preparation. Result.--'I am surprised, and I should
+have been surprised if I had seen it in the newspaper without previous
+confidence from you. But nothing more. N--no. Certainly not. Nothing
+more. I don't see that there is anything derogatory in it, even now when
+you ask me that question. I think upon the whole that most people would
+be glad you should have the money, rather than other people. It might be
+misunderstood here and there, at first; but I think the thing would very
+soon express itself, and that your own power of making it express itself
+would be very great.' As she wished me to ask B, who was in another
+room, I did so. She was for a moment tremendously disconcerted, '_under
+the impression that it was to lead to the stage_' (!!). Then, without
+knowing anything of A's opinion, closely followed it. That absurd
+association had never entered my head or yours; but it might enter some
+other heads for all that. Take these two opinions for whatever they are
+worth. A (being very much interested and very anxious to help to a right
+conclusion) proposed to ask a few people of various degrees who know
+what the Readings are, what _they_ think--not compromising me, but
+suggesting the project afar-off, as an idea in somebody else's mind. I
+thanked her, and said 'Yes,' of course."
+
+[215 Oh! for my sake do you with Fortune chide
+ The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
+ That did not better for my life provide
+ Than public means which public manners breeds.
+ Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;
+ And almost thence my nature is subdu'd
+ To what it works in, like the dyer's hand. . .
+ Pity me, then, and wish I were renew'd. . .
+
+Sonnet cxi.
+
+And in the preceding Sonnet cx.
+
+ Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there,
+ And made myself a motley to the view,
+ Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear. . .
+
+[216] Vol. I. pp. 72-3. I repeat from that passage one or two sentences,
+though it is hardly fair to give them without the modifications that
+accompany them. "A too great confidence in himself, a sense that
+everything was possible to the will that would make it so, laid
+occasionally upon him self-imposed burdens greater than might be borne
+by any one with safety. In that direction there was in him, at such
+times, something even hard and aggressive; in his determinations a
+something that had almost the tone of fierceness; something in his
+nature that made his resolves insuperable, however hasty the opinions on
+which they had been formed."
+
+[217] The Board of Health returns, showing that out of every annual
+thousand of deaths in London, the immense proportion of four hundred
+were those of children under four years old, had established the
+necessity for such a scheme. Of course the stress of this mortality fell
+on the children of the poor, "dragged up rather than brought up," as
+Charles Lamb expressed it, and perishing unhelped by the way.
+
+[218] Here is the rough note: in which the reader will be interested to
+observe the limits originally placed to the proposal. The first Readings
+were to comprise only the _Carol_, and for others a new story was to be
+written. He had not yet the full confidence in his power or versatility
+as an actor which subsequent experience gave him. "I propose to announce
+in a short and plain advertisement (what is quite true) that I cannot so
+much as answer the numerous applications that are made to me to read,
+and that compliance with ever so few of them is, in any reason,
+impossible. That I have therefore resolved upon a course of readings of
+the _Christmas Carol_ both in town and country, and that those in London
+will take place at St. Martin's Hall on certain evenings. Those evenings
+will be either four or six Thursdays, in May and the beginning of
+June. . . . I propose an Autumn Tour, for the country, extending through
+August, September, and October. It would comprise the Eastern Counties,
+the West, Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Scotland. I should read from 35 to
+40 times in this tour, at the least. At each place where there was a
+great success, I would myself announce that I should come back, on the
+turn of Christmas, to read a new Christmas story written for that
+purpose. This story I should first read a certain number of times in
+London. I have the strongest belief that by April in next year, a very
+large sum of money indeed would be gained by these means. Ireland would
+be still untouched, and I conceive America alone (if I could resolve to
+go there) to be worth Ten Thousand Pounds. In all these proceedings, the
+Business would be wholly detached from me, and I should never appear in
+it. I would have an office, belonging to the Readings and to nothing
+else, opened in London; I would have the advertisements emanating from
+it, and also signed by some one belonging to it; and they should always
+mention me as a third person--just as the Child's Hospital, for
+instance, in addressing the public, mentions me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+GADSHILL PLACE.
+
+1856-1870.
+
+ First Description of Gadshill
+ Place--Negociations for Purchase--Becomes his
+ Home in 1859--Gadshill a Century
+ Ago--Antecedents of Dickens's House--Exterior
+ and Porch--Gradual Additions--Later
+ Changes--Swiss Chalet presented by Mr.
+ Fechter--Dickens's Writing-table--Making
+ Gadshill his Home--Planting Trees--New
+ Conservatory--Course of Daily Life--Dickens's
+ Dogs--A Dog with a Taste--Favourite
+ Walks--Cooling Churchyard.
+
+
+"I WAS better pleased with Gadshill Place last Saturday," he wrote to me
+from Paris on the 13th of February 1856, "on going down there, even than
+I had prepared myself to be. The country, against every disadvantage of
+season, is beautiful; and the house is so old fashioned, cheerful, and
+comfortable, that it is really pleasant to look at. The good old Rector
+now there, has lived in it six and twenty years, so I have not the heart
+to turn him out. He is to remain till Lady-Day next year, when I shall
+go in, please God; make my alterations; furnish the house; and keep it
+for myself that summer." Returning to England through the Kentish
+country with Mr. Wilkie Collins in July, other advantages occurred to
+him. "A railroad opened from Rochester to Maidstone, which connects
+Gadshill at once with the whole sea coast, is certainly an addition to
+the place, and an enhancement of its value. Bye and bye we shall have
+the London, Chatham and Dover, too; and that will bring it within an
+hour of Canterbury and an hour and a half of Dover. I am glad to hear
+of your having been in the neighbourhood. There is no healthier (marshes
+avoided), and none in my eyes more beautiful. One of these days I shall
+show you some places up the Medway with which you will be charmed."
+
+[Illustration: THE PORCH AT GADSHILL.]
+
+The association with his youthful fancy that first made the place
+attractive to him has been told; and it was with wonder he had heard one
+day, from his friend and fellow worker at _Household Words_, Mr. W. H.
+Wills, that not only was the house for sale to which he had so often
+looked wistfully, but that the lady chiefly interested as its owner had
+been long known and much esteemed by himself. Such curious chances led
+Dickens to his saying about the smallness of the world; but the close
+relation often found thus existing between things and persons far apart,
+suggests not so much the smallness of the world as the possible
+importance of the least things done in it, and is better explained by
+the grander teaching of Carlyle, that causes and effects, connecting
+every man and thing with every other, extend through all space and time.
+
+It was at the close of 1855 the negociation for its purchase began.
+"They wouldn't," he wrote (25th of November), "take L1700 for the
+Gadshill property, but 'finally' wanted L1800. I have finally offered
+L1750. It will require an expenditure of about L300 more before yielding
+L100 a year." The usual discovery of course awaited him that this first
+estimate would have to be increased threefold. "The changes absolutely
+necessary" (9th of February 1856) "will take a thousand pounds; which
+sum I am always resolving to squeeze out of this, grind out of that, and
+wring out of the other; this, that, and the other generally all three
+declining to come up to the scratch for the purpose." "This day,"[219]
+he wrote on the 14th of March, "I have paid the purchase money for
+Gadshill Place. After drawing the cheque (L1790) I turned round to give
+it to Wills, and said, 'Now isn't it an extraordinary thing--look at the
+Day--Friday! I have been nearly drawing it half a dozen times when the
+lawyers have not been ready, and here it comes round upon a Friday as a
+matter of course.'" He had no thought at this time of reserving the
+place wholly for himself, or of making it his own residence except at
+intervals of summer. He looked upon it as an investment only. "You will
+hardly know Gadshill again," he wrote in January 1858, "I am improving
+it so much--yet I have no interest in the place." But continued
+ownership brought increased liking; he took more and more interest in
+his own improvements, which were just the kind of occasional occupation
+and resource his life most wanted in its next seven or eight years; and
+any farther idea of letting it he soon abandoned altogether. It only
+once passed out of his possession thus, for four months in 1859; in the
+following year, on the sale of Tavistock House, he transferred to it his
+books and pictures and choicer furniture; and thenceforward, varied only
+by houses taken from time to time for the London season, he made it his
+permanent family abode. Now and then, even during those years, he would
+talk of selling it; and on his last return from America, when he had
+sent the last of his sons out into the world, he really might have sold
+it if he could then have found a house in London suitable to him, and
+such as he could purchase. But in this he failed; secretly to his own
+satisfaction, as I believe; and thereupon, in that last autumn of his
+life, he projected and carried out his most costly addition to Gadshill.
+Already of course more money had been spent upon it than his first
+intention in buying it would have justified. He had so enlarged the
+accommodation, improved the grounds and offices, and added to the land,
+that, taking also into account this final outlay, the reserved price
+placed upon the whole after his death more than quadrupled what he had
+given in 1856 for the house, shrubbery, and twenty years' lease of a
+meadow field. It was then purchased, and is now inhabited, by his eldest
+son.
+
+Its position has been described, and one of the last-century-histories
+of Rochester quaintly mentions the principal interest of the locality.
+"Near the twenty-seventh stone from London is Gadshill, supposed to have
+been the scene of the robbery mentioned by Shakespeare in his play of
+Henry IV; there being reason to think also that it was Sir John
+Falstaff, of truly comic memory, who under the name of Oldcastle
+inhabited Cooling Castle of which the ruins are in the neighbourhood. A
+small distance to the left appears on an eminence the Hermitage the seat
+of the late Sir Francis Head, Bart;[220] and close to the road, on a
+small ascent, is a neat building lately erected by Mr. Day. In
+descending Strood-hill is a fine prospect of Strood, Rochester, and
+Chatham, which three towns form a continued street extending above two
+miles in length." It had been supposed[221] that "the neat building
+lately erected by Mr. Day" was that which the great novelist made
+famous; but Gadshill Place had no existence until eight years after the
+date of the history. The good rector who so long lived in it told me, in
+1859, that it had been built eighty years before by a then well-known
+character in those parts, one Stevens, father-in-law of Henslow the
+Cambridge professor of botany. Stevens, who could only with much
+difficulty manage to write his name, had begun life as ostler at an inn;
+had become husband to the landlord's widow; then a brewer; and finally,
+as he subscribed himself on one occasion, "mare" of Rochester.
+Afterwards the house was inhabited by Mr. Lynn (from some of the members
+of whose family Dickens made his purchase); and, before the Rev. Mr.
+Hindle became its tenant, it was inhabited by a Macaroni parson named
+Townshend, whose horses the Prince Regent bought, throwing into the
+bargain a box of much desired cigars. Altogether the place had notable
+associations even apart from those which have connected it with the
+masterpieces of English humour. "THIS HOUSE, GADSHILL PLACE, stands on
+the summit of Shakespeare's Gadshill, ever memorable for its association
+with Sir John Falstaff in his noble fancy. _But, my lads, my lads,
+to-morrow morning, by four o'clock, early at Gadshill! there are
+pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich offerings, and traders riding to
+London with fat purses: I have vizards for you all; you have horses for
+yourselves._" Illuminated by Mr. Owen Jones, and placed in a frame on
+the first-floor landing, these words were the greeting of the new tenant
+to his visitors. It was his first act of ownership.
+
+All his improvements, it should perhaps be remarked, were not
+exclusively matters of choice; and to illustrate by his letters what
+befell at the beginning of his changes, will show what attended them to
+the close. His earliest difficulty was very grave. There was only one
+spring of water for gentlefolk and villagers, and from some of the
+houses or cottages it was two miles away. "We are still" (6th of July)
+"boring for water here, at the rate of two pounds per day for wages. The
+men seem to like it very much, and to be perfectly comfortable." Another
+of his earliest experiences (5th of September) was thus expressed:
+"Hop-picking is going on, and people sleep in the garden, and breathe in
+at the keyhole of the house door. I have been amazed, before this year,
+by the number of miserable lean wretches, hardly able to crawl, who go
+hop-picking. I find it is a superstition that the dust of the newly
+picked hop, falling freshly into the throat, is a cure for consumption.
+So the poor creatures drag themselves along the roads, and sleep under
+wet hedges, and get cured soon and finally." Towards the close of the
+same month (24th of September) he wrote: "Here are six men perpetually
+going up and down the well (I know that somebody will be killed), in the
+course of fitting a pump; which is quite a railway terminus--it is so
+iron, and so big. The process is much more like putting Oxford-street
+endwise, and laying gas along it, than anything else. By the time it is
+finished, the cost of this water will be something absolutely frightful.
+But of course it proportionately increases the value of the property,
+and that's my only comfort. . . . The horse has gone lame from a sprain,
+the big dog has run a tenpenny nail into one of his hind feet, the bolts
+have all flown out of the basket-carriage, and the gardener says all the
+fruit trees want replacing with new ones." Another note came in three
+days. "I have discovered that the seven miles between Maidstone and
+Rochester is one of the most beautiful walks in England. Five men have
+been looking attentively at the pump for a week, and (I should hope) may
+begin to fit it in the course of October." . . .
+
+With even such varying fortune he effected other changes.[222] The
+exterior remained to the last much as it was when he used as a boy to
+see it first; a plain, old-fashioned, two-story, brick-built country
+house, with a bell-turret on the roof, and over the front door a quaint
+neat wooden porch with pillars and seats. But, among his additions and
+alterations, was a new drawing-room built out from the smaller existing
+one, both being thrown together ultimately; two good bedrooms built on
+a third floor at the back; and such rearrangement of the ground floor
+as, besides its handsome drawing-room, and its dining-room which he hung
+with pictures, transformed its bedroom into a study which he lined with
+books and sometimes wrote in, and changed its breakfast-parlour into a
+retreat fitted up for smokers into which he put a small billiard-table.
+These several rooms opened from a hall having in it a series of Hogarth
+prints, until, after the artist's death, Stanfield's noble scenes were
+placed there, when the Hogarths were moved to his bedroom; and in this
+hall, during his last absence in America, a parquet floor was laid down.
+Nor did he omit such changes as might increase the comfort of his
+servants. He built entirely new offices and stables, and replaced a very
+old coach-house by a capital servants' hall, transforming the loft above
+into a commodious school-room or study for his boys. He made at the same
+time an excellent croquet-ground out of a waste piece of orchard.
+
+Belonging to the house, but unfortunately placed on the other side of
+the high road, was a shrubbery, well wooded though in desolate
+condition, in which stood two magnificent cedars; and having obtained,
+in 1859, the consent of the local authorities for the necessary
+underground work, Dickens constructed a passage beneath the road[223]
+from his front lawn; and in the shrubbery thus rendered accessible, and
+which he then laid out very prettily, he placed afterwards a Swiss
+chalet[224] presented to him by Mr. Fechter, which arrived from Paris in
+ninety-four pieces fitting like the joints of a puzzle, but which proved
+to be somewhat costly in setting on its legs by means of a foundation of
+brickwork. Once up, however, it was a great resource in the summer
+months, and much of Dickens's work was done there. "I have put five
+mirrors in the chalet where I write,"[225] he told an American friend,
+"and they reflect and refract, in all kinds of ways, the leaves that are
+quivering at the windows, and the great fields of waving corn, and the
+sail-dotted river. My room is up among the branches of the trees; and
+the birds and the butterflies fly in and out, and the green branches
+shoot in at the open windows, and the lights and shadows of the clouds
+come and go with the rest of the company. The scent of the flowers, and
+indeed of everything that is growing for miles and miles, is most
+delicious." He used to make great boast, too, not only of his crowds of
+singing birds all day, but of his nightingales at night.
+
+[Illustration: THE CHALET.]
+
+One or two more extracts from letters having reference to these changes
+may show something of the interest to him with which Gadshill thus grew
+under his hands. A sun-dial on his back-lawn had a bit of historic
+interest about it. "One of the balustrades of the destroyed old
+Rochester Bridge," he wrote to his daughter in June 1859, "has been
+(very nicely) presented to me by the contractors for the works, and has
+been duly stone-masoned and set up on the lawn behind the house. I have
+ordered a sun-dial for the top of it, and it will be a very good object
+indeed." "When you come down here next month," he wrote to me, "we have
+an idea that we shall show you rather a neat house. What terrific
+adventures have been in action; how many overladen vans were knocked up
+at Gravesend, and had to be dragged out of Chalk-turnpike in the dead of
+the night by the whole equine power of this establishment; shall be
+revealed at another time." That was in the autumn of 1860, when, on the
+sale of his London house, its contents were transferred to his country
+home. "I shall have an alteration or two to show you at Gadshill that
+greatly improve the little property; and when I get the workmen out this
+time, I think I'll leave off." October 1861 had now come, when the new
+bedrooms were built; but in the same month of 1863 he announced his
+transformation of the old coach-house. "I shall have a small new
+improvement to show you at Gads, which I think you will accept as the
+crowning ingenuity of the inimitable." But of course it was not over
+yet. "My small work and planting," he wrote in the spring of 1866,
+"really, truly, and positively the last, are nearly at an end in these
+regions, and the result will await summer inspection." No, nor even yet.
+He afterwards obtained, by exchange of some land with the trustees of
+Watts's Charity, the much coveted meadow at the back of the house of
+which heretofore he had the lease only; and he was then able to plant a
+number of young limes and chestnuts and other quick-growing trees. He
+had already planted a row of limes in front. He had no idea, he would
+say, of planting only for the benefit of posterity, but would put into
+the ground what he might himself enjoy the sight and shade of. He put
+them in two or three clumps in the meadow, and in a belt all round.
+
+Still there were "more last words," for the limit was only to be set by
+his last year of life. On abandoning his notion, after the American
+Readings, of exchanging Gadshill for London, a new staircase was put up
+from the hall; a parquet floor laid on the first landing; and a
+conservatory built, opening into both drawing-room and dining-room,
+"glass and iron," as he described it, "brilliant but expensive, with
+foundations as of an ancient Roman work of horrible solidity." This last
+addition had long been an object of desire with him; though he would
+hardly even now have given himself the indulgence but for the golden
+shower from America. He saw it first in a completed state on the Sunday
+before his death, when his younger daughter was on a visit to him.
+"Well, Katey," he said to her, "now you see POSITIVELY the last
+improvement at Gadshill;" and every one laughed at the joke against
+himself. The success of the new conservatory was unquestionable. It was
+the remark of all around him that he was certainly, from this last of
+his improvements, drawing more enjoyment than from any of its
+predecessors, when the scene for ever closed.
+
+[Illustration: HOUSE AND CONSERVATORY: FROM THE MEADOW.]
+
+Of the course of his daily life in the country there is not much to be
+said. Perhaps there was never a man who changed places so much and
+habits so little. He was always methodical and regular; and passed his
+life from day to day, divided for the most part between working and
+walking, the same wherever he was. The only exception was when special
+or infrequent visitors were with him. When such friends as Longfellow
+and his daughters, or Charles Eliot Norton and his wife, came, or when
+Mr. Fields brought his wife and Professor Lowell's daughter, or when he
+received other Americans to whom he owed special courtesy, he would
+compress into infinitely few days an enormous amount of sight seeing and
+country enjoyment, castles, cathedrals, and fortified lines, lunches and
+picnics among cherry orchards and hop-gardens, excursions to Canterbury
+or Maidstone and their beautiful neighbourhoods, Druid-stone and Blue
+Bell Hill. "All the neighbouring country that could be shown in so short
+a time," he wrote of the Longfellow visit, "they saw. I turned out a
+couple of postilions in the old red jackets of the old red royal Dover
+road for our ride, and it was like a holiday ride in England fifty years
+ago." For Lord Lytton he did the same, for the Emerson Tennents, for Mr.
+Layard and Mr. Helps, for Lady Molesworth and the Higginses (Jacob
+Omnium), and such other less frequent visitors.
+
+Excepting on such particular occasions however, and not always even
+then, his mornings were reserved wholly to himself; and he would
+generally preface his morning work (such was his love of order in
+everything around him) by seeing that all was in its place in the
+several rooms, visiting also the dogs, stables, and kitchen garden, and
+closing, unless the weather was very bad indeed, with a turn or two
+round the meadow before settling to his desk. His dogs were a great
+enjoyment to him;[226] and, with his high road traversed as frequently
+as any in England by tramps and wayfarers of a singularly undesirable
+description, they were also a necessity. There were always two, of the
+mastiff kind, but latterly the number increased. His own favourite was
+Turk, a noble animal, full of affection and intelligence, whose death by
+a railway-accident, shortly after the Staplehurst catastrophe, caused
+him great grief. Turk's sole companion up to that date was Linda, puppy
+of a great St. Bernard brought over by Mr. Albert Smith, and grown into
+a superbly beautiful creature. After Turk there was an interval of an
+Irish dog, Sultan, given by Mr. Percy Fitzgerald; a cross between a St.
+Bernard and a bloodhound, built and coloured like a lioness and of
+splendid proportions, but of such indomitably aggressive propensities,
+that, after breaking his kennel-chain and nearly devouring a luckless
+little sister of one of the servants, he had to be killed. Dickens
+always protested that Sultan was a Fenian, for that no dog, not a
+secretly sworn member of that body, would ever have made such a point,
+muzzled as he was, of rushing at and bearing down with fury anything in
+scarlet with the remotest resemblance to a British uniform. Sultan's
+successor was Don, presented by Mr. Frederic Lehmann, a grand
+Newfoundland brought over very young, who with Linda became parent to a
+couple of Newfoundlands, that were still gambolling about their master,
+huge, though hardly out of puppydom, when they lost him. He had given to
+one of them the name of Bumble, from having observed, as he described
+it, "a peculiarly pompous and overbearing manner he had of appearing to
+mount guard over the yard when he was an absolute infant." Bumble was
+often in scrapes. Describing to Mr. Fields a drought in the summer of
+1868, when their poor supply of ponds and surface wells had become
+waterless, he wrote: "I do not let the great dogs swim in the canal,
+because the people have to drink of it. But when they get into the
+Medway, it is hard to get them out again. The other day Bumble (the son,
+Newfoundland dog) got into difficulties among some floating timber, and
+became frightened. Don (the father) was standing by me, shaking off the
+wet and looking on carelessly, when all of a sudden he perceived
+something amiss, and went in with a bound and brought Bumble out by the
+ear. The scientific way in which he towed him along was charming." The
+description of his own reception, on his reappearance after America, by
+Bumble and his brother, by the big and beautiful Linda, and by his
+daughter Mary's handsome little Pomeranian, may be added from his
+letters to the same correspondent. "The two Newfoundland dogs coming to
+meet me, with the usual carriage and the usual driver, and beholding me
+coming in my usual dress out at the usual door, it struck me that their
+recollection of my having been absent for any unusual time was at once
+cancelled. They behaved (they are both young dogs) exactly in their
+usual manner; coming behind the basket phaeton as we trotted along, and
+lifting their heads to have their ears pulled, a special attention which
+they receive from no one else. But when I drove into the stable-yard,
+Linda (the St. Bernard) was greatly excited; weeping profusely, and
+throwing herself on her back that she might caress my foot with her
+great fore-paws. Mary's little dog too, Mrs. Bouncer, barked in the
+greatest agitation on being called down and asked by Mary, 'Who is
+this?' and tore round and round me like the dog in the Faust outlines."
+The father and mother and their two sons, four formidable-looking
+companions, were with him generally in his later walks.
+
+Round Cobham, skirting the park and village and passing the Leather
+Bottle famous in the page of _Pickwick_, was a favourite walk with
+Dickens. By Rochester and the Medway, to the Chatham Lines, was another.
+He would turn out of Rochester High-street through The Vines (where some
+old buildings, from one of which called Restoration-house he took
+Satis-house for _Great Expectations_, had a curious attraction for him),
+would pass round by Fort Pitt, and coming back by Frindsbury would bring
+himself by some cross fields again into the high road. Or, taking the
+other side, he would walk through the marshes to Gravesend, return by
+Chalk church, and stop always to have greeting with a comical old monk
+who for some incomprehensible reason sits carved in stone, cross-legged
+with a jovial pot, over the porch of that sacred edifice. To another
+drearier churchyard, itself forming part of the marshes beyond the
+Medway, he often took friends to show them the dozen small tombstones of
+various sizes adapted to the respective ages of a dozen small children
+of one family which he made part of his story of _Great Expectations_,
+though, with the reserves always necessary in copying nature not to
+overstep her modesty by copying too closely, he makes the number that
+appalled little Pip not more than half the reality. About the whole of
+this Cooling churchyard, indeed, and the neighbouring castle ruins,
+there was a weird strangeness that made it one of his attractive walks
+in the late year or winter, when from Higham he could get to it across
+country over the stubble fields; and, for a shorter summer walk, he was
+not less fond of going round the village of Shorne, and sitting on a hot
+afternoon in its pretty shaded churchyard. But on the whole, though
+Maidstone had also much that attracted him to its neighbourhood, the
+Cobham neighbourhood was certainly that which he had greatest pleasure
+in; and he would have taken oftener than he did the walk through Cobham
+park and woods, which was the last he enjoyed before life suddenly
+closed upon him, but that here he did not like his dogs to follow.
+
+[Illustration: THE STUDY AT GADSHILL.]
+
+Don now has his home there with Lord Darnley, and Linda lies under one
+of the cedars at Gadshill.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[219] On New Year's Day he had written from Paris. "When in London
+Coutts's advised me not to sell out the money for Gadshill Place (the
+title of my estate sir, my place down in Kent) until the conveyance was
+settled and ready."
+
+[220] Two houses now stand on what was Sir Francis Head's estate, the
+Great and Little Hermitage, occupied respectively by Mr. Malleson and
+Mr. Hulkes, who became intimate with Dickens. Perry of the _Morning
+Chronicle_, whose town house was in that court out of Tavistock-square
+of which Tavistock House formed part, had occupied the Great Hermitage
+previously.
+
+[221] By the obliging correspondent who sent me this _History of
+Rochester_, 8vo. (Rochester, 1772), p. 302.
+
+[222] "As to the carpenters," he wrote to his daughter in September
+1860, "they are absolutely maddening. They are always at work yet never
+seem to do anything, L. was down on Friday, and said (with his eye fixed
+on Maidstone and rubbing his hands to conciliate his moody employer)
+that 'he didn't think there would be very much left to do after Saturday
+the 29th.' I didn't throw him out of window."
+
+[223] A passage in his paper on Tramps embodies very amusingly
+experience recorded in his letters of this brick-work tunnel and the
+sinking of the well; but I can only borrow one sentence. "The current of
+my uncommercial pursuits caused me only last summer to want a little
+body of workmen for a certain spell of work in a pleasant part of the
+country; and I was at one time honoured with the attendance of as many
+as seven-and-twenty, who were looking at six." Bits of wonderful
+observation are in that paper.
+
+[224] This was at the beginning of 1865. "The chalet," he wrote to me on
+the 7th of January, "is going on excellently, though the ornamental part
+is more slowly put together than the substantial. It will really be a
+very pretty thing; and in the summer (supposing it not to be blown away
+in the spring), the upper room will make a charming study. It is much
+higher than we supposed."
+
+[225] As surely, however, as he did any work there, so surely his
+indispensable little accompaniments of work (ii. 226) were carried along
+with him; and of these I will quote what was written shortly after his
+death by his son-in-law, Mr. Charles Collins, to illustrate a very
+touching sketch by Mr. Fildes of his writing-desk and vacant chair.
+"Ranged in front of, and round about him, were always a variety of
+objects for his eye to rest on in the intervals of actual writing, and
+any one of which he would have instantly missed had it been removed.
+There was a French bronze group representing a duel with swords, fought
+by a couple of very fat toads, one of them (characterised by that
+particular buoyancy which belongs to corpulence) in the act of making a
+prodigious lunge forward, which the other receives in the very middle of
+his digestive apparatus, and under the influence of which it seems
+likely that he will satisfy the wounded honour of his opponent by
+promptly expiring. There was another bronze figure which always stood
+near the toads, also of French manufacture, and also full of comic
+suggestion. It was a statuette of a dog-fancier, such a one as you used
+to see on the bridges or quays of Paris, with a profusion of little dogs
+stuck under his arms and into his pockets, and everywhere where little
+dogs could possibly be insinuated, all for sale, and all, as even a
+casual glance at the vendor's exterior would convince the most
+unsuspicious person, with some screw loose in their physical
+constitutions or moral natures, to be discovered immediately after
+purchase. There was the long gilt leaf with the rabbit sitting erect
+upon its haunches, the huge paper-knife often held in his hand during
+his public readings, and the little fresh green cup ornamented with the
+leaves and blossoms of the cowslip, in which a few fresh flowers were
+always placed every morning--for Dickens invariably worked with flowers
+on his writing-table. There was also the register of the day of the week
+and of the month, which stood always before him; and when the room in
+the chalet in which he wrote his last paragraph was opened, some time
+after his death, the first thing to be noticed by those who entered was
+this register, set at 'Wednesday, June 8'--the day of his seizure." It
+remains to this day as it was found.
+
+[226] Dickens's interest in dogs (as in the habits and ways of all
+animals) was inexhaustible, and he welcomed with delight any new trait.
+The subjoined, told him by a lady friend, was a great acquisition. "I
+must close" (14th of May 1867) "with an odd story of a Newfoundland dog.
+An immense black good-humoured Newfoundland dog. He came from Oxford and
+had lived all his life at a brewery. Instructions were given with him
+that if he were let out every morning alone, he would immediately find
+out the river; regularly take a swim; and gravely come home again. This
+he did with the greatest punctuality, but after a little while was
+observed to smell of beer. She was so sure that he smelt of beer that
+she resolved to watch him. Accordingly, he was seen to come back from
+his swim, round the usual corner, and to go up a flight of steps into a
+beer-shop. Being instantly followed, the beer-shop-keeper is seen to
+take down a pot (pewter pot), and is heard to say: 'Well, old chap! Come
+for your beer as usual, have you?' Upon which he draws a pint and puts
+it down, and the dog drinks it. Being required to explain how this comes
+to pass, the man says, 'Yes ma'am. I know he's your dog ma'am, but I
+didn't when he first come. He looked in ma'am--as a Brickmaker
+might--and then he come in--as a Brickmaker might--and he wagged his
+tail at the pots, and he giv' a sniff round, and conveyed to me as he
+was used to beer. So I draw'd him a drop, and he drunk it up. Next
+morning he come agen by the clock and I drawed him a pint, and ever
+since he has took his pint reglar.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+FIRST PAID READINGS.
+
+1858-1859.
+
+ First Series--Exeter Audience--Impressions of
+ Dublin--Irish Car-driver--Young Ireland and Old
+ England--Reception in Belfast--At Harrogate--At
+ York--At Manchester--Continued Successes--Scene
+ at Edinburgh--At Dundee--At Aberdeen and
+ Perth--At Glasgow--Glasgow Audience--Subjects
+ of First Readings--First Library Edition of his
+ Books--At Coventry--Frith's Portrait of
+ Dickens.
+
+
+DICKENS gave his paid public Readings successively, with not long
+intervals, at four several dates; in 1858-9, in 1861-63, in 1866-67, and
+in 1868-70; the first series under Mr. Arthur Smith's management, the
+second under Mr. Headland's, and the third and fourth, in America as
+well as before and after it, under that of Mr. George Dolby, who,
+excepting in America, acted for the Messrs. Chappell. The references in
+the present chapter are to the first series only.
+
+It began with sixteen nights at St. Martin's Hall, the first on the 29th
+of April, the last on the 22nd of July, 1858; and there was afterwards a
+provincial tour of 87 readings, beginning at Clifton on the 2nd of
+August, ending at Brighton on the 13th of November, and taking in
+Ireland and Scotland as well as the principal English cities: to which
+were added, in London, three Christmas readings, three in January, with
+two in the following month; and, in the provinces in the month of
+October, fourteen, beginning at Ipswich and Norwich, taking in Cambridge
+and Oxford, and closing with Birmingham and Cheltenham. The series had
+comprised altogether 125 Readings when it ended on the 27th of October,
+1859; and without the touches of character and interest afforded by his
+letters written while thus employed, the picture of the man would not be
+complete.
+
+Here was one day's work at the opening which will show something of the
+fatigue they involved even at their outset. "On Friday we came from
+Shrewsbury to Chester; saw all right for the evening; and then went to
+Liverpool. Came back from Liverpool and read at Chester. Left Chester at
+11 at night, after the reading, and went to London. Got to Tavistock
+House at 5 A.M. on Saturday, left it at a quarter past 10 that morning,
+and came down here" (Gadshill: 15th of August 1858).
+
+The "greatest personal affection and respect" had greeted him
+everywhere. Nothing could have been "more strongly marked or warmly
+expressed;" and the readings had "gone" quite wonderfully. What in this
+respect had most impressed him, at the outset of his adventures, was
+Exeter. "I think they were the finest audience I ever read to; I don't
+think I ever read in some respects so well; and I never beheld anything
+like the personal affection which they poured out upon me at the end. I
+shall always look back upon it with pleasure." He often lost his voice
+in these early days, having still to acquire the art of husbanding it;
+and in the trial to recover it would again waste its power. "I think I
+sang half the Irish melodies to myself as I walked about, to test it."
+
+An audience of two thousand three hundred people (the largest he had
+had) greeted him at Liverpool on his way to Dublin, and, besides the
+tickets sold, more than two hundred pounds in money was taken at the
+doors. This taxed his business staff a little. "They turned away
+hundreds, sold all the books, rolled on the ground of my room knee-deep
+in checks, and made a perfect pantomime of the whole thing." (20th of
+August.) He had to repeat the reading thrice.[227]
+
+It was the first time he had seen Ireland, and Dublin greatly surprised
+him by appearing to be so much larger and more populous than he had
+supposed. He found it to have altogether an unexpectedly thriving look,
+being pretty nigh as big, he first thought, as Paris; of which some
+places in it, such as the quays on the river, reminded him. Half the
+first day he was there, he took to explore it; walking till tired, and
+then taking a car. "Power, dressed for the character of Teddy the Tiler,
+drove me: in a suit of patches, and with his hat unbrushed for twenty
+years. Wonderfully pleasant, light, intelligent, and careless."[228] The
+number of common people he saw in his drive, "also riding about in cars
+as hard as they could split," brought to his recollection a more distant
+scene, and but for the dresses he could have thought himself on the
+Toledo at Naples.
+
+In respect of the number of his audience, and their reception of him,
+Dublin was one of his marked successes. He came to have some doubt of
+their capacity of receiving the pathetic, but of their quickness as to
+the humorous there could be no question, any more than of their
+heartiness. He got on wonderfully well with the Dublin people.[229] The
+Boots at Morrison's expressed the general feeling in a patriotic point
+of view. "He was waiting for me at the hotel door last night. 'Whaat
+sart of a hoose sur?' he asked me. 'Capital.' 'The Lard be praised fur
+the 'onor 'o Dooblin!'" Within the hotel, on getting up next morning, he
+had a dialogue with a smaller resident, landlord's son he supposed, a
+little boy of the ripe age of six, which he presented, in his letter to
+his sister-in-law, as a colloquy between Old England and Young Ireland
+inadequately reported for want of the "imitation" it required for its
+full effect. "I am sitting on the sofa, writing, and find him sitting
+beside me.
+
+"_Old England._ Halloa old chap.
+
+"_Young Ireland._ Hal--loo!
+
+"_Old England_ (in his delightful way). What a nice old fellow you are.
+I am very fond of little boys.
+
+"_Young Ireland._ Air yes? Ye'r right.
+
+"_Old England._ What do you learn, old fellow?
+
+"_Young Ireland_ (very intent on Old England, and always childish except
+in his brogue). I lairn wureds of three sillibils--and wureds of two
+sillibils--and wureds of one sillibil.
+
+"_Old England_ (cheerfully). Get out, you humbug! You learn only words
+of one syllable.
+
+"_Young Ireland_ (laughs heartily). You may say that it is mostly wureds
+of one sillibil.
+
+"_Old England._ Can you write?
+
+"_Young Ireland,_ Not yet. Things comes by deegrays.
+
+"_Old England._ Can you cipher?
+
+"_Young Ireland_ (very quickly). Whaat's that?
+
+"_Old England._ Can you make figures?
+
+"_Young Ireland._ I can make a nought, which is not asy, being roond.
+
+"_Old England._ I say, old boy! Wasn't it you I saw on Sunday morning in
+the Hall, in a soldier's cap? You know!--In a soldier's cap?
+
+"_Young Ireland_ (cogitating deeply). Was it a very good cap?
+
+"_Old England._ Yes.
+
+"_Young Ireland._ Did it fit ankommon?
+
+"_Old England._ Yes.
+
+"_Young Ireland._ Dat was me!"
+
+The last night in Dublin was an extraordinary scene. "You can hardly
+imagine it. All the way from the hotel to the Rotunda (a mile), I had to
+contend against the stream of people who were turned away. When I got
+there, they had broken the glass in the pay-boxes, and were offering L5
+freely for a stall. Half of my platform had to be taken down, and people
+heaped in among the ruins. You never saw such a scene."[230] But he
+would not return after his other Irish engagements. "I have positively
+said No. The work is too hard. It is not like doing it in one easy room,
+and always the same room. With a different place every night, and a
+different audience with its own peculiarity every night, it is a
+tremendous strain. . . . I seem to be always either in a railway carriage
+or reading, or going to bed; and I get so knocked up whenever I have a
+minute to remember it, that then I go to bed as a matter of course."
+
+Belfast he liked quite as much as Dublin in another way. "A fine place
+with a rough people; everything looking prosperous; the railway ride
+from Dublin quite amazing in the order, neatness, and cleanness of all
+you see; every cottage looking as if it had been whitewashed the day
+before; and many with charming gardens, prettily kept with bright
+flowers." The success, too, was quite as great. "Enormous audiences. We
+turn away half the town.[231] I think them a better audience on the
+whole than Dublin; and the personal affection is something overwhelming.
+I wish you and the dear girls" (he is writing to his sister-in-law)
+"could have seen the people look at me in the street; or heard them ask
+me, as I hurried to the hotel after the reading last night, to 'do me
+the honor to shake hands Misther Dickens and God bless you sir; not
+ounly for the light you've been to me this night, but for the light
+you've been in mee house sir (and God love your face!) this many a
+year!'"[232] He had never seen men "go in to cry so undisguisedly," as
+they did at the Belfast _Dombey_ reading; and as to the _Boots_ and
+_Mrs. Gamp_ "it was just one roar with me and them. For they made me
+laugh so, that sometimes I _could not_ compose my face to go on." His
+greatest trial in this way however was a little later at
+Harrogate--"the queerest place, with the strangest people in it, leading
+the oddest lives of dancing, newspaper-reading, and tables
+d'hote"--where he noticed, at the same reading, embodiments respectively
+of the tears and laughter to which he has moved his fellow creatures so
+largely. "There was one gentleman at the _Little Dombey_ yesterday
+morning" (he is still writing to his sister-in-law) "who exhibited--or
+rather concealed--the profoundest grief. After crying a good deal
+without hiding it, he covered his face with both his hands, and laid it
+down on the back of the seat before him, and really shook with emotion.
+He was not in mourning, but I supposed him to have lost some child in
+old time. . . . There was a remarkably good fellow too, of thirty or so,
+who found something so very ludicrous in Toots that he _could not_
+compose himself at all, but laughed until he sat wiping his eyes with
+his handkerchief; and whenever he felt Toots coming again, he began to
+laugh and wipe his eyes afresh; and when Toots came once more, he gave a
+kind of cry, as if it were too much for him. It was uncommonly droll,
+and made me laugh heartily."
+
+At Harrogate he read twice on one day (a Saturday), and had to engage a
+special engine to take him back that night to York, which, having
+reached at one o'clock in the morning, he had to leave, because of
+Sunday restrictions on travel, the same morning at half-past four, to
+enable him to fulfil a Monday's reading at Scarborough. Such fatigues
+became matters of course; but their effect, not noted at the time, was
+grave. "At York I had a most magnificent audience, and might have
+filled the place for a week. . . . I think the audience possessed of a
+better knowledge of character than any I have seen. But I recollect
+Doctor Belcombe to have told me long ago that they first found out
+Charles Mathews's father, and to the last understood him (he used to
+say) better than any other people. . . . The let is enormous for next
+Saturday at Manchester, stalls alone four hundred! I shall soon be able
+to send you the list of places to the 15th of November, the end. I shall
+be, O most heartily glad, when that time comes! But I must say that the
+intelligence and warmth of the audiences are an immense sustainment, and
+one that always sets me up. Sometimes before I go down to read
+(especially when it is in the day), I am so oppressed by having to do it
+that I feel perfectly unequal to the task. But the people lift me out of
+this directly; and I find that I have quite forgotten everything but
+them and the book, in a quarter of an hour."
+
+The reception that awaited him at Manchester had very special warmth in
+it, occasioned by an adverse tone taken in the comment of one of the
+Manchester daily papers on the letter which by a breach of confidence
+had been then recently printed. "My violated letter" Dickens always
+called it. "When I came to Manchester on Saturday I found seven hundred
+stalls taken! When I went into the room at night 2500 people had paid,
+and more were being turned away from every door. The welcome they gave
+me was astounding in its affectionate recognition of the late trouble,
+and fairly for once unmanned me. I never saw such a sight or heard such
+a sound. When they had thoroughly done it, they settled down to enjoy
+themselves; and certainly did enjoy themselves most heartily to the last
+minute." Nor, for the rest of his English tour, in any of the towns that
+remained, had he reason to complain of any want of hearty greeting. At
+Sheffield great crowds came in excess of the places. At Leeds the hall
+overflowed in half an hour. At Hull the vast concourse had to be
+addressed by Mr. Smith on the gallery stairs, and additional Readings
+had to be given, day and night, "for the people out of town and for the
+people in town."
+
+The net profit to himself, thus far, had been upwards of three hundred
+pounds a week;[233] but this was nothing to the success in Scotland,
+where his profit in a week, with all expenses paid, was five hundred
+pounds. The pleasure was enhanced, too, by the presence of his two
+daughters, who had joined him over the Border. At first the look of
+Edinburgh was not promising. "We began with, for us, a poor room. . . .
+But the effect of that reading (it was the _Chimes_) was immense; and on
+the next night, for _Little Dombey_, we had a full room. It is our
+greatest triumph everywhere. Next night (_Poor Traveller_, _Boots_, and
+_Gamp_) we turned away hundreds upon hundreds of people; and last night,
+for the _Carol_, in spite of advertisements in the morning that the
+tickets were gone, the people had to be got in through such a crowd as
+rendered it a work of the utmost difficulty to keep an alley into the
+room. They were seated about me on the platform, put into the doorway of
+the waiting-room, squeezed into every conceivable place, and a multitude
+turned away once more. I think I am better pleased with what was done in
+Edinburgh than with what has been done anywhere, almost. It was so
+completely taken by storm, and carried in spite of itself. Mary and
+Katey have been infinitely pleased and interested with Edinburgh. We are
+just going to sit down to dinner and therefore I cut my missive short.
+Travelling, dinner, reading, and everything else, come crowding together
+into this strange life."
+
+Then came Dundee: "An odd place," he wrote, "like Wapping with high
+rugged hills behind it. We had the strangest journey here--bits of sea,
+and bits of railroad, alternately; which carried my mind back to
+travelling in America. The room is an immense new one, belonging to Lord
+Kinnaird, and Lord Panmure, and some others of that sort. It looks
+something between the Crystal-palace and Westminster-hall (I can't
+imagine who wants it in this place), and has never been tried yet for
+speaking in. Quite disinterestedly of course, I hope it will succeed."
+The people he thought, in respect of taste and intelligence, below any
+other of his Scotch audiences; but they woke up surprisingly, and the
+rest of his Caledonian tour was a succession of triumphs. "At Aberdeen
+we were crammed to the street, twice in one day. At Perth (where I
+thought when I arrived, there literally could be nobody to come) the
+gentlefolk came posting in from thirty miles round, and the whole town
+came besides, and filled an immense hall. They were as full of
+perception, fire, and enthusiasm as any people I have seen. At Glasgow,
+where I read three evenings and one morning, we took the prodigiously
+large sum of six hundred pounds! And this at the Manchester prices,
+which are lower than St. Martin's Hall. As to the effect--I wish you
+could have seen them after Lilian died in the _Chimes_, or when Scrooge
+woke in the _Carol_ and talked to the boy outside the window. And at the
+end of _Dombey_ yesterday afternoon, in the cold light of day, they all
+got up, after a short pause, gentle and simple, and thundered and waved
+their hats with such astonishing heartiness and fondness that, for the
+first time in all my public career, they took me completely off my legs,
+and I saw the whole eighteen hundred of them reel to one side as if a
+shock from without had shaken the hall. Notwithstanding which, I must
+confess to you, I am very anxious to get to the end of my Readings, and
+to be at home again, and able to sit down and think in my own study.
+There has been only one thing quite without alloy. The dear girls have
+enjoyed themselves immensely, and their trip with me has been a great
+success."
+
+The subjects of his readings during this first circuit were the _Carol_,
+the _Chimes_, the _Trial in Pickwick_, the chapters containing _Paul
+Dombey_, _Boots at the Holly Tree Inn_, the _Poor Traveller_ (Captain
+Doubledick), and _Mrs. Gamp_: to which he continued to restrict himself
+through the supplementary nights that closed in the autumn of 1859.[234]
+Of these the most successful in their uniform effect upon his audiences
+were undoubtedly the _Carol_, the _Pickwick_ scene, _Mrs. Gamp_, and the
+_Dombey_--the quickness, variety, and completeness of his assumption of
+character, having greatest scope in these. Here, I think, more than in
+the pathos or graver level passages, his strength lay; but this is
+entitled to no weight other than as an individual opinion, and his
+audiences gave him many reasons for thinking differently.[235]
+
+The incidents of the period covered by this chapter that had any general
+interest in them, claim to be mentioned briefly. At the close of 1857 he
+presided at the fourth anniversary of the Warehousemen and Clerks'
+Schools, describing and discriminating, with keenest wit and kindliest
+fun, the sort of schools he liked and he disliked. To the spring and
+summer of 1858 belongs the first collection of his writings into a
+succinct library form, each of the larger novels occupying two volumes.
+In March he paid warm public tribute to Thackeray (who had been induced
+to take the chair at the General Theatrical Fund) as one for whose
+genius he entertained the warmest admiration, who did honour to
+literature, and in whom literature was honoured. In May he presided at
+the Artists' Benevolent Fund dinner, and made striking appeal for that
+excellent charity. In July he took earnest part in the opening efforts
+on behalf of the Royal Dramatic College, which he supplemented later by
+a speech for the establishment of schools for actors' children; in which
+he took occasion to declare his belief that there were no institutions
+in England so socially liberal as its public schools, and that there was
+nowhere in the country so complete an absence of servility to mere rank,
+position, or riches. "A boy, there, is always what his abilities or his
+personal qualities make him. We may differ about the curriculum and
+other matters, but of the frank, free, manly, independent spirit
+preserved in our public schools, I apprehend there can be no kind of
+question." In December[236] he was entertained at a public dinner in
+Coventry on the occasion of receiving, by way of thanks for help
+rendered to their Institute, a gold repeater of special construction by
+the watchmakers of the town; as to which he kept faithfully his pledge
+to the givers, that it should be thenceforward the inseparable companion
+of his workings and wanderings, and reckon off the future labours of his
+days until he should have done with the measurement of time. Within a
+day from this celebration, he presided at the Institutional Association
+of Lancashire and Cheshire in Manchester Free Trade Hall; gave prizes to
+candidates from a hundred and fourteen local mechanics' institutes
+affiliated to the Association; described in his most attractive language
+the gallant toiling fellows by whom the prizes had been won; and ended
+with the monition he never failed to couple with his eulogies of
+Knowledge, that it should follow the teaching of the Saviour, and not
+satisfy the understanding merely. "Knowledge has a very limited power
+when it informs the head only; but when it informs the heart as well,
+it has a power over life and death, the body and the soul, and dominates
+the universe."
+
+This too was the year when Mr. Frith completed Dickens's portrait, and
+it appeared upon the walls of the Academy in the following spring. "I
+wish," said Edwin Landseer as he stood before it, "he looked less eager
+and busy, and not so much out of himself, or beyond himself. I should
+like to catch him asleep and quiet now and then." There is something in
+the objection, and he also would be envious at times of what he too
+surely knew could never be his lot. On the other hand who would
+willingly have lost the fruits of an activity on the whole so healthy
+and beneficent?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[227] This was the _Carol_ and _Pickwick_. "We are reduced sometimes,"
+he adds, "to a ludicrous state of distress by the quantity of silver we
+have to carry about. Arthur Smith is always accompanied by an immense
+black leather-bag full." Mr. Smith had an illness a couple of days
+later, and Dickens whimsically describes his rapid recovery on
+discovering the state of their balances. "He is now sitting opposite to
+me on a bag of L40 of silver. It must be dreadfully hard."
+
+[228] A letter to his eldest daughter (23rd of Aug.) makes humorous
+addition. "The man who drove our jaunting car yesterday hadn't a piece
+in his coat as big as a penny roll, and had had his hat on (apparently
+without brushing it) ever since he was grown-up. But he was remarkably
+intelligent and agreeable, with something to say about everything. For
+instance, when I asked him what a certain building was, he didn't say
+'Courts of Law' and nothing else, but 'Av yer plase Sir, its the foor
+Coorts o' looyers, where Misther O'Connell stood his trial wunst, as
+ye'll remimbir sir, afore I till ye ov it.' When we got into the
+Phoenix Park, he looked round him as if it were his own, and said
+'THAT'S a Park sir, av ye plase!' I complimented it, and he said
+'Gintlemen tills me as they iv bin, sir, over Europe and never see a
+Park aqualling ov it. Yander's the Vice-regal Lodge, sir; in thim two
+corners lives the two Sicretaries, wishing I was thim sir. There's air
+here sir, av yer plase! There's scenery here sir! There's mountains thim
+sir! Yer coonsider it a Park sir? It is that sir!'"
+
+[229] The Irish girls outdid the American (i. 385) in one particular. He
+wrote to his sister-in-law: "Every night, by the bye, since I have been
+in Ireland, the ladies have beguiled John out of the bouquet from my
+coat; and yesterday morning, as I had showered the leaves from my
+geranium in reading _Little Dombey_, they mounted the platform after I
+was gone, and picked them all up as a keepsake." A few days earlier he
+had written to the same correspondent: "The papers are full of remarks
+upon my white tie, and describe it as being of enormous size, which is a
+wonderful delusion; because, as you very well know, it is a small tie.
+Generally, I am happy to report, the Emerald press is in favour of my
+appearance, and likes my eyes. But one gentleman comes out with a letter
+at Cork, wherein he says that although only 46, I look like an old man."
+
+[230] "They had offered frantic prices for stalls. Eleven bank-notes
+were thrust into a paybox at one time for eleven stalls. Our men were
+flattened against walls and squeezed against beams. Ladies stood all
+night with their chins against my platform. Other ladies sat all night
+upon my steps. We turned away people enough to make immense houses for a
+week." Letter to his eldest daughter.
+
+[231] "Shillings get into stalls, and half-crowns get into shillings,
+and stalls get nowhere, and there is immense confusion." Letter to his
+daughter.
+
+[232] "I was brought very near to what I sometimes dream may be my
+Fame," he says in a letter of later date to myself from York, "when a
+lady whose face I had never seen stopped me yesterday in the street, and
+said to me, _Mr. Dickens, will you let me touch the hand that has filled
+my house with many friends_." October 1858.
+
+[233] "That is no doubt immense, our expenses being necessarily large,
+and the travelling party being always five." Another source of profit
+was the sale of the copies of the several Readings prepared by himself.
+"Our people alone sell eight, ten, and twelve dozen a night." A later
+letter says: "The men with the reading books were sold out, for about
+the twentieth time, at Manchester. Eleven dozen of the _Poor Traveller_,
+_Boots_, and _Gamp_ being sold in about ten minutes, they had no more
+left; and Manchester became green with the little tracts, in every
+bookshop, outside every omnibus, and passing along every street. The
+sale of them, apart from us, must be very great." "Did I tell you," he
+writes in another letter, "that the agents for our tickets who are also
+booksellers, say very generally that the readings decidedly increase the
+sale of the books they are taken from? We were first told of this by a
+Mr. Parke, a wealthy old gentleman in a very large way at Wolverhampton,
+who did all the business for love, and would not take a farthing. Since
+then, we have constantly come upon it; and M'Glashin and Gill at Dublin
+were very strong about it indeed."
+
+[234] The last of them were given immediately after his completion of
+the _Tale of Two Cities_: "I am a little tired; but as little, I
+suspect, as any man could be with the work of the last four days, and
+perhaps the change of work was better than subsiding into rest and rust.
+The Norwich people were a noble audience. There, and at Ipswich and
+Bury, we had the demonstrativeness of the great working-towns, and a
+much finer perception."--14th of October 1859.
+
+[235] Two pleasing little volumes may here be named as devoted to
+special descriptions of the several Readings; by his friend Mr. Charles
+Kent in England (_Charles Dickens as a Reader_), and by Miss Kate Field
+in America (_Pen Photographs_).
+
+[236] Let me subjoin his own note of a less important incident of that
+month which will show his quick and sure eye for any bit of acting out
+of the common. The lady has since justified its closing prediction.
+Describing an early dinner with Chauncy Townshend, he adds (17th of
+December 1858): "I escaped at half-past seven, and went to the Strand
+Theatre: having taken a stall beforehand, for it is always crammed. I
+really wish you would go, between this and next Thursday, to see the
+_Maid and the Magpie_ burlesque there. There is the strangest thing in
+it that ever I have seen on the stage. The boy, Pippo, by Miss Wilton.
+While it is astonishingly impudent (must be, or it couldn't be done at
+all), it is so stupendously like a boy, and unlike a woman, that it is
+perfectly free from offence. I never have seen such a thing. Priscilla
+Horton, as a boy, not to be thought of beside it. She does an imitation
+of the dancing of the Christy Minstrels--wonderfully clever--which, in
+the audacity of its thorough-going, is surprising. A thing that you _can
+not_ imagine a woman's doing at all; and yet the manner, the appearance,
+the levity, impulse, and spirits of it, are so exactly like a boy that
+you cannot think of anything like her sex in association with it. It
+begins at 8, and is over by a quarter-past 9. I never have seen such a
+curious thing, and the girl's talent is unchallengeable. I call her the
+cleverest girl I have ever seen on the stage in my time, and the most
+singularly original."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+ALL THE YEAR ROUND AND THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER.
+
+1859-1861.
+
+ _All the Year Round_ started--_Household Words_
+ discontinued--Differences with Mr. Bentley--In
+ Search of a Name for New Periodical--Opening a
+ Story--Success of New Periodical--At Knebworth
+ with Bulwer Lytton--Sale of Christmas
+ Numbers--Commercial Travellers'
+ Schools--Personal References--Remedy for
+ Sleeplessness--"Tramp" Experiences--Reduced
+ Bantams--Bethnal-green Fowls--The Goldfinch and
+ his Friend--Offers from America--Visit of Mr.
+ Fields.
+
+
+IN the interval before the close of the first circuit of readings,
+painful personal disputes arising out of the occurrences of the previous
+year were settled by the discontinuance of _Household Words_, and the
+establishment in its place of _All the Year Round_. The disputes turned
+upon matters of feeling exclusively, and involved no charge on either
+side that would render any detailed reference here other than gravely
+out of place. The question into which the difference ultimately resolved
+itself was that of the respective rights of the parties as proprietors
+of _Household Words_; and this, upon a bill filed in Chancery, was
+settled by a winding-up order, under which the property was sold. It was
+bought by Dickens, who, even before the sale, exactly fulfilling a
+previous announcement of the proposed discontinuance of the existing
+periodical and establishment of another in its place, precisely similar
+but under a different title, had started _All the Year Round_. It was to
+be regretted perhaps that he should have thought it necessary to move at
+all, but he moved strictly within his rights.
+
+To the publishers first associated with his great success in literature,
+Messrs. Chapman and Hall, he now returned for the issue of the remainder
+of his books; of which he always in future reserved the copyrights,
+making each the subject of such arrangement as for the time might seem
+to him desirable. In this he was met by no difficulty; and indeed it
+will be only proper to add, that, in any points affecting his relations
+with those concerned in the production of his books, though his
+resentments were easily and quickly roused, they were never very
+lasting. The only fair rule therefore was, in a memoir of his life, to
+confine the mention of such things to what was strictly necessary to
+explain its narrative. This accordingly has been done; and, in the
+several disagreements it has been necessary to advert to, I cannot
+charge myself with having in a single instance overstepped the rule.
+Objection has been made to my revival of the early differences with Mr.
+Bentley. But silence respecting them was incompatible with what
+absolutely required to be said, if the picture of Dickens in his most
+interesting time, at the outset of his career in letters, was not to be
+omitted altogether; and, suppressing everything of mere temper that
+gathered round the dispute, use was made of those letters only
+containing the young writer's urgent appeal to be absolved, rightly or
+wrongly, from engagements he had too precipitately entered into.
+Wrongly, some might say, because the law was undoubtedly on Mr.
+Bentley's side; but all subsequent reflection has confirmed the view I
+was led strongly to take at the time, that in the facts there had come
+to be involved what the law could not afford to overlook, and that the
+sale of brain-work can never be adjusted by agreement with the same
+exactness and certainty as that of ordinary goods and chattels. Quitting
+the subject once for all with this remark, it is not less incumbent on
+me to say that there was no stage of the dispute in which Mr. Bentley,
+holding as strongly the other view, might not think it to have
+sufficient justification; and certainly in later years there was no
+absence of friendly feeling on the part of Dickens to his old publisher.
+This already has been mentioned; and on the occasion of Hans Andersen's
+recent visit to Gadshill, Mr. Bentley was invited to meet the celebrated
+Dane. Nor should I omit to say, that, in the year to which this
+narrative has now arrived, his prompt compliance with an intercession
+made to him for a common friend pleased Dickens greatly.
+
+At the opening of 1859, bent upon such a successor to _Household Words_
+as should carry on the associations connected with its name, Dickens was
+deep in search of a title to give expression to them. "My determination
+to settle the title arises out of my knowledge that I shall never be
+able to do anything for the work until it has a fixed name; also out of
+my observation that the same odd feeling affects everybody else." He had
+proposed to himself a title that, as in _Household Words_, might be
+capable of illustration by a line from Shakespeare; and alighting upon
+that wherein poor Henry the Sixth is fain to solace his captivity by the
+fancy, that, like birds encaged he might soothe himself for loss of
+liberty "at last by notes of household harmony," he for the time forgot
+that this might hardly be accepted as a happy comment on the occurrences
+out of which the supposed necessity had arisen of replacing the old by a
+new household friend. "Don't you think," he wrote on the 24th of
+January, "this is a good name and quotation? I have been quite delighted
+to get hold of it for our title.
+
+ "HOUSEHOLD HARMONY.
+
+ "'At last by notes of Household Harmony.'--_Shakespeare._"
+
+He was at first reluctant even to admit the objection when stated to
+him. "I am afraid we must not be too particular about the possibility of
+personal references and applications: otherwise it is manifest that I
+never can write another book. I could not invent a story of any sort, it
+is quite plain, incapable of being twisted into some such nonsensical
+shape. It would be wholly impossible to turn one through half a dozen
+chapters." Of course he yielded, nevertheless; and much consideration
+followed over sundry other titles submitted. Reviving none of those
+formerly rejected, here were a few of these now rejected in their turn.
+THE HEARTH. THE FORGE. THE CRUCIBLE. THE ANVIL OF THE TIME. CHARLES
+DICKENS'S OWN. SEASONABLE LEAVES. EVERGREEN LEAVES. HOME. HOME-MUSIC.
+CHANGE. TIME AND TIDE. TWOPENCE. ENGLISH BELLS. WEEKLY BELLS. THE
+ROCKET. GOOD HUMOUR. Still the great want was the line adaptable from
+Shakespeare, which at last exultingly he sent on the 28th of January.
+
+"I am dining early, before reading, and write literally with my mouth
+full. But I have just hit upon a name that I think really an admirable
+one--especially with the quotation _before_ it, in the place where our
+present _H. W._ quotation stands.
+
+ "'The story of our lives, from year to year.'--_Shakespeare._"
+ "ALL THE YEAR ROUND.
+
+ "A weekly journal conducted by Charles Dickens."
+
+With the same resolution and energy other things necessary to the
+adventure were as promptly done. "I have taken the new office," he wrote
+from Tavistock House on the 21st of February; "have got workmen in; have
+ordered the paper; settled with the printer; and am getting an immense
+system of advertising ready. Blow to be struck on the 12th of March. . . .
+Meantime I cannot please myself with the opening of my story" (the _Tale
+of Two Cities_, which _All the Year Round_ was to start with), "and
+cannot in the least settle at it or take to it. . . . I wish you would come
+and look at what I flatter myself is a rather ingenious account to which
+I have turned the Stanfield scenery here." He had placed the
+_Lighthouse_ scene in a single frame; had divided the scene of the
+_Frozen Deep_ into two subjects, a British man-of-war and an Arctic sea,
+which he had also framed; and the school-room that had been the theatre
+was now hung with sea-pieces by a great painter of the sea. To believe
+them to have been but the amusement of a few mornings was difficult
+indeed. Seen from the due distance there was nothing wanting to the most
+masterly and elaborate art.
+
+The first number of _All the Year Round_ appeared on the 30th of April,
+and the result of the first quarter's accounts of the sale will tell
+everything that needs to be said of a success that went on without
+intermission to the close. "A word before I go back to Gadshill," he
+wrote from Tavistock House in July, "which I know you will be glad to
+receive. So well has _All the Year Round_ gone that it was yesterday
+able to repay me, with five per cent. interest, all the money I advanced
+for its establishment (paper, print &c. all paid, down to the last
+number), and yet to leave a good L500 balance at the banker's!" Beside
+the opening of his _Tale of Two Cities_ its first number had contained
+another piece of his writing, the "Poor Man and his Beer;" as to which
+an interesting note has been sent me. The Rev. T. B. Lawes, of
+Rothamsted, St. Alban's, had been associated upon a sanitary commission
+with Mr. Henry Austin, Dickens's brother-in-law and counsellor in regard
+to all such matters in his own houses, or in the houses of the poor; and
+this connection led to Dickens's knowledge of a club that Mr. Lawes had
+established at Rothamsted, which he became eager to recommend as an
+example to other country neighbourhoods. The club had been set on
+foot[237] to enable the agricultural labourers of the parish to have
+their beer and pipes independent of the public-house; and the
+description of it, says Mr. Lawes, "was the occupation of a drive
+between this place (Rothamsted) and London, 25 miles, Mr. Dickens
+refusing the offer of a bed, and saying that he could arrange his ideas
+on the journey. In the course of our conversation I mentioned that the
+labourers were very jealous of the small tradesmen, blacksmiths and
+others, holding allotment-gardens; but that the latter did so indirectly
+by paying higher rents to the labourers for a share. This circumstance
+is not forgotten in the verses on the Blacksmith in the same number,
+composed by Mr. Dickens and repeated to me while he was walking about,
+and which close the mention of his gains with allusion to
+
+ "A share (concealed) in the poor man's field,
+ Which adds to the poor man's store."
+
+The periodical thus established was in all respects, save one, so
+exactly the counterpart of what it replaced, that a mention of this
+point of difference is the only description of it called for. Besides
+his own three-volume stories of _The Tale of Two Cities_ and _Great
+Expectations_, Dickens admitted into it other stories of the same length
+by writers of character and name, of which the authorship was avowed. It
+published tales of varied merit and success by Mr. Edmund Yates, Mr.
+Percy Fitzgerald, and Mr. Charles Lever. Mr. Wilkie Collins contributed
+to it his _Woman in White_, _No Name_, and _Moonstone_, the first of
+which had a pre-eminent success; Mr. Reade his _Hard Cash_; and Lord
+Lytton his _Strange Story_. Conferring about the latter Dickens passed a
+week at Knebworth, accompanied by his daughter and sister-in-law, in the
+summer of 1861, as soon as he had closed _Great Expectations_; and there
+met Mr. Arthur Helps, with whom and Lord Orford he visited the
+so-called "Hermit" near Stevenage, whom he described as Mr. Mopes in
+_Tom Tiddler's Ground_. With his great brother-artist he thoroughly
+enjoyed himself, as he invariably did; and reported him as "in better
+health and spirits than I have seen him in, in all these years,--a
+little weird occasionally regarding magic and spirits, but always fair
+and frank under opposition. He was brilliantly talkative, anecdotical,
+and droll; looked young and well; laughed heartily; and enjoyed with
+great zest some games we played. In his artist-character and talk, he
+was full of interest and matter, saying the subtlest and finest
+things--but that he never fails in. I enjoyed myself immensely, as we
+all did."[238]
+
+In _All the Year Round_, as in its predecessor, the tales for Christmas
+were of course continued, but with a surprisingly increased popularity;
+and Dickens never had such sale for any of his writings as for his
+Christmas pieces in the later periodical. It had reached, before he
+died, to nearly three hundred thousand. The first was called the
+_Haunted House_, and had a small mention of a true occurrence in his
+boyhood which is not included in the bitter record on a former page. "I
+was taken home, and there was debt at home as well as death, and we had
+a sale there. My own little bed was so superciliously looked upon by a
+power unknown to me hazily called The Trade, that a brass coal-scuttle,
+a roasting jack, and a bird cage were obliged to be put into it to make
+a lot of it, and then it went for a song. So I heard mentioned, and I
+wondered what song, and thought what a dismal song it must have been to
+sing!" The other subjects will have mention in another chapter.
+
+His tales were not his only important work in _All the Year Round_. The
+detached papers written by him there had a character and completeness
+derived from their plan, and from the personal tone, as well as frequent
+individual confessions, by which their interest is enhanced, and which
+will always make them specially attractive. Their title expressed a
+personal liking. Of all the societies, charitable or self-assisting,
+which his tact and eloquence in the "chair" so often helped, none had
+interested him by the character of its service to its members, and the
+perfection of its management, so much as that of the Commercial
+Travellers. His, admiration of their schools introduced him to one who
+then acted as their treasurer, and whom, of all the men he had known, I
+think he rated highest for the union of business qualities in an
+incomparable measure to a nature comprehensive enough to deal with
+masses of men, however differing in creed or opinion, humanely and
+justly. He never afterwards wanted support for any good work that he did
+not think first of Mr. George Moore,[239] and appeal was never made to
+him in vain. "Integrity, enterprise, public spirit, and benevolence," he
+told the Commercial Travellers on one occasion, "had their synonym in
+Mr. Moore's name;" and it was another form of the same liking when he
+took to himself the character and title of a Traveller _Un_commercial.
+"I am both a town traveller and a country traveller, and am always on
+the road. Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of
+Human-interest Brothers, and have rather a large connection in the fancy
+goods way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there from
+my rooms in Covent-garden, London: now about the city streets; now about
+the country by-roads: seeing many little things, and some great things,
+which, because they interest me, I think may interest others." In a few
+words that was the plan and drift of the papers which he began in 1860,
+and continued to write from time to time until the last autumn of his
+life.
+
+Many of them, such as "Travelling Abroad," "City Churches,"
+"Dullborough," "Nurses' Stories," and "Birthday Celebrations," have
+supplied traits, chiefly of his younger days, to portions of this
+memoir; and parts of his later life receive illustration from others,
+such as "Tramps," "Night Walks," "Shy Neighbourhoods," "The Italian
+Prisoner," and "Chatham Dockyard." Indeed hardly any is without its
+personal interest or illustration. One may learn from them, among other
+things, what kind of treatment he resorted to for the disorder of
+sleeplessness from which he had often suffered amid his late anxieties.
+Experimenting upon it in bed, he found to be too slow and doubtful a
+process for him; but he very soon defeated his enemy by the brisker
+treatment, of getting up directly after lying down, going out, and
+coming home tired at sunrise. "My last special feat was turning out of
+bed at two, after a hard day pedestrian and otherwise, and walking
+thirty miles into the country to breakfast." One description he did not
+give in his paper, but I recollect his saying that he had seldom seen
+anything so striking as the way in which the wonders of an equinoctial
+dawn (it was the 15th of October 1857) presented themselves during that
+walk. He had never before happened to see night so completely at odds
+with morning, "which was which." Another experience of his night
+ramblings used to be given in vivid sketches of the restlessness of a
+great city, and the manner in which _it_ also tumbles and tosses before
+it can get to sleep. Nor should anyone curious about his habits and ways
+omit to accompany him with his Tramps into Gadshill lanes; or to follow
+him into his Shy Neighbourhoods of the Hackney-road, Waterloo-road,
+Spitalfields, or Bethnal-green. For delightful observation both of
+country and town, for the wit that finds analogies between remote and
+familiar things, and for humorous personal sketches and experience,
+these are perfect of their kind.
+
+"I have my eye upon a piece of Kentish road, bordered on either side by
+a wood, and having on one hand, between the road-dust and the trees, a
+skirting patch of grass. Wild flowers grow in abundance on this spot,
+and it lies high and airy, with a distant river stealing steadily away
+to the ocean, like a man's life. To gain the mile-stone here, which the
+moss, primroses, violets, blue-bells, and wild roses, would soon render
+illegible but for peering travellers pushing them aside with their
+sticks, you must come up a steep hill, come which way you may. So, all
+the tramps with carts or caravans--the Gipsy-tramp, the Show-tramp, the
+Cheap Jack--find it impossible to resist the temptations of the place;
+and all turn the horse loose when they come to it, and boil the pot.
+Bless the place, I love the ashes of the vagabond fires that have
+scorched its grass!" It was there he found Dr. Marigold, and Chops the
+Dwarf, and the White-haired Lady with the pink eyes eating meat-pie with
+the Giant. So, too, in his Shy Neighbourhoods, when he relates his
+experiences of the bad company that birds are fond of, and of the effect
+upon domestic fowls of living in low districts, his method of handling
+the subject has all the charm of a discovery. "That anything born of an
+egg and invested with wings should have got to the pass that it hops
+contentedly down a ladder into a cellar, and calls _that_ going home, is
+a circumstance so amazing as to leave one nothing more in this
+connexion to wonder at." One of his illustrations is a reduced Bantam
+family in the Hackney-road deriving their sole enjoyment from crowding
+together in a pawnbroker's side-entry; but seeming as if only newly come
+down in the world, and always in a feeble flutter of fear that they may
+be found out. He contrasts them with others. "I know a low fellow,
+originally of a good family from Dorking, who takes his whole
+establishment of wives, in single file, in at the door of the Jug
+Department of a disorderly tavern near the Haymarket, manoeuvres them
+among the company's legs, emerges with them at the Bottle Entrance, and
+so passes his life: seldom, in the season, going to bed before two in
+the morning. . . . But, the family I am best acquainted with, reside in the
+densest part of Bethnal-green. Their abstraction from the objects among
+which they live, or rather their conviction that those objects have all
+come into existence in express subservience to fowls, has so enchanted
+me, that I have made them the subject of many journeys at divers hours.
+After careful observation of the two lords and the ten ladies of whom
+this family consists, I have come to the conclusion that their opinions
+are represented by the leading lord and leading lady: the latter, as I
+judge, an aged personage, afflicted with a paucity of feather and
+visibility of quill that gives her the appearance of a bundle of office
+pens. When a railway goods-van that would crush an elephant comes round
+the corner, tearing over these fowls, they emerge unharmed from under
+the horses, perfectly satisfied that the whole rush was a passing
+property in the air, which may have left something to eat behind it.
+They look upon old shoes, wrecks of kettles and saucepans, and
+fragments of bonnets, as a kind of meteoric discharge, for fowls to peck
+at. . . . Gaslight comes quite as natural to them as any other light; and I
+have more than a suspicion that, in the minds of the two lords, the
+early public-house at the corner has superseded the sun. They always
+begin to crow when the public-house shutters begin to be taken down, and
+they salute the Potboy, the instant he appears to perform that duty, as
+if he were Phoebes in person." For the truth of the personal adventure
+in the same essay, which he tells in proof of a propensity to bad
+company in more refined members of the feathered race, I am myself in a
+position to vouch. Walking by a dirty court in Spitalfields one day, the
+quick little busy intelligence of a goldfinch, drawing water for himself
+in his cage, so attracted him that he bought the bird, which had other
+accomplishments; but not one of them would the little creature show off
+in his new abode in Doughty-street, and he drew no water but by stealth
+or under the cloak of night. "After an interval of futile and at length
+hopeless expectation, the merchant who had educated him was appealed to.
+The merchant was a bow-legged character, with a flat and cushiony nose,
+like the last new strawberry. He wore a fur cap, and shorts, and was of
+the velveteen race, velveteeny. He sent word that he would 'look round.'
+He looked round, appeared in the doorway of the room, and slightly
+cocked up his evil eye at the goldfinch. Instantly a raging thirst beset
+that bird; and when it was appeased, he still drew several unnecessary
+buckets of water, leaping about his perch and sharpening his bill with
+irrepressible satisfaction."
+
+The Uncommercial Traveller papers, his two serial stories, and his
+Christmas tales, were all the contributions of any importance made by
+Dickens to _All the Year Round_; but he reprinted in it, on the
+completion of his first story, a short tale called "Hunted Down,"
+written for a newspaper in America called the _New York Ledger_. Its
+subject had been taken from the life of a notorious criminal already
+named, and its principal claim to notice was the price paid for it. For
+a story not longer than half of one of the numbers of _Chuzzlewit_ or
+_Copperfield_, he had received a thousand pounds.[240] It was one of the
+indications of the eager desire which his entry on the career of a
+public reader had aroused in America to induce him again to visit that
+continent; and at the very time he had this magnificent offer from the
+New York journal, Mr. Fields of Boston, who was then on a visit to
+Europe, was pressing him so much to go that his resolution was almost
+shaken. "I am now," he wrote to me from Gadshill on the 9th of July
+1859, "getting the _Tale of Two Cities_ into that state that IF I should
+decide to go to America late in September, I could turn to, at any time,
+and write on with great vigour. Mr. Fields has been down here for a day,
+and with the strongest intensity urges that there is no drawback, no
+commercial excitement or crisis, no political agitation; and that so
+favourable an opportunity, in all respects, might not occur again for
+years and years. I should be one of the most unhappy of men if I were
+to go, and yet I cannot help being much stirred and influenced by the
+golden prospect held before me."
+
+He yielded nevertheless to other persuasion, and for that time the visit
+was not to be. In six months more the Civil War began, and America was
+closed to any such enterprise for nearly five years.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[237] It is pleasant to have to state that it was still flourishing when
+I received Mr. Lawes's letter, on the 18th of December 1871.
+
+[238] From the same letter, dated 1st of July 1861, I take what follows.
+"Poor Lord Campbell's seems to me as easy and good a death as one could
+desire. There must be a sweep of these men very soon, and one feels as
+if it must fall out like the breaking of an arch--one stone goes from a
+prominent place, and then the rest begin to drop. So, one looks, not
+without satisfaction (in our sadness) at lives so rounded and complete,
+towards Brougham, and Lyndhurst, and Pollock" . . . Yet, of Dickens's own
+death, Pollock lived to write to me as the death of "one of the most
+distinguished and honoured men England has ever produced; in whose loss
+every man among us feels that he has lost a friend and an instructor."
+Temple-Hatton, 10th of June 1870.
+
+[239] If space were available here, his letters would supply many proofs
+of his interest in Mr. George Moore's admirable projects; but I can only
+make exception for his characteristic allusion to an incident that
+tickled his fancy very much at the time. "I hope" (20th of Aug. 1863)
+"you have been as much amused as I am by the account of the Bishop of
+Carlisle at (my very particular friend's) Mr. George Moore's schools? It
+strikes me as the funniest piece of weakness I ever saw, his addressing
+those unfortunate children concerning Colenso. I cannot get over the
+ridiculous image I have erected in my mind, of the shovel-hat and apron
+holding forth, at that safe distance, to that safe audience. There is
+nothing so extravagant in Rabelais, or so satirically humorous in Swift
+or Voltaire."
+
+[240] Eight years later he wrote "Holiday Romance" for a Child's
+Magazine published by Mr. Fields, and "George Silverman's
+Explanation"--of the same length, and for the same price. There are no
+other such instances, I suppose, in the history of literature.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+SECOND SERIES OF READINGS.
+
+1861-1863.
+
+ Daughter Kate's Marriage--Wedding Party--Sale
+ of Tavistock House--Brother Alfred's
+ Death--Metropolitan Readings--Proposed
+ Provincial Readings--Good of doing Nothing--New
+ Subjects for Readings--Mr. Arthur Smith's
+ Death--Eldest Son's Marriage--Audience at
+ Brighton--Audiences at Canterbury and
+ Dover--Alarming Scene at Newcastle--Impromptu
+ Reading Hall at Berwick-on-Tweed--In
+ Scotland--At Torquay--At
+ Liverpool--Metropolitan Success--Offer from
+ Australia--Writing or Reading not always
+ possible--Arguments for and against going to
+ Australia--Readings in Paris--A Religious
+ Richardson's Show--Exiled Ex-potentate.
+
+
+AT the end of the first year of residence at Gadshill it was the remark
+of Dickens that nothing had gratified him so much as the confidence with
+which his poorer neighbours treated him. He had tested generally their
+worth and good conduct, and they had been encouraged in illness or
+trouble to resort to him for help. There was pleasant indication of the
+feeling thus awakened, when, in the summer of 1860, his younger daughter
+Kate was married to Charles Alston Collins, brother of the novelist, and
+younger son of the painter and academician, who might have found, if
+spared to witness that summer-morning scene, subjects not unworthy of
+his delightful pencil in many a rustic group near Gadshill. All the
+villagers had turned out in honour of Dickens, and the carriages could
+hardly get to and from the little church for the succession of triumphal
+arches they had to pass through. It was quite unexpected by him; and
+when the feu de joie of the blacksmith in the lane, whose enthusiasm had
+smuggled a couple of small cannon into his forge, exploded upon him at
+the return, I doubt if the shyest of men was ever so taken aback at an
+ovation.
+
+To name the principal persons present that day will indicate the faces
+that (with addition of Miss Mary Boyle, Miss Marguerite Power, Mr.
+Fechter, Mr. Charles Kent, Mr. Edmund Yates, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, and
+members of the family of Mr. Frank Stone, whose sudden death[241] in the
+preceding year had been a great grief to Dickens) were most familiar at
+Gadshill in these later years. Mr. Frederic Lehmann was there with his
+wife, whose sister, Miss Chambers, was one of the bridesmaids; Mr. and
+Mrs. Wills were there, and Dickens's old fast friend Mr. Thomas Beard;
+the two nearest country neighbours with whom the family had become very
+intimate, Mr. Hulkes and Mr. Malleson, with their wives, joined the
+party; among the others were Henry Chorley, Chauncy Townshend, and
+Wilkie Collins; and, for friend special to the occasion, the bridegroom
+had brought his old fellow-student in art, Mr. Holman Hunt. Mr. Charles
+Collins had himself been bred as a painter, for success in which line he
+had some rare gifts; but inclination and capacity led him also to
+literature, and, after much indecision between the two callings, he took
+finally to letters. His contributions to _All the Year Round_ were among
+the most charming of its detached papers, and two stories published
+independently showed strength of wing for higher flights. But his health
+broke down, and his taste was too fastidious for his failing power. It
+is possible however that he may live by two small books of description,
+the _New Sentimental Journey_ and the _Cruize on Wheels_, which have in
+them unusual delicacy and refinement of humour; and if those volumes
+should make any readers in another generation curious about the writer,
+they will learn, if correct reply is given to their inquiries, that no
+man disappointed so many reasonable hopes with so little fault or
+failure of his own, that his difficulty always was to please himself,
+and that an inferior mind would have been more successful in both the
+arts he followed. He died in 1873 in his forty-fifth year; and until
+then it was not known, even by those nearest to him, how great must have
+been the suffering which he had borne, through many trying years, with
+uncomplaining patience.
+
+His daughter's marriage was the chief event that had crossed the even
+tenor of Dickens's life since his first paid readings closed; and it was
+followed by the sale of Tavistock House, with the resolve to make his
+future home at Gadshill. In the brief interval (29th of July) he wrote
+to me of his brother Alfred's death. "I was telegraphed for to
+Manchester on Friday night. Arrived there at a quarter past ten, but he
+had been dead three hours, poor fellow! He is to be buried at Highgate
+on Wednesday. I brought the poor young widow back with me yesterday."
+All that this death involved,[242] the troubles of his change of home,
+and some difficulties in working out his story, gave him more than
+sufficient occupation till the following spring; and as the time arrived
+for the new Readings, the change was a not unwelcome one.
+
+The first portion of this second series was planned by Mr. Arthur Smith,
+but he only superintended the six readings in London which opened it.
+These were the first at St. James's Hall (St. Martin's Hall having been
+burnt since the last readings there) and were given in March and April
+1861. "We are all well here and flourishing," he wrote to me from
+Gadshill on the 28th of April. "On the 18th I finished the readings as I
+purposed. We had between seventy and eighty pounds _in the stalls_,
+which, at four shillings apiece, is something quite unprecedented in
+these times. . . . The result of the six was, that, after paying a large
+staff of men and all other charges, and Arthur Smith's ten per cent. on
+the receipts, and replacing everything destroyed in the fire at St.
+Martin's Hall (including all our tickets, country-baggage, cheque-boxes,
+books, and a quantity of gas-fittings and what not), I got upwards of
+L500. A very great result. We certainly might have gone on through the
+season, but I am heartily glad to be concentrated on my story."
+
+It had been part of his plan that the Provincial Readings should not
+begin until a certain interval after the close of his story of _Great
+Expectations_. They were delayed accordingly until the 28th of October,
+from which date, when they opened at Norwich, they went on with the
+Christmas intervals to be presently named to the 30th of January 1862,
+when they closed at Chester. Kept within England and Scotland, they took
+in the border town of Berwick, and, besides the Scotch cities, comprised
+the contrasts and varieties of Norwich and Lancaster, Bury St. Edmunds
+and Cheltenham, Carlisle and Hastings, Plymouth and Birmingham,
+Canterbury and Torquay, Preston and Ipswich, Manchester and Brighton,
+Colchester and Dover, Newcastle and Chester. They were followed by ten
+readings at the St. James's Hall, between the 13th of March and the 27th
+of June 1862; and by four at Paris in January 1863, given at the Embassy
+in aid of the British Charitable Fund. The second series had thus in the
+number of the readings nearly equalled the first, when it closed at
+London in June 1863 with thirteen readings in the Hanover Square Rooms;
+and it is exclusively the subject of such illustrations or references as
+this chapter will supply.
+
+On _Great Expectations_ closing in June 1861, Bulwer Lytton, at
+Dickens's earnest wish, took his place in _All the Year Round_ with the
+"Strange Story;" and he then indulged himself in idleness for a little
+while. "The subsidence of those distressing pains in my face the moment
+I had done my work, made me resolve to do nothing in that way for some
+time if I could help it."[243] But his "doing nothing" was seldom more
+than a figure of speech, and what it meant in this case was soon told.
+"Every day for two or three hours, I practise my new readings, and
+(except in my office work) do nothing else. With great pains I have made
+a continuous narrative out of _Copperfield_, that I think will reward
+the exertion it is likely to cost me. Unless I am much mistaken, it will
+be very valuable in London. I have also done _Nicholas Nickleby_ at the
+Yorkshire school, and hope I have got something droll out of Squeers,
+John Browdie, & Co. Also, the Bastille prisoner from the _Tale of Two
+Cities_. Also, the Dwarf from one of our Christmas numbers." Only the
+first two were added to the list for the present circuit.
+
+It was in the midst of these active preparations that painful news
+reached him. An illness under which Mr. Arthur Smith had been some time
+suffering took unexpectedly a dangerous turn, and there came to be but
+small chance of his recovery. A distressing interview on the 28th of
+September gave Dickens little hope. "And yet his wakings and wanderings
+so perpetually turn on his arrangements for the Readings, and he is so
+desperately unwilling to relinquish the idea of 'going on with the
+business' to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow, that I had not the
+heart to press him for the papers. He told me that he believed he had by
+him '70 or 80 letters unanswered.' You may imagine how anxious it makes
+me, and at what a deadstop I stand." Another week passed, and with it
+the time fixed at the places where his work was to have opened; but he
+could not bring himself to act as if all hope had gone. "With a sick man
+who has been so zealous and faithful, I feel bound to be very tender and
+patient. When I told him the other day about my having engaged
+Headland--'to do all the personally bustling and fatiguing part of your
+work,' I said--he nodded his heavy head with great satisfaction, and
+faintly got out of himself the words, 'Of course I pay him, and not
+you.'" The poor fellow died in October; and on the day after attending
+the funeral,[244] Dickens heard of the death of his brother-in-law and
+friend, Mr. Henry Austin, whose abilities and character he respected as
+much as he liked the man. He lost much in losing the judicious and safe
+counsel which had guided him on many public questions in which he took
+lively interest, and it was with a heavy heart he set out at last upon
+his second circuit. "With what difficulty I get myself back to the
+readings after all this loss and trouble, or with what unwillingness I
+work myself up to the mark of looking them in the face, I can hardly
+say. As for poor Arthur Smith at this time, it is as if my right arm
+were gone. It is only just now that I am able to open one of the books,
+and screw the text out of myself in a flat dull way. Enclosed is the
+list of what I have to do. You will see that I have left ten days in
+November for the Christmas number, and also a good Christmas margin for
+our meeting at Gadshill. I shall be very glad to have the money that I
+expect to get; but it will be earned." That November interval was also
+the date of the marriage of his eldest son to the daughter of Mr. Evans,
+so long, in connection with Mr. Bradbury, his publisher and printer.
+
+The start of the readings at Norwich was not good, so many changes of
+vexation having been incident to the opening announcements as to leave
+some doubt of their fulfilment. But the second night, when trial was
+made of the _Nickleby_ scenes, "we had a splendid hall, and I think
+_Nickleby_ will top all the readings. Somehow it seems to have got in
+it, by accident, exactly the qualities best suited to the purpose; and
+it went last night, not only with roars, but with a general hilarity and
+pleasure that I have never seen surpassed."[245] From this night onward,
+the success was uninterrupted, and here was his report to me from
+Brighton on the 8th of November. "We turned away half Dover and half
+Hastings and half Colchester; and, if you can believe such a thing, I
+may tell you that in round numbers we find 1000 stalls already taken
+here in Brighton! I left Colchester in a heavy snow-storm. To-day it is
+so warm here that I can hardly bear the fire, and am writing with the
+window open down to the ground. Last night I had a most charming
+audience for _Copperfield_, with a delicacy of perception that really
+made the work delightful. It is very pretty to see the girls and women
+generally, in the matter of Dora; and everywhere I have found that
+peculiar personal relation between my audience and myself on which I
+counted most when I entered on this enterprise. _Nickleby_ continues to
+go in the wildest manner."
+
+A storm was at this time sweeping round the coast, and while at Dover he
+had written of it to his sister-in-law (7th of November): "The bad
+weather has not in the least touched us, and the storm was most
+magnificent at Dover. All the great side of the Lord Warden next the
+sea had to be emptied, the break of the waves was so prodigious, and the
+noise so utterly confounding. The sea came in like a great sky of
+immense clouds, for ever breaking suddenly into furious rain; all kinds
+of wreck were washed in; among other things, a very pretty brass-bound
+chest being thrown about like a feather. . . . The unhappy Ostend packet,
+unable to get in or go back, beat about the Channel all Tuesday night,
+and until noon yesterday; when I saw her come in, with five men at the
+wheel, a picture of misery inconceivable. . . . The effect of the readings
+at Hastings and Dover really seems to have outdone the best usual
+impression; and at Dover they wouldn't go, but sat applauding like mad.
+The most delicate audience I have seen in any provincial place, is
+Canterbury" ("an intelligent and delightful response in them," he wrote
+to his daughter, "like the touch of a beautiful instrument"); "but the
+audience with the greatest sense of humour certainly is Dover. The
+people in the stalls set the example of laughing, in the most curiously
+unreserved way; and they laughed with such really cordial enjoyment,
+when Squeers read the boys' letters, that the contagion extended to me.
+For, one couldn't hear them without laughing too. . . . So, I am thankful
+to say, all goes well, and the recompense for the trouble is in every
+way Great."
+
+From the opposite quarter of Berwick-on-Tweed he wrote again in the
+midst of storm. But first his mention of Newcastle, which he had also
+taken on his way to Edinburgh, reading two nights there, should be
+given. "At Newcastle, against the very heavy expenses, I made more than
+a hundred guineas profit. A finer audience there is not in England, and
+I suppose them to be a specially earnest people; for, while they can
+laugh till they shake the roof, they have a very unusual sympathy with
+what is pathetic or passionate. An extraordinary thing occurred on the
+second night. The room was tremendously crowded and my gas-apparatus
+fell down. There was a terrible wave among the people for an instant,
+and God knows what destruction of life a rush to the stairs would have
+caused. Fortunately a lady in the front of the stalls ran out towards
+me, exactly in a place where I knew that the whole hall could see her.
+So I addressed her, laughing, and half-asked and half-ordered her to sit
+down again; and, in a moment, it was all over. But the men in attendance
+had such a fearful sense of what might have happened (besides the real
+danger of Fire) that they positively shook the boards I stood on, with
+their trembling, when they came up to put things right. I am proud to
+record that the gas-man's sentiment, as delivered afterwards, was, 'The
+more you want of the master, the more you'll find in him.' With which
+complimentary homage, and with the wind blowing so that I can hardly
+hear myself write, I conclude."[246]
+
+It was still blowing, in shape of a gale from the sea, when, an hour
+before the reading, he wrote from the King's Arms at Berwick-on-Tweed.
+"As odd and out of the way a place to be at, it appears to me, as ever
+was seen! And such a ridiculous room designed for me to read in! An
+immense Corn Exchange, made of glass and iron, round, dome-topp'd,
+lofty, utterly absurd for any such purpose, and full of thundering
+echoes; with a little lofty crow's nest of a stone gallery, breast high,
+deep in the wall, into which it was designed to put----_me_! I instantly
+struck, of course; and said I would either read in a room attached to
+this house (a very snug one, capable of holding 500 people), or not at
+all. Terrified local agents glowered, but fell prostrate, and my men
+took the primitive accommodation in hand. Ever since, I am alarmed to
+add, the people (who besought the honour of the visit) have been coming
+in numbers quite irreconcileable with the appearance of the place, and
+what is to be the end I do not know. It was poor Arthur Smith's
+principle that a town on the way paid the expenses of a long
+through-journey, and therefore I came." The Reading paid more than
+those expenses.
+
+Enthusiastic greeting awaited him in Edinburgh. "We had in the hall
+exactly double what we had on the first night last time. The success of
+_Copperfield_ was perfectly unexampled. Four great rounds of applause
+with a burst of cheering at the end, and every point taken in the finest
+manner." But this was nothing to what befell on the second night, when,
+by some mistake of the local agents, the tickets issued were out of
+proportion to the space available. Writing from Glasgow next day (3rd of
+December) he described the scene. "Such a pouring of hundreds into a
+place already full to the throat, such indescribable confusion, such a
+rending and tearing of dresses, and yet such a scene of good humour on
+the whole, I never saw the faintest approach to. While I addressed the
+crowd in the room, G addressed the crowd in the street. Fifty frantic
+men got up in all parts of the hall and addressed me all at once. Other
+frantic men made speeches to the walls. The whole B family were borne in
+on the top of a wave, and landed with their faces against the front of
+the platform. I read with the platform crammed with people. I got them
+to lie down upon it, and it was like some impossible tableau or gigantic
+pic-nic--one pretty girl in full dress, lying on her side all night,
+holding on to one of the legs of my table! It was the most extraordinary
+sight. And yet, from the moment I began to the moment of my leaving off,
+they never missed a point, and they ended with a burst of cheers. . . . The
+expenditure of lungs and spirits was (as you may suppose) rather great;
+and to sleep well was out of the question. I am therefore rather fagged
+to-day; and as the hall in which I read to-night is a large one, I must
+make my letter a short one. . . . My people were torn to ribbons last
+night. They have not a hat among them--and scarcely a coat." He came
+home for his Christmas rest by way of Manchester, and thus spoke of the
+reading there on the 14th of December. "_Copperfield_ in the Free Trade
+Hall last Saturday was really a grand scene."
+
+He was in southern latitudes after Christmas, and on the 8th of January
+wrote from Torquay: "We are now in the region of small rooms, and
+therefore this trip will not be as profitable as the long one. I imagine
+the room here to be very small. Exeter I know, and that is small too. I
+am very much used up on the whole, for I cannot bear this moist warm
+climate. It would kill me very soon. And I have now got to the point of
+taking so much out of myself with _Copperfield_ that I might as well do
+Richard Wardour. . . . This is a very pretty place--a compound of Hastings,
+Tunbridge Wells, and little bits of the hills about Naples; but I met
+four respirators as I came up from the station, and three pale curates
+without them who seemed in a bad way." They had been not bad omens,
+however. The success was good, at both Torquay and Exeter; and he closed
+the month, and this series of the country readings, at the great towns
+of Liverpool and Chester. "The beautiful St. George's Hall crowded to
+excess last night" (28th of January 1862) "and numbers turned away.
+Brilliant to see when lighted up, and for a reading simply perfect. You
+remember that a Liverpool audience is usually dull; but they put me on
+my mettle last night, for I never saw such an audience--no, not even in
+Edinburgh! The agents (alone, and of course without any reference to
+ready money at the doors) had taken for the two readings two hundred
+pounds." But as the end approached the fatigues had told severely on
+him. He described himself sleeping horribly, and with head dazed and
+worn by gas and heat. Rest, before he could resume at the St. James's
+Hall in March, was become an absolute necessity.
+
+Two brief extracts from letters of the dates respectively of the 8th of
+April[247] and the 28th of June will sufficiently describe the London
+readings. "The money returns have been quite astounding. Think of L190 a
+night! The effect of _Copperfield_ exceeds all the expectations which
+its success in the country led me to form. It seems to take people
+entirely by surprise. If this is not new to you, I have not a word of
+news. The rain that raineth every day seems to have washed news away or
+got it under water." That was in April. In June he wrote: "I finished my
+readings on Friday night to an enormous hall--nearly L200. The success
+has been throughout complete. It seems almost suicidal to leave off
+with the town so full, but I don't like to depart from my public pledge.
+A man from Australia is in London ready to pay L10,000 for eight months
+there. If----" It was an If that troubled him for some time, and led to
+agitating discussion. The civil war having closed America, an increase
+made upon the just-named offer tempted him to Australia. He tried to
+familiarize himself with the fancy that he should thus also get new
+material for observation, and he went so far as to plan an Uncommercial
+Traveller Upside Down.[248] It is however very doubtful if such a
+scheme would have been entertained for a moment, but for the unwonted
+difficulties of invention that were now found to beset a twenty-number
+story. Such a story had lately been in his mind, and he had just chosen
+the title for it (_Our Mutual Friend_); but still he halted and
+hesitated sorely. "If it was not," (he wrote on the 5th of October 1862)
+"for the hope of a gain that would make me more independent of the
+worst, I could not look the travel and absence and exertion in the face.
+I know perfectly well beforehand how unspeakably wretched I should be.
+But these renewed and larger offers tempt me. I can force myself to go
+aboard a ship, and I can force myself to do at that reading-desk what I
+have done a hundred times; but whether, with all this unsettled
+fluctuating distress in my mind, I could force an original book out of
+it, is another question." On the 22nd, still striving hard to find
+reasons to cope with the all but irresistible arguments against any such
+adventure, which indeed, with everything that then surrounded him, would
+have been little short of madness, he thus stated his experience of his
+two circuits of public reading. "Remember that at home here the thing
+has never missed fire, but invariably does more the second time than it
+did the first; and also that I have got so used to it, and have worked
+so hard at it, as to get out of it more than I ever thought was in it
+for that purpose. I think all the probabilities for such a country as
+Australia are immense." The terrible difficulty was that the home
+argument struck both ways. "If I were to go it would be a penance and a
+misery, and I dread the thought more than I can possibly express. The
+domestic life of the Readings is all but intolerable to me when I am
+away for a few weeks at a time merely, and what would it be----." On the
+other hand it was also a thought of home, far beyond the mere personal
+loss or gain of it, that made him willing still to risk even so much
+misery and penance; and he had a fancy that it might be possible to take
+his eldest daughter with him. "It is useless and needless for me to say
+what the conflict in my own mind is. How painfully unwilling I am to go,
+and yet how painfully sensible that perhaps I ought to go--with all the
+hands upon my skirts that I cannot fail to feel and see there, whenever
+I look round. It is a struggle of no common sort, as you will suppose,
+you who know the circumstances of the struggler." It closed at once when
+he clearly saw that to take any of his family with him, and make
+satisfactory arrangement for the rest during such an absence, would be
+impossible. By this time also he began to find his way to the new story,
+and better hopes and spirits had returned.
+
+In January 1863 he had taken his daughter and his sister-in-law to
+Paris, and he read twice at the Embassy in behalf of the British
+Charitable Fund, the success being such that he consented to read twice
+again.[249] He passed his birthday of that year (the 7th of the
+following month) at Arras. "You will remember me to-day, I know. Thanks
+for it. An odd birthday, but I am as little out of heart as you would
+have me be--floored now and then, but coming up again at the call of
+Time. I wanted to see this town, birthplace of our amiable Sea Green"
+(Robespierre); "and I find a Grande Place so very remarkable and
+picturesque that it is astonishing how people miss it. Here too I found,
+in a bye-country place just near, a Fair going on, with a Religious
+Richardson's in it--THEATRE RELIGIEUX--'donnant six fois par jour,
+l'histoire de la Croix en tableaux vivants, depuis la naissance de notre
+Seigneur jusqu'a son sepulture. Aussi l'immolation d'Isaac, par son pere
+Abraham.' It was just before nightfall when I came upon it; and one of
+the three wise men was up to his eyes in lamp oil, hanging the
+moderators. A woman in blue and fleshings (whether an angel or Joseph's
+wife I don't know) was addressing the crowd through an enormous
+speaking-trumpet; and a very small boy with a property lamb (I leave you
+to judge who _he_ was) was standing on his head on a barrel-organ."
+Returning to England by Boulogne in the same year, as he stepped into
+the Folkestone boat he encountered a friend, Mr. Charles Manby (for, in
+recording a trait of character so pleasing and honourable, it is not
+necessary that I should suppress the name), also passing over to
+England. "Taking leave of Manby was a shabby man of whom I had some
+remembrance, but whom I could not get into his place in my mind.
+Noticing when we stood out of the harbour that he was on the brink of
+the pier, waving his hat in a desolate manner, I said to Manby, 'Surely
+I know that man.'--'I should think you did,' said he: 'Hudson!' He is
+living--just living--at Paris, and Manby had brought him on. He said to
+Manby at parting, 'I shall not have a good dinner again, till you come
+back.' I asked Manby why he stuck to him? He said, Because he (Hudson)
+had so many people in his power, and had held his peace; and because he
+(Manby) saw so many Notabilities grand with him now, who were always
+grovelling for 'shares' in the days of his grandeur."
+
+Upon Dickens's arrival in London the second series of his readings was
+brought to a close; and opportunity may be taken, before describing the
+third, to speak of the manuscript volume found among his papers,
+containing Memoranda for use in his writings.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[241] "You will be grieved," he wrote (Saturday 19th of Nov. 1859) "to
+hear of poor Stone. On Sunday he was not well. On Monday, went to Dr.
+Todd, who told him he had aneurism of the heart. On Tuesday, went to Dr.
+Walsh, who told him he hadn't. On Wednesday I met him in a cab in the
+Square here, and he got out to talk to me. I walked about with him a
+little while at a snail's pace, cheering him up; but when I came home, I
+told them that I thought him much changed, and in danger. Yesterday at 2
+o'clock he died of spasm of the heart. I am going up to Highgate to look
+for a grave for him."
+
+[242] He was now hard at work on his story; and a note written from
+Gadshill after the funeral shows, what so frequently was incident to his
+pursuits, the hard conditions under which sorrow, and its claim on his
+exertion, often came to him. "To-morrow I have to work against time and
+tide and everything else, to fill up a No. keeping open for me, and the
+stereotype plates of which must go to America on Friday. But indeed the
+enquiry into poor Alfred's affairs; the necessity of putting the widow
+and children somewhere; the difficulty of knowing what to do for the
+best; and the need I feel under of being as composed and deliberate as I
+can be, and yet of not shirking or putting off the occasion that there
+is for doing a duty; would have brought me back here to be quiet, under
+any circumstances."
+
+[243] The same letter adds: "The fourth edition of _Great Expectations_
+is now going to press; the third being nearly out. Bulwer's story keeps
+us up bravely. As well as we can make out, we have even risen fifteen
+hundred."
+
+[244] "There was a very touching thing in the Chapel" (at Brompton).
+"When the body was to be taken up and carried to the grave, there
+stepped out, instead of the undertaker's men with their hideous
+paraphernalia, the men who had always been with the two brothers at the
+Egyptian Hall; and they, in their plain, decent, own mourning clothes,
+carried the poor fellow away. Also, standing about among the
+gravestones, dressed in black, I noticed every kind of person who had
+ever had to do with him--from our own gas man and doorkeepers and
+billstickers, up to Johnson the printer and that class of man. The
+father and Albert and he now lie together, and the grave, I suppose,
+will be no more disturbed I wrote a little inscription for the stone,
+and it is quite full."
+
+[245] Of his former manager he writes in the same letter: "I miss him
+dreadfully. The sense I used to have of compactness and comfort about me
+while I was reading, is quite gone; and on my coming out for the ten
+minutes, when I used to find him always ready for me with something
+cheerful to say, it is forlorn. . . . Besides which, H. and all the rest of
+them are always somewhere, and he was always everywhere."
+
+[246] The more detailed account of the scene which he wrote to his
+daughter is also well worth giving. "A most tremendous hall here last
+night. Something almost terrible in the cram. A fearful thing might have
+happened. Suddenly, when they were all very still over Smike, my Gas
+Batten came down, and it looked as if the room were falling. There were
+three great galleries crammed to the roof, and a high steep flight of
+stairs; and a panic must have destroyed numbers of people. A lady in the
+front row of stalls screamed, and ran out wildly towards me, and for one
+instant there was a terrible wave in the crowd. I addressed that lady,
+laughing (for I knew she was in sight of everybody there), and called
+out as if it happened every night--'There's nothing the matter I assure
+you; don't be alarmed; pray sit down----' and she sat down directly, and
+there was a thunder of applause. It took some five minutes to mend, and
+I looked on with my hands in my pockets; for I think if I had turned my
+back for a moment, there might still have been a move. My people were
+dreadfully alarmed--Boycott" (the gas-man) "in particular, who I suppose
+had some notion that the whole place might have taken fire--'but there
+stood the master,' he did me the honour to say afterwards, in addressing
+the rest, 'as cool as ever I see him a lounging at a Railway Station.'"
+
+[247] The letter referred also to the death of his American friend
+Professor Felton. "Your mention of poor Felton's death is a shock of
+surprise as well as grief to me, for I had not heard a word about it.
+Mr. Fields told me when he was here that the effect of that hotel
+disaster of bad drinking water had not passed away; so I suppose, as you
+do, that he sank under it. Poor dear Felton! It is 20 years since I told
+you of the delight my first knowledge of him gave me, and it is as
+strongly upon me to this hour. I wish our ways had crossed a little
+oftener, but that would not have made it better for us now. Alas! alas!
+all ways have the same finger-post at the head of them, and at every
+turning in them."
+
+[248] I give the letter in which he put the scheme formally before me,
+after the renewed and larger offers had been submitted. "If there were
+reasonable hope and promise, I could make up my mind to go to Australia
+and get money. I would not accept the Australian people's offer. I would
+take no money from them; would bind myself to nothing with them; but
+would merely make them my agents at such and such a per centage, and go
+and read there. I would take some man of literary pretensions as a
+secretary (Charles Collins? What think you?) and with his aid" (he
+afterwards made the proposal to his old friend Mr. Thomas Beard) "would
+do, for _All the Year Round_ while I was away, The Uncommercial
+Traveller Upside Down. If the notion of these speculators be anything
+like accurate, I should come back rich. I should have seen a great deal
+of novelty to boot. I should have been very miserable too. . . . Of course
+one cannot possibly count upon the money to be realized by a six months'
+absence, but, L12,000 is supposed to be a low estimate. Mr. S. brought
+me letters from members of the legislature, newspaper editors, and the
+like, exhorting me to come, saying how much the people talk of me, and
+dwelling on the kind of reception that would await me. No doubt this is
+so, and of course a great deal of curious experience for after use would
+be gained over and above the money. Being my own master too, I could
+'work' myself more delicately than if I bound myself for money
+beforehand. A few years hence, if all other circumstances were the same,
+I might not be so well fitted for the excessive wear and tear. This is
+about the whole case. But pray do not suppose that I am in my own mind
+favourable to going, or that I have any fancy for going." That was late
+in October. From Paris in November (1862), he wrote: "I mentioned the
+question to Bulwer when he dined with us here last Sunday, and he was
+all for going. He said that not only did he think the whole population
+would go to the Readings, but that the country would strike me in some
+quite new aspect for a Book; and that wonders might be done with such
+book in the way of profit, over there as well as here."
+
+[249] A person present thus described (1st of February 1863) the second
+night to Miss Dickens. "No one can imagine the scene of last Friday
+night at the Embassy . . . a two hours' storm of excitement and pleasure.
+They actually murmured and applauded right away into their carriages and
+down the street."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+HINTS FOR BOOKS WRITTEN AND UNWRITTEN.
+
+1855-1865.
+
+ Book of MS. Memoranda--Home of the
+ Barnacles--Original of Mrs. Clennam--River and
+ Ferryman--Notions for _Little Dorrit_--Original
+ of _Hunted Down_--Titles for _Tale of Two
+ Cities_--Hints for _Mutual Friend_--Reprobate's
+ Notion of Duty--Proposed Opening for a
+ Story--England first seen by an
+ Englishman--Touching Fancy--Story from State
+ Trials--Sentimentalist and her Fate--Female
+ Groups--Children Farming--Subjects for
+ Description--Fancies not worked upon--Available
+ Names--Mr. Brobity's Snuff-box.
+
+
+DICKENS began the Book of Memoranda for possible use in his work, to
+which occasional reference has been made, in January 1855, six months
+before the first page of _Little Dorrit_ was written; and I find no
+allusion leading me to suppose, except in one very doubtful instance,
+that he had made addition to its entries, or been in the habit of
+resorting to them, after the date of _Our Mutual Friend_. It seems to
+comprise that interval of ten years in his life.
+
+In it were put down any hints or suggestions that occurred to him. A
+mere piece of imagery or fancy, it might be at one time; at another the
+outline of a subject or a character; then a bit of description or
+dialogue; no order or sequence being observed in any. Titles for stories
+were set down too, and groups of names for the actors in them; not the
+least curious of the memoranda belonging to this class. More rarely,
+entry is made of some oddity of speech; and he has thus preserved in it,
+_verbatim et literatim_, what he declared to have been as startling a
+message as he ever received. A confidential servant at Tavistock House,
+having conferred on some proposed changes in his bed-room with the party
+that was to do the work, delivered this ultimatum to her master. "The
+gas-fitter says, sir, that he can't alter the fitting of your gas in
+your bed-room without taking up almost the ole of your bed-room floor,
+and pulling your room to pieces. He says, of course you can have it done
+if you wish, and he'll do it for you and make a good job of it, but he
+would have to destroy your room first, and go entirely under the
+jistes."[250]
+
+It is very interesting in this book, last legacy as it is of the
+literary remains of such a writer, to compare the way in which fancies
+were worked out with their beginnings entered in its pages. Those
+therefore will first be taken that in some form or other appeared
+afterwards in his writings, with such reference to the latter as may
+enable the reader to make comparison for himself.
+
+"Our House. Whatever it is, it is in a first-rate situation, and a
+fashionable neighbourhood. (Auctioneer called it 'a gentlemanly
+residence.') A series of little closets squeezed up into the corner of a
+dark street--but a Duke's Mansion round the corner. The whole house
+just large enough to hold a vile smell. The air breathed in it, at the
+best of times, a kind of Distillation of Mews." He made it the home of
+the Barnacles in _Little Dorrit_.
+
+What originally he meant to express by Mrs. Clennam in the same story
+has narrower limits, and a character less repellent, in the Memoranda
+than it assumed in the book. "Bed-ridden (or room-ridden)
+twenty--five-and-twenty--years; any length of time. As to most things,
+kept at a standstill all the while. Thinking of altered streets as the
+old streets--changed things as the unchanged things--the youth or girl I
+quarrelled with all those years ago, as the same youth or girl now.
+Brought out of doors by an unexpected exercise of my latent strength of
+character, and then how strange!"
+
+One of the people of the same story who becomes a prominent actor in it,
+Henry Gowan, a creation on which he prided himself as forcible and new,
+seems to have risen to his mind in this way. "I affect to believe that I
+would do anything myself for a ten-pound note, and that anybody else
+would. I affect to be always book-keeping in every man's case, and
+posting up a little account of good and evil with every one. Thus the
+greatest rascal becomes 'the dearest old fellow,' and there is much less
+difference than you would be inclined to suppose between an honest man
+and a scoundrel. While I affect to be finding good in most men, I am in
+reality decrying it where it really is, and setting it up where it is
+not. Might not a presentation of this far from uncommon class of
+character, if I could put it strongly enough, be likely to lead some
+men to reflect, and change a little? I think it has never been done."
+
+In _Little Dorrit_ also will be found a picture which seems to live with
+a more touching effect in his first pleasing fancy of it. "The ferryman
+on a peaceful river, who has been there from youth, who lives, who grows
+old, who does well, who does ill, who changes, who dies--the river runs
+six hours up and six hours down, the current sets off that point, the
+same allowance must be made for the drifting of the boat, the same tune
+is always played by the rippling water against the prow."
+
+Here was an entry made when the thought occurred to him of the close of
+old Dorrit's life. "First sign of the father failing and breaking down.
+Cancels long interval. Begins to talk about the turnkey who first called
+him the Father of the Marshalsea--as if he were still living. 'Tell Bob
+I want to speak to him. See if he is on the Lock, my dear.'" And here
+was the first notion of Clennam's reverse of fortune. "His falling into
+difficulty, and himself imprisoned in the Marshalsea. Then she, out of
+all her wealth and changed station, comes back in her old dress, and
+devotes herself in the old way."
+
+He seems to have designed, for the sketches of society in the same tale,
+a "Full-length portrait of his lordship, surrounded by worshippers;" of
+which, beside that brief memorandum, only his first draft of the general
+outline was worked at. "Sensible men enough, agreeable men enough,
+independent men enough in a certain way;--but the moment they begin to
+circle round my lord, and to shine with a borrowed light from his
+lordship, heaven and earth how mean and subservient! What a competition
+and outbidding of each other in servility."
+
+The last of the Memoranda hints which were used in the story whose
+difficulties at its opening seem first to have suggested them, ran thus:
+"The unwieldy ship taken in tow by the snorting little steam tug"--by
+which was prefigured the patriarch Casby and his agent Panks.
+
+In a few lines are the germ of the tale called _Hunted Down_: "Devoted
+to the Destruction of a man. Revenge built up on love. The secretary in
+the Wainewright case, who had fallen in love (or supposed he had) with
+the murdered girl."--The hint on which he worked in his description of
+the villain of that story, is also in the Memoranda. "The man with his
+hair parted straight up the front of his head, like an aggravating
+gravel-walk. Always presenting it to you. 'Up here, if you please.
+Neither to the right nor left. Take me exactly in this direction.
+Straight up here. Come off the grass--'"
+
+His first intention as to the _Tale of Two Cities_ was to write it upon
+a plan proposed in this manuscript book. "How as to a story in two
+periods--with a lapse of time between, like a French Drama? Titles for
+such a notion. TIME! THE LEAVES OF THE FOREST. SCATTERED LEAVES. THE
+GREAT WHEEL. ROUND AND ROUND. OLD LEAVES. LONG AGO. FAR APART. FALLEN
+LEAVES. FIVE AND TWENTY YEARS. YEARS AND YEARS. ROLLING YEARS. DAY AFTER
+DAY. FELLED TREES. MEMORY CARTON. ROLLING STONES. TWO GENERATIONS." That
+special title of _Memory Carton_ shows that what led to the greatest
+success of the book as written was always in his mind; and another of
+the memoranda is this rough hint of the character itself. "The
+drunken?--dissipated?--What?--LION--and his JACKALL and Primer, stealing
+down to him at unwonted hours."
+
+The studies of Silas Wegg and his patron as they exist in _Our Mutual
+Friend_, are hardly such good comedy as in the form which the first
+notion of them seems to have intended. "Gibbon's Decline and Fall. The
+two characters. One reporting to the other as he reads. Both getting
+confused as to whether it is not all going on now." In the same story
+may be traced, more or less clearly, other fancies which had found their
+first expression in the Memoranda. A touch for Bella Wilfer is here.
+"Buying poor shabby--FATHER?--a new hat. So incongruous that it makes
+him like African King Boy, or King George; who is usually full dressed
+when he has nothing upon him but a cocked hat or a waistcoat." Here
+undoubtedly is the voice of Podsnap. "I stand by my friends and
+acquaintances;--not for their sakes, but because they are _my_ friends
+and acquaintances. _I_ know them, _I_ have licensed them, they have
+taken out _my_ certificate. Ergo, I champion them as myself." To the
+same redoubtable person another trait clearly belongs. "And by denying a
+thing, supposes that he altogether puts it out of existence." A third
+very perfectly expresses the boy, ready for mischief, who does all the
+work there is to be done in Eugene Wrayburn's place of business. "The
+office boy for ever looking out of window, who never has anything to
+do."
+
+The poor wayward purposeless good-hearted master of the boy, Eugene
+himself, is as evidently in this: "If they were great things, I, the
+untrustworthy man in little things, would do them earnestly--But O No, I
+wouldn't!" What follows has a more direct reference; being indeed almost
+literally copied in the story. "As to the question whether I, Eugene,
+lying ill and sick even unto death, may be consoled by the
+representation that coming through this illness, I shall begin a new
+life, and have energy and purpose and all I have yet wanted: 'I _hope_ I
+should, but I _know_ I shouldn't. Let me die, my dear.'"
+
+In connection with the same book, the last in that form which he lived
+to complete, another fancy may be copied from which, though not
+otherwise worked out in the tale, the relation of Lizzie Hexam to her
+brother was taken. "A man, and his wife--or daughter--or niece. The man,
+a reprobate and ruffian; the woman (or girl) with good in her, and with
+compunctions. He believes nothing, and defies everything; yet has
+suspicions always, that she is 'praying against' his evil schemes, and
+making them go wrong. He is very much opposed to this, and is always
+angrily harping on it. 'If she _must_ pray, why can't she pray in their
+favour, instead of going against 'em? She's always ruining me--she
+always is--and calls that, Duty! There's a religious person! Calls it
+Duty to fly in my face! Calls it Duty to go sneaking against me!'"
+
+Other fancies preserved in his Memoranda were left wholly unemployed,
+receiving from him no more permanent form of any kind than that which
+they have in this touching record; and what most people would probably
+think the most attractive and original of all the thoughts he had thus
+set down for future use, are those that were never used.
+
+Here were his first rough notes for the opening of a story. "Beginning
+with the breaking up of a large party of guests at a country house:
+house left lonely with the shrunken family in it: guests spoken of, and
+introduced to the reader that way.--OR, beginning with a house abandoned
+by a family fallen into reduced circumstances. Their old furniture
+there, and numberless tokens of their old comforts. Inscriptions under
+the bells downstairs--'Mr. John's Room,' 'Miss Caroline's Room.' Great
+gardens trimly kept to attract a tenant: but no one in them. A landscape
+without figures. Billiard room: table covered up, like a body. Great
+stables without horses, and great coach-houses without carriages. Grass
+growing in the chinks of the stone-paving, this bright cold winter day.
+_Downhills._" Another opening had also suggested itself to him. "Open a
+story by bringing two strongly contrasted places and strongly contrasted
+sets of people, into the connexion necessary for the story, by means of
+an electric message. Describe the message--_be_ the message--flashing
+along through space, over the earth, and under the sea."[251] Connected
+with which in some way would seem to be this other notion, following it
+in the Memoranda. "Representing London--or Paris, or any other great
+place--in the new light of being actually unknown to all the people in
+the story, and only taking the colour of their fears and fancies and
+opinions. So getting a new aspect, and being unlike itself. An _odd_
+unlikeness of itself."
+
+The subjects for stories are various, and some are striking. There was
+one he clung to much, and thought of frequently as in a special degree
+available for a series of papers in his periodical; but when he came to
+close quarters with it the difficulties were found to be too great.
+"English landscape. The beautiful prospect, trim fields, clipped hedges,
+everything so neat and orderly--gardens, houses, roads. Where are the
+people who do all this? There must be a great many of them, to do it.
+Where are they all? And are _they_, too, so well kept and so fair to
+see? Suppose the foregoing to be wrought out by an Englishman: say, from
+China: who knows nothing about his native country." To which may be
+added a fancy that savours of the same mood of discontent, political and
+social. "How do I know that I, a man, am to learn from insects--unless
+it is to learn how little my littlenesses are? All that botheration in
+the hive about the queen bee, may be, in little, me and the court
+circular."
+
+A domestic story he had met with in the State Trials struck him greatly
+by its capabilities, and I may preface it by mentioning another subject,
+not entered in the Memoranda, which for a long time impressed him as
+capable of attractive treatment. It was after reading one of the
+witch-trials that this occurred to him; and the heroine was to be a girl
+who for a special purpose had taken a witch's disguise, and whose trick
+was not discovered until she was actually at the stake. Here is the
+State Trials story as told by Dickens. "There is a case in the State
+Trials, where a certain officer made love to a (supposed) miser's
+daughter, and ultimately induced her to give her father slow poison,
+while nursing him in sickness. Her father discovered it, told her so,
+forgave her, and said 'Be patient my dear--I shall not live long, even
+if I recover: and then you shall have all my wealth.' Though penitent
+then, she afterwards poisoned him again (under the same influence), and
+successfully. Whereupon it appeared that the old man had no money at
+all, and had lived on a small annuity which died with him, though always
+feigning to be rich. He had loved this daughter with great affection."
+
+A theme touching closely on ground that some might think dangerous, is
+sketched in the following fancy. "The father (married young) who, in
+perfect innocence, venerates his son's young wife, as the realization of
+his ideal of woman. (He not happy in his own choice.) The son slights
+her, and knows nothing of her worth. The father watches her, protects
+her, labours for her, endures for her,--is for ever divided between his
+strong natural affection for his son as his son, and his resentment
+against him as this young creature's husband." Here is another, less
+dangerous, which he took from an actual occurrence made known to him
+when he was at Bonchurch. "The idea of my being brought up by my mother
+(me the narrator), my father being dead; and growing up in this belief
+until I find that my father is the gentleman I have sometimes seen, and
+oftener heard of, who has the handsome young wife, and the dog I once
+took notice of when I was a little child, and who lives in the great
+house and drives about."
+
+Very admirable is this. "The girl separating herself from the lover who
+has shewn himself unworthy--loving him still--living single for his
+sake--but never more renewing their old relations. Coming to him when
+they are both grown old, and nursing him in his last illness." Nor is
+the following less so. "Two girls _mis-marrying_ two men. The man who
+has evil in him, dragging the superior woman down. The man who has good
+in him, raising the inferior woman up." Dickens would have been at his
+best in working out both fancies.
+
+In some of the most amusing of his sketches of character, women also
+take the lead. "The lady un peu passee, who is determined to be
+interesting. No matter how much I love that person--nay, the more so for
+that very reason--I MUST flatter, and bother, and be weak and
+apprehensive and nervous, and what not. If I were well and strong,
+agreeable and self-denying, my friend might forget me." Another not
+remotely belonging to the same family is as neatly hit off. "The
+sentimental woman feels that the comic, undesigning, unconscious man, is
+'Her Fate.'--I her fate? God bless my soul, it puts me into a cold
+perspiration to think of it. _I_ her fate? How can _I_ be her fate? I
+don't mean to be. I don't want to have anything to do with
+her--Sentimental woman perceives nevertheless that Destiny must be
+accomplished."
+
+Other portions of a female group are as humorously sketched and hardly
+less entertaining. "The enthusiastically complimentary person, who
+forgets you in her own flowery prosiness: as--'I have no need to say to
+a person of your genius and feeling, and wide range of experience'--and
+then, being shortsighted, puts up her glass to remember who you
+are."--"Two sisters" (these were real people known to him). "One going
+in for being generally beloved (which she is not by any means); and the
+other for being generally hated (which she needn't be)."--"The
+bequeathed maid-servant, or friend. Left as a legacy. And a devil of a
+legacy too."--"The woman who is never on any account to hear of anything
+shocking. For whom the world is to be of barley-sugar."--"The lady who
+lives on her enthusiasm; and hasn't a jot."--"Bright-eyed creature
+selling jewels. The stones and the eyes." Much significance is in the
+last few words. One may see to what uses Dickens would have turned them.
+
+A more troubled note is sounded in another of these female characters.
+"I am a common woman--fallen. Is it devilry in me--is it a wicked
+comfort--what is it--that induces me to be always tempting other women
+down, while I hate myself!" This next, with as much truth in it, goes
+deeper than the last. "The prostitute who will not let one certain youth
+approach her. 'O let there be some one in the world, who having an
+inclination towards me has not gratified it, and has not known me in my
+degradation!' She almost loving him.--Suppose, too, this touch in her
+could not be believed in by his mother or mistress: by some handsome and
+proudly virtuous woman, always revolting from her." A more agreeable
+sketch than either follows, though it would not please M. Taine so well.
+"The little baby-like married woman--so strange in her new dignity, and
+talking with tears in her eyes, of her sisters 'and all of them' at
+home. Never from home before, and never going back again." Another from
+the same manuscript volume not less attractive, which was sketched in
+his own home, I gave upon a former page.
+
+The female character in its relations with the opposite sex has lively
+illustration in the Memoranda. "The man who is governed by his wife, and
+is heartily despised in consequence by all other wives; who still want
+to govern _their_ husbands, notwithstanding." An alarming family pair
+follows that. "The playful--and scratching--family. Father and
+daughter." And here is another. "The agreeable (and wicked) young-mature
+man, and his devoted sister." What next was set down he had himself
+partly seen; and, by enquiry at the hospital named, had ascertained the
+truth of the rest. "The two people in the Incurable Hospital.--The poor
+incurable girl lying on a water-bed, and the incurable man who has a
+strange flirtation with her; comes and makes confidences to her; snips
+and arranges her plants; and rehearses to her the comic songs(!) by
+writing which he materially helps out his living."[252]
+
+Two lighter figures are very pleasantly touched. "Set of circumstances
+which suddenly bring an easy, airy fellow into near relations with
+people he knows nothing about, and has never even seen. This, through
+his being thrown in the way of the innocent young personage of the
+story. 'Then there is Uncle Sam to be considered,' says she. 'Aye to be
+sure,' says he, 'so there is! By Jupiter, I forgot Uncle Sam. He's a
+rock ahead, is Uncle Sam. He must be considered, of course; he must be
+smoothed down; he must be cleared out of the way. To be sure. I never
+thought of Uncle Sam.--By the bye, who _is_ Uncle Sam?'"
+
+There are several such sketches as that, to set against the groups of
+women; and some have Dickens's favourite vein of satire in them. "The
+man whose vista is always stopped up by the image of Himself. Looks down
+a long walk, and can't see round himself, or over himself, or beyond
+himself. Is always blocking up his own way. Would be such a good thing
+for him, if he could knock himself down." Another picture of selfishness
+is touched with greater delicacy. "'Too good' to be grateful to, or
+dutiful to, or anything else that ought to be. 'I won't thank you: you
+are too good.'--'Don't ask me to marry you: you are too good.'--In
+short, I don't particularly mind ill-using you, and being selfish with
+you: for you are _so_ good. Virtue its own reward!" A third, which seems
+to reverse the dial, is but another face of it: frankly avowing faults,
+which are virtues. "In effect--I admit I am generous, amiable, gentle,
+magnanimous. Reproach me--I deserve it--I know my faults--I have striven
+in vain to get the better of them." Dickens would have made much, too,
+of the working out of the next. "The knowing man in distress, who
+borrows a round sum of a generous friend. Comes, in depression and
+tears, dines, gets the money, and gradually cheers up over his wine, as
+he obviously entertains himself with the reflection that his friend is
+an egregious fool to have lent it to him, and that _he_ would have known
+better." And so of this other. "The man who invariably says apposite
+things (in the way of reproof or sarcasm) THAT HE DON'T MEAN. Astonished
+when they are explained to him."
+
+Here is a fancy that I remember him to have been more than once bent
+upon making use of: but the opportunity never came. "The two men to be
+guarded against, as to their revenge. One, whom I openly hold in some
+serious animosity, whom I am at the pains to wound and defy, and whom I
+estimate as worth wounding and defying;--the other, whom I treat as a
+sort of insect, and contemptuously and pleasantly flick aside with my
+glove. But, it turns out to be the latter who is the really dangerous
+man; and, when I expect the blow from the other, it comes from _him_."
+
+We have the master hand in the following bit of dialogue, which takes
+wider application than that for which it appears to have been intended.
+
+"'There is some virtue in him too.'
+
+"'Virtue! Yes. So there is in any grain of seed in a seedsman's
+shop--but you must put it in the ground, before you can get any good out
+of it.'
+
+"'Do you mean that _he_ must be put in the ground before any good comes
+of _him_?'
+
+"'Indeed I do. You may call it burying him, or you may call it sowing
+him, as you like. You must set him in the earth, before you get any good
+of him.'"
+
+One of the entries is a list of persons and places meant to have been
+made subjects for special description, and it will awaken regret that
+only as to one of them (the Mugby Refreshments) his intention was
+fulfilled. "A Vestryman. A Briber. A Station Waiting-Room. Refreshments
+at Mugby. A Physician's Waiting-Room. The Royal Academy. An Antiquary's
+house. A Sale Room. A Picture Gallery (for sale). A Waste-paper Shop. A
+Post-Office. A Theatre."
+
+All will have been given that have particular interest or value, from
+this remarkable volume, when the thoughts and fancies I proceed to
+transcribe have been put before the reader.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"The man who is incapable of his own happiness. Or who is always in
+pursuit of happiness. Result, Where is happiness to be found then?
+Surely not Everywhere? Can that be so, after all? Is _this_ my
+experience?"
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"The people who persist in defining and analysing their (and everybody
+else's) moral qualities, motives and what not, at once in the narrowest
+spirit and the most lumbering manner;--as if one should put up an
+enormous scaffolding for the building of a pigstye."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"The house-full of Toadies and Humbugs. They all know and despise one
+another; but--partly to keep their hands in, and partly to make out
+their own individual cases--pretend not to detect one another."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"People realising immense sums of money,
+imaginatively--speculatively--counting their chickens before hatched.
+Inflaming each other's imaginations about great gains of money, and
+entering into a sort of intangible, impossible, competition as to who is
+the richer."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"The advertising sage, philosopher, and friend: who educates 'for the
+bar, the pulpit, or the stage.'"
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"The character of the real refugee--not the conventional; the real."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"The mysterious character, or characters, interchanging confidences.
+'Necessary to be very careful in that direction.'--'In what
+direction?'--'B'--'You don't say so. What, do you mean that C----?'--'Is
+aware of D. Exactly.'"
+
+"The father and boy, as I dramatically see them. Opening with the wild
+dance I have in my mind."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"The old child. That is to say, born of parents advanced in life, and
+observing the parents of other children to be young. Taking an old tone
+accordingly."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"A thoroughly sulky character--perverting everything. Making the good,
+bad--and the bad, good."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"The people who lay all their sins negligences and ignorances, on
+Providence."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"The man who marries his cook at last, after being so desperately
+knowing about the sex."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"The swell establishment, frightfully mean and miserable in all but the
+'reception rooms.' Those very showy."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"B. tells M. what my opinion is of his work, &c. Quoting the man you
+have once spoken to as if he had talked a life's talk in two minutes."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"A misplaced and mis-married man; always, as it were, playing hide and
+seek with the world; and never finding what Fortune seems to have hidden
+when he was born."
+
+"Certain women in Africa who have lost children, carry little wooden
+images of children on their heads, and always put their food to the lips
+of those images, before tasting it themselves. This is in a part of
+Africa where the mortality among children (judging from the number of
+these little memorials) is very great."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Two more entries are the last which he made. "AVAILABLE NAMES"
+introduces a wonderful list in the exact following classes and order; as
+to which the reader may be left to his own memory for selection of such
+as found their way into the several stories from _Little Dorrit_ to the
+end. The rest, not lifted into that higher notice by such favour of
+their creator, must remain like any other undistinguished crowd. But
+among them may perhaps be detected, by those who have special insight
+for the physiognomy of a name, some few with so great promise in them of
+fun and character as will make the "mute inglorious" fate which has
+befallen them a subject for special regret; and much ingenious
+speculation will probably wait upon all. Dickens has generally been
+thought, by the curious, to display not a few of his most characteristic
+traits in this particular field of invention.
+
+First there are titles for books; and from the list subjoined were taken
+two for Christmas numbers and two for stories, though _Nobody's Fault_
+had ultimately to give way to _Little Dorrit_.
+
+ "THE LUMBER ROOM.
+ SOMEBODY'S LUGGAGE.
+ TO BE LEFT TILL CALLED FOR.
+ SOMETHING WANTED.
+ EXTREMES MEET.
+ NOBODY'S FAULT.
+ THE GRINDSTONE.
+ ROKESMITH'S FORGE.
+ OUR MUTUAL FRIEND.
+ THE CINDER HEAP.
+ TWO GENERATIONS.
+ BROKEN CROCKERY.
+ DUST.
+ THE HOME DEPARTMENT.
+ THE YOUNG PERSON.
+ NOW OR NEVER.
+ MY NEIGHBOURS.
+ THE CHILDREN OF THE FATHERS.
+ NO THOROUGHFARE."
+
+Then comes a batch of "Christian names": Girls and Boys: which stand
+thus, with mention of the source from which he obtained them. These
+therefore can hardly be called pure invention. Some would have been
+reckoned too extravagant for anything but reality.
+
+"_Girls from Privy Council Education lists._
+
+ "LELIA.
+ MENELLA.
+ RUBINA.
+ IRIS.
+ REBECCA.
+ ETTY.
+ REBINAH.
+ SEBA.
+ PERSIA.
+ ARAMANDA.
+ DORIS.
+ BALZINA.
+ PLEASANT.
+ GENTILLA.
+
+"_Boys from Privy Council Education lists._
+
+ "DOCTOR.
+ HOMER.
+ ODEN.
+ BRADLEY.
+ ZERUBBABEL.
+ MAXIMILIAN.
+ URBIN.
+ SAMILIAS.
+ PICKLES.
+ ORANGE.
+ FEATHER.
+
+"_Girls and Boys from Ditto._
+
+ "AMANDA, ETHLYNIDA; BOETIUS, BOLTIUS."
+
+To which he adds supplementary lists that appear to be his own.
+
+"_More Boys._
+
+ "ROBERT LADLE.
+ JOLY STICK.
+ BILL MARIGOLD.
+ STEPHEN MARQUICK.
+ JONATHAN KNOTWELL.
+ PHILIP BROWNDRESS.
+ HENRY GHOST.
+ GEORGE MUZZLE.
+ WALTER ASHES.
+ ZEPHANIAH FERRY (or FURY).
+ WILLIAM WHY.
+ ROBERT GOSPEL.
+ THOMAS FATHERLY.
+ ROBIN SCUBBAM.
+
+"_More Girls._
+
+ "SARAH GOLDSACKS.
+ ROSETTA DUST.
+ SUSAN GOLDRING.
+ CATHERINE TWO.
+ MATILDA RAINBIRD.
+ MIRIAM DENIAL.
+ SOPHIA DOOMSDAY.
+ ALICE THORNEYWORK.
+ SALLY GIMBLET.
+ VERITY HAWKYARD.
+ BIRDIE NASH.
+ AMBROSINA EVENTS.
+ APAULINA VERNON.
+ NELTIE ASHFORD."
+
+And then come the mass of his "available names," which stand thus,
+without other introduction or comment:
+
+ "TOWNDLING.
+ MOOD.
+ GUFF.
+ TREBLE.
+ CHILBY.
+ SPESSIFER.
+ WODDER.
+ WHELPFORD.
+ FENNERCK.
+ GANNERSON.
+ CHINKERBLE.
+ BINTREY.
+ FLEDSON.
+ HIRLL.
+ BRAYLE.
+ MULLENDER.
+ TRESLINGHAM.
+ BRANKLE.
+ SITTERN.
+ DOSTONE.
+ CAY-LON.
+ SLYANT.
+ QUEEDY.
+ BESSELTHUR.
+ MUSTY.
+ GROUT.
+ TERTIUS JOBBER.
+ AMON HEADSTON.
+ STRAYSHOTT.
+ HIGDEN.
+ MORFIT.
+ GOLDSTRAW.
+ BARREL.
+ INGE.
+ JUMP.
+ JIGGINS.
+ BONES.
+ COY.
+ DAWN.
+ TATKIN.
+ DROWVEY.
+ PUDSEY.
+ PEDSEY.
+ DUNCALF.
+ TRICKLEBANK.
+ SAPSEA.
+ READYHUFF.
+ DUFTY.
+ FOGGY.
+ TWINN.
+ BROWNSWORD.
+ PEARTREE.
+ SUDDS.
+ SILVERMAN.
+ KIMBER.
+ LAUGHLEY.
+ LESSOCK.
+ TIPPINS.
+ MINNITT.
+ RADLOWE.
+ PRATCHET.
+ MAWDETT.
+ WOZENHAM.
+ SNOWELL.
+ LOTTRUM.
+ LAMMLE.
+ FROSER.
+ HOLBLACK.
+ MULLEY.
+ REDWORTH.
+ REDFOOT.
+ TARBOX (B).
+ TINKLING.
+ DUDDLE.
+ JEBUS.
+ POWDERHILL.
+ GRIMMER.
+ SKUSE.
+ TITCOOMBE.
+ CRABBLE.
+ SWANNOCK.
+ TUZZEN.
+ TWEMLOW.
+ SQUAB.
+ JACKMAN.
+ SUGG.
+ BREMMIDGE.
+ SILAS BLODGET.
+ MELVIN BEAL.
+ BUTTRICK.
+ EDSON.
+ SANLORN.
+ LIGHTWORD.
+ TITBULL.
+ BANGHAM.
+ KYLE--NYLE.
+ PEMBLE.
+ MAXEY.
+ ROKESMITH.
+ CHIVERY.
+ WABBLER.
+ PEEX--SPEEX.
+ GANNAWAY.
+ MRS. FLINKS.
+ FLINX.
+ JEE.
+ HARDEN.
+ MERDLE.
+ MURDEN.
+ TOPWASH.
+ PORDAGE.
+ DORRET--DORRIT.
+ CARTON.
+ MINIFIE.
+ SLINGO.
+ JOAD.
+ KINCH.
+ MAG.
+ CHELLYSON.
+ BLENNAM--CL.
+ BARDOCK.
+ SNIGSWORTH.
+ SWENTON.
+ CASBY--PEACH.
+ LOWLEIGH--LOWELY.
+ PIGRIN.
+ YERBURY.
+ PLORNISH.
+ MAROON.
+ BANDY-NANDY.
+ STONEBURY.
+ MAGWITCH.
+ MEAGLES.
+ PANCKS.
+ HAGGAGE.
+ PROVIS.
+ STILTINGTON.
+ STILTWALK.
+ STILTINGSTALK.
+ STILTSTALKING.
+ RAVENDER.
+ PODSNAP.
+ CLARRIKER.
+ COMPERY.
+ STRIVER-STRYVER.
+ PUMBLECHOOK.
+ WANGLER.
+ BOFFIN.
+ BANTINCK.
+ DIBTON.
+ WILFER.
+ GLIBBERY.
+ MULVEY.
+ HORLICK.
+ DOOLGE.
+ GANNERY.
+ GARGERY.
+ WILLSHARD.
+ RIDERHOOD.
+ PRATTERSTONE.
+ CHINKIBLE.
+ WOPSELL.
+ WOPSLE.
+ WHELPINGTON.
+ WHELPFORD.
+ GAYVERY.
+ WEGG.
+ HUBBLE.
+ URRY.
+ KIBBLE.
+ SKIFFINS.
+ WODDER.
+ ETSER.
+ AKERSHEM."
+
+The last of the Memoranda, and the last words written by Dickens in the
+blank paper book containing them, are these. "'Then I'll give up
+snuff.' Brobity.--An alarming sacrifice. Mr. Brobity's snuff-box. The
+Pawnbroker's account of it?" What was proposed by this must be left to
+conjecture; but "Brobity" is the name of one of the people in his
+unfinished story, and the suggestion may have been meant for some
+incident in it. If so, it is the only passage in the volume which can be
+in any way connected with the piece of writing on which he was last
+engaged. Some names were taken for it from the lists, but there is
+otherwise nothing to recall _Edwin Drood_.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[250] From the same authority proceeded, in answer to a casual question
+one day, a description of the condition of his wardrobe of which he has
+also made note in the Memoranda. "Well, sir, your clothes is all shabby,
+and your boots is all burst."
+
+[251] The date when this fancy dropped into his Memoranda is fixed by
+the following passage in a letter to me of the 25th of August 1862. "I
+am trying to coerce my thoughts into hammering out the Christmas number.
+And I have an idea of opening a book (not the Christmas number--a book)
+by bringing together two strongly contrasted places and two strongly
+contrasted sets of people, with which and with whom the story is to
+rest, through the agency of an electric message. I think a fine thing
+might be made of the message itself shooting over the land and under the
+sea, and it would be a curious way of sounding the key note."
+
+[252] Following this in the "Memoranda" is an advertisement cut from the
+_Times_: of a kind that always expressed to Dickens a child-farming that
+deserved the gallows quite as much as the worst kind of starving, by way
+of farming, babies. The fourteen guineas a-year, "tender" age of the
+"dear" ones, maternal care, and no vacations or extras, to him had only
+one meaning.
+
+ EDUCATION FOR LITTLE CHILDREN.--Terms 14 to 18
+ guineas per annum; no extras or vacations. The
+ system of education embraces the wide range of
+ each useful and ornamental study suited to the
+ tender age of the dear children. Maternal care
+ and kindness may be relied on.--X., Heald's
+ Library, Fulham-road.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+THIRD SERIES OF READINGS.
+
+1864-1867.
+
+ Death of Thackeray--Dickens on
+ Thackeray--Mother's Death--Death of his Second
+ Son--_Our Mutual Friend_--Revising a
+ Play--Sorrowful New Year--Lameness--Fatal
+ Anniversary--New Readings undertaken--Offer of
+ Messrs. Chappell--Relieved from
+ Management--Greater Fatigues involved--A
+ Memorable Evening--Mrs. Carlyle--Offer for more
+ Readings--Result of the Last--Grave
+ Warnings--At Liverpool--At Manchester--At
+ Birmingham--In Scotland--Exertion and its
+ Result--An Old Malady--Audiences at
+ Newcastle--Scene at Tynemouth--In Dublin--At
+ Cambridge--Close of the Third Series--Desire in
+ America to hear Dickens read--Sends Agent to
+ America--Warning unheeded--For and against
+ reading in America--Decision to go--Departure.
+
+
+THE sudden death of Thackeray on the Christmas eve of 1863 was a painful
+shock to Dickens. It would not become me to speak, when he has himself
+spoken, of his relations with so great a writer and so old a friend.
+
+"I saw him first, nearly twenty-eight years ago, when he proposed to
+become the illustrator of my earliest book. I saw him last,[253] shortly
+before Christmas, at the Athenaeum Club, when he told me that he had
+been in bed three days . . . and that he had it in his mind to try a new
+remedy which he laughingly described. He was cheerful, and looked very
+bright. In the night of that day week, he died. The long interval
+between these two periods is marked in my remembrance of him by many
+occasions when he was extremely humorous, when he was irresistibly
+extravagant, when he was softened and serious, when he was charming with
+children. . . . No one can be surer than I, of the greatness and goodness
+of his heart. . . . In no place should I take it upon myself at this time
+to discourse of his books, of his refined knowledge of character, of his
+subtle acquaintance with the weaknesses of human nature, of his
+delightful playfulness as an essayist, of his quaint and touching
+ballads, of his mastery over the English language. . . . But before me lies
+all that he had written of his latest story . . . and the pain I have felt
+in perusing it has not been deeper than the conviction that he was in
+the healthiest vigour of his powers when he worked on this last
+labour. . . . The last words he corrected in print were 'And my heart
+throbbed with an exquisite bliss.' God grant that on that Christmas Eve
+when he laid his head back on his pillow and threw up his arms as he had
+been wont to do when very weary, some consciousness of duty done, and of
+Christian hope throughout life humbly cherished, may have caused his
+own heart so to throb, when he passed away to his Redeemer's rest. He
+was found peacefully lying as above described, composed, undisturbed,
+and to all appearance asleep."
+
+Other griefs were with Dickens at this time, and close upon them came
+the too certain evidence that his own health was yielding to the
+overstrain which had been placed upon it by the occurrences and
+anxieties of the few preceding years. His mother, whose infirm health
+had been tending for more than two years to the close, died in September
+1863; and on his own birthday in the following February he had tidings
+of the death of his second son Walter, on the last day of the old year
+in the officers' hospital at Calcutta; to which he had been sent up
+invalided from his station, on his way home. He was a lieutenant in the
+26th Native Infantry regiment, and had been doing duty with the 42nd
+Highlanders. In 1853 his father had thus written to the youth's
+godfather, Walter Savage Landor: "Walter is a very good boy, and comes
+home from school with honorable commendation and a prize into the
+bargain. He never gets into trouble, for he is a great favourite with
+the whole house and one of the most amiable boys in the boy-world. He
+comes out on birthdays in a blaze of shirt pin." The pin was a present
+from Landor; to whom three years later, when the boy had obtained his
+cadetship through the kindness of Miss Coutts, Dickens wrote again.
+"Walter has done extremely well at school; has brought home a prize in
+triumph; and will be eligible to 'go up' for his India examination soon
+after next Easter. Having a direct appointment he will probably be sent
+out soon after he has passed, and so will fall into that strange life
+'up the country' before he well knows he is alive, or what life
+is--which indeed seems to be rather an advanced state of knowledge." If
+he had lived another month he would have reached his twenty-third year,
+and perhaps not then the advanced state of knowledge his father speaks
+of. But, never forfeiting his claim to those kindly paternal words, he
+had the goodness and simplicity of boyhood to the last.
+
+Dickens had at this time begun his last story in twenty numbers, and my
+next chapter will show through what unwonted troubles, in this and the
+following year, he had to fight his way. What otherwise during its
+progress chiefly interested him, was the enterprise of Mr. Fechter at
+the Lyceum, of which he had become the lessee; and Dickens was moved to
+this quite as much by generous sympathy with the difficulties of such a
+position to an artist who was not an Englishman, as by genuine
+admiration of Mr. Fechter's acting. He became his helper in disputes,
+adviser on literary points, referee in matters of management; and for
+some years no face was more familiar than the French comedian's at
+Gadshill or in the office of his journal. But theatres and their affairs
+are things of a season, and even Dickens's whim and humour will not
+revive for us any interest in these. No bad example, however, of the
+difficulties in which a French actor may find himself with English
+playwrights, will appear in a few amusing words from one of his letters
+about a piece played at the Princess's before the Lyceum management was
+taken in hand.
+
+"I have been cautioning Fechter about the play whereof he gave the plot
+and scenes to B; and out of which I have struck some enormities, my
+account of which will (I think) amuse you. It has one of the best first
+acts I ever saw; but if he can do much with the last two, not to say
+three, there are resources in his art that _I_ know nothing about. When
+I went over the play this day week, he was at least 20 minutes, _in a
+boat, in the last scene_, discussing with another gentleman (also in the
+boat) whether he should kill him or not; after which the gentleman dived
+overboard and swam for it. Also, in the most important and dangerous
+parts of the play, there was a young person of the name of Pickles who
+was constantly being mentioned by name, in conjunction with the powers
+of light or darkness; as, 'Great Heaven! Pickles?'--'By Hell, 'tis
+Pickles!'--'Pickles? a thousand Devils!'--'Distraction! Pickles?'"[254]
+
+
+The old year ended and the new one opened sadly enough. The death of
+Leech in November affected Dickens very much,[255] and a severe attack
+of illness in February put a broad mark between his past life and what
+remained to him of the future. The lameness now began in his left foot
+which never afterwards wholly left him, which was attended by great
+suffering, and which baffled experienced physicians. He had persisted
+in his ordinary exercise during heavy snow-storms, and to the last he
+had the fancy that his illness was merely local. But that this was an
+error is now certain; and it is more than probable that if the nervous
+danger and disturbance it implied had been correctly appreciated at the
+time, its warning might have been of priceless value to Dickens.
+Unhappily he never thought of husbanding his strength except for the
+purpose of making fresh demands upon it, and it was for this he took a
+brief holiday in France during the summer. "Before I went away," he
+wrote to his daughter, "I had certainly worked myself into a damaged
+state. But the moment I got away, I began, thank God, to get well. I
+hope to profit by this experience, and to make future dashes from my
+desk before I want them." At his return he was in the terrible railway
+accident at Staplehurst, on a day[256] which proved afterwards more
+fatal to him; and it was with shaken nerves but unsubdued energy he
+resumed the labour to be presently described. His foot troubled him more
+or less throughout the autumn;[257] he was beset by nervous
+apprehensions which the accident had caused to himself, not lessened by
+his generous anxiety to assuage the severer sufferings inflicted by it
+on others;[258] and that he should nevertheless have determined, on the
+close of his book, to undertake a series of readings involving greater
+strain and fatigue than any hitherto, was a startling circumstance. He
+had perhaps become conscious, without owning it even to himself, that
+for exertion of this kind the time left him was short; but, whatever
+pressed him on, his task of the next three years, self-imposed, was to
+make the most money in the shortest time without any regard to the
+physical labour to be undergone. The very letter announcing his new
+engagement shows how entirely unfit he was to enter upon it.
+
+"For some time," he wrote at the end of February 1866, "I have been very
+unwell. F. B. wrote me word that with such a pulse as I described, an
+examination of the heart was absolutely necessary. 'Want of muscular
+power in the heart,' B said. 'Only remarkable irritability of the
+heart,' said Doctor Brinton of Brook-street, who had been called in to
+consultation. I was not disconcerted; for I knew well beforehand that
+the effect could not possibly be without the one cause at the bottom of
+it, of some degeneration of some function of the heart. Of course I am
+not so foolish as to suppose that all my work can have been achieved
+without _some_ penalty, and I have noticed for some time a decided
+change in my buoyancy and hopefulness--in other words, in my usual
+'tone.' But tonics have already brought me round. So I have accepted an
+offer, from Chappells of Bond-street, of L50 a night for thirty nights
+to read 'in England, Ireland, Scotland, or Paris;' they undertaking all
+the business, paying all personal expenses, travelling and otherwise, of
+myself, John" (his office servant), "and my gasman; and making what they
+can of it. I begin, I believe, in Liverpool on the Thursday in Easter
+week, and then come to London. I am going to read at Cheltenham (on my
+own account) on the 23rd and 24th of this month, staying with Macready
+of course."
+
+The arrangement of this series of Readings differed from those of its
+predecessors in relieving Dickens from every anxiety except of the
+reading itself; but, by such rapid and repeated change of nights at
+distant places as kept him almost wholly in a railway carriage when not
+at the reading-desk or in bed, it added enormously to the physical
+fatigue. He would read at St. James's Hall in London one night, and at
+Bradford the next. He would read in Edinburgh, go on to Glasgow and to
+Aberdeen, then come back to Glasgow, read again in Edinburgh, strike off
+to Manchester, come back to St. James's Hall once more, and begin the
+same round again. It was labour that must in time have broken down the
+strongest man, and what Dickens was when he assumed it we have seen.
+
+He did not himself admit a shadow of misgiving. "As to the readings"
+(11th of March), "all I have to do is, to take in my book and read, at
+the appointed place and hour, and come out again. All the business of
+every kind, is done by Chappells. They take John and my other man,
+merely for my convenience. I have no more to do with any detail
+whatever, than you have. They transact all the business at their own
+cost, and on their own responsibility. I think they are disposed to do
+it in a very good spirit, because, whereas the original proposition was
+for thirty readings 'in England, Ireland, Scotland, or Paris,' they
+wrote out their agreement 'in London, the Provinces, or elsewhere, _as
+you and we may agree_.' For this they pay L1500 in three sums; L500 on
+beginning, L500 on the fifteenth Reading, L500 at the close. Every
+charge of every kind, they pay besides. I rely for mere curiosity on
+_Doctor Marigold_ (I am going to begin with him in Liverpool, and at St.
+James's Hall). I have got him up with immense pains, and should like to
+give you a notion what I am going to do with him."
+
+The success everywhere went far beyond even the former successes. A
+single night at Manchester, when eight hundred stalls were let, two
+thousand five hundred and sixty-five people admitted, and the receipts
+amounted to more than three hundred pounds, was followed in nearly the
+same proportion by all the greater towns; and on the 20th of April the
+outlay for the entire venture was paid, leaving all that remained, to
+the middle of the month of June, sheer profit. "I came back last
+Sunday," he wrote on the 30th of May, "with my last country piece of
+work for this time done. Everywhere the success has been the same. St.
+James's Hall last night was quite a splendid spectacle. Two more
+Tuesdays there, and I shall retire into private life. I have only been
+able to get to Gadshill once since I left it, and that was the day
+before yesterday."
+
+One memorable evening he had passed at my house in the interval, when he
+saw Mrs. Carlyle for the last time. Her sudden death followed shortly
+after, and near the close of April he had thus written to me from
+Liverpool. "It was a terrible shock to me, and poor dear Carlyle has
+been in my mind ever since. How often I have thought of the unfinished
+novel. No one now to finish it. None of the writing women come near her
+at all." This was an allusion to what had passed at their meeting. It
+was on the second of April, the day when Mr. Carlyle had delivered his
+inaugural address as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, and a couple
+of ardent words from Professor Tyndall had told her of the triumph just
+before dinner. She came to us flourishing the telegram in her hand, and
+the radiance of her enjoyment of it was upon her all the night. Among
+other things she gave Dickens the subject for a novel, from what she had
+herself observed at the outside of a house in her street; of which the
+various incidents were drawn from the condition of its blinds and
+curtains, the costumes visible at its windows, the cabs at its door, its
+visitors admitted or rejected, its articles of furniture delivered or
+carried away; and the subtle serious humour of it all, the truth in
+trifling bits of character, and the gradual progress into a
+half-romantic interest, had enchanted the skilled novelist. She was well
+into the second volume of her small romance before she left, being as
+far as her observation then had taken her; but in a few days exciting
+incidents were expected, the denouement could not be far off, and
+Dickens was to have it when they met again. Yet it was to something far
+other than this amusing little fancy his thoughts had carried him, when
+he wrote of no one being capable to finish what she might have begun. In
+greater things this was still more true. No one could doubt it who had
+come within the fascinating influence of that sweet and noble nature.
+With some of the highest gifts of intellect, and the charm of a most
+varied knowledge of books and things, there was something "beyond,
+beyond." No one who knew Mrs. Carlyle could replace her loss when she
+had passed away.
+
+The same letter which told of his uninterrupted success to the last,
+told me also that he had a heavy cold upon him and was "very tired and
+depressed." Some weeks before the first batch of readings closed,
+Messrs. Chappell had already tempted him with an offer for fifty more
+nights to begin at Christmas, for which he meant, as he then said, to
+ask them seventy pounds a night. "It would be unreasonable to ask
+anything now on the ground of the extent of the late success, but I am
+bound to look to myself for the future. The Chappells are speculators,
+though of the worthiest and most honourable kind. They make some bad
+speculations, and have made a very good one in this case, and will set
+this against those. I told them when we agreed: 'I offer these thirty
+Readings to you at fifty pounds a night, because I know perfectly well
+beforehand that no one in your business has the least idea of their real
+worth, and I wish to prove it.' The sum taken is L4720." The result of
+the fresh negotiation, though not completed until the beginning of
+August, may be at once described. "Chappell instantly accepts my
+proposal of forty nights at sixty pounds a night, and every conceivable
+and inconceivable expense paid. To make an even sum, I have made it
+forty-two nights for L2500. So I shall now try to discover a Christmas
+number" (he means the subject for one), "and shall, please Heaven, be
+quit of the whole series of readings so as to get to work on a new story
+for the new series of _All the Year Round_ early in the spring. The
+readings begin probably with the New Year." These were fair designs, but
+the fairest are the sport of circumstance, and though the subject for
+Christmas was found, the new series of _All the Year_ Round never had a
+new story from its founder. With whatever consequence to himself, the
+strong tide of the Readings was to sweep on to its full. The American
+war had ceased, and the first renewed offers from the States had been
+made and rejected. Hovering over all, too, were other sterner
+dispositions. "I think," he wrote in September, "there is some strange
+influence in the atmosphere. Twice last week I was seized in a most
+distressing manner--apparently in the heart; but, I am persuaded, only
+in the nervous system."
+
+In the midst of his ovations such checks had not been wanting. "The
+police reported officially," he wrote to his daughter from Liverpool on
+the 14th of April, "that three thousand people were turned away from the
+hall last night. . . . Except that I can _not_ sleep, I really think myself
+in very much better training than I had anticipated. A dozen oysters and
+a little champagne between the parts every night, seem to constitute the
+best restorative I have ever yet tried." "Such a prodigious
+demonstration last night at Manchester," he wrote to the same
+correspondent twelve days later, "that I was obliged (contrary to my
+principle in such cases) to go back. I am very tired to-day; for it
+would be of itself very hard work in that immense place, if there were
+not to be added eighty miles of railway and late hours to boot." "It has
+been very heavy work," he wrote to his sister-in-law on the 11th of May
+from Clifton, "getting up at 6.30 each morning after a heavy night, and
+I am not at all well to-day. We had a tremendous hall at Birmingham last
+night, L230 odd, 2100 people; and I made a most ridiculous mistake. Had
+_Nickleby_ on my list to finish with, instead of _Trial_. Read
+_Nickleby_ with great go, _and the people remained_. Went back again at
+10 o'clock, and explained the accident: but said if they liked I would
+give them the _Trial_. They _did_ like;--and I had another half hour of
+it, in that enormous place. . . . I have so severe a pain in the ball of my
+left eye that it makes it hard for me to do anything after 100 miles
+shaking since breakfast. My cold is no better, nor my hand either." It
+was his left eye, it will be noted, as it was his left foot and hand;
+the irritability or faintness of heart was also of course on the left
+side; and it was on the same left side he felt most of the effect of the
+railway accident.
+
+Everything was done to make easier the labour of travel, but nothing
+could materially abate either the absolute physical exhaustion, or the
+nervous strain. "We arrived here," he wrote from Aberdeen (16th of May),
+"safe and sound between 3 and 4 this morning. There was a compartment
+for the men, and a charming room for ourselves furnished with sofas and
+easy chairs. We had also a pantry and washing-stand. This carriage is to
+go about with us." Two days later he wrote from Glasgow: "We halted at
+Perth yesterday, and got a lovely walk there. Until then I had been in a
+condition the reverse of flourishing; half strangled with my cold, and
+dyspeptically gloomy and dull; but, as I feel much more like myself this
+morning, we are going to get some fresh air aboard a steamer on the
+Clyde." The last letter during his country travel was from Portsmouth on
+the 24th of May, and contained these words: "You need have no fear about
+America." The readings closed in June.
+
+The readings of the new year began with even increased enthusiasm, but
+not otherwise with happier omen. Here was his first outline of plan: "I
+start on Wednesday afternoon (the 15th of January) for Liverpool, and
+then go on to Chester, Derby, Leicester, and Wolverhampton. On Tuesday
+the 29th I read in London again, and in February I read at Manchester
+and then go on into Scotland." From Liverpool he wrote on the 21st:
+"The enthusiasm has been unbounded. On Friday night I quite astonished
+myself; but I was taken so faint afterwards that they laid me on a sofa,
+at the hall for half an hour. I attribute it to my distressing inability
+to sleep at night, and to nothing worse. Everything is made as easy to
+me as it possibly can be. Dolby would do anything to lighten the work,
+and _does_ everything." The weather was sorely against him. "At
+Chester," he wrote on the 24th from Birmingham, "we read in a snow-storm
+and a fall of ice. I think it was the worst weather I ever saw. . . . At
+Wolverhampton last night the thaw had thoroughly set in, and it rained
+furiously, and I was again heavily beaten. We came on here after the
+reading (it is only a ride of forty miles), and it was as much as I
+could do to hold out the journey. But I was not faint, as at Liverpool.
+I was only exhausted." Five days later he had returned for his Reading
+in London, and thus replied to a summons to dine with Macready at my
+house: "I am very tired; cannot sleep; have been severely shaken on an
+atrocious railway; read to-night, and have to read at Leeds on Thursday.
+But I have settled with Dolby to put off our going to Leeds on
+Wednesday, in the hope of coming to dine with you, and seeing our dear
+old friend. I say 'in the hope,' because if I should be a little more
+used-up to-morrow than I am to-day, I should be constrained, in spite of
+myself, to take to the sofa and stick there."
+
+On the 15th of February he wrote to his sister-in-law from Liverpool
+that they had had "an enormous turnaway" the previous night. "The day
+has been very fine, and I have turned it to the wholesomest account by
+walking on the sands at New Brighton all the morning. I am not quite
+right within, but believe it to be an effect of the railway shaking.
+There is no doubt of the fact that, after the Staplehurst experience, it
+tells more and more (railway shaking, that is) instead of, as one might
+have expected, less and less." The last remark is a strange one, from a
+man of his sagacity; but it was part of the too-willing self-deception
+which he practised, to justify him in his professed belief that these
+continued excesses of labour and excitement were really doing him no
+harm. The day after that last letter he pushed on to Scotland, and on
+the 17th wrote to his daughter from Glasgow. The closing night at
+Manchester had been enormous. "They cheered to that extent after it was
+over that I was obliged to huddle on my clothes (for I was undressing to
+prepare for the journey) and go back again. After so heavy a week, it
+_was_ rather stiff to start on this long journey at a quarter to two in
+the morning; but I got more sleep than I ever got in a railway-carriage
+before. . . . I have, as I had in the last series of readings, a curious
+feeling of soreness all round the body--which I suppose to arise from
+the great exertion of voice . . ." Two days later he wrote to his
+sister-in-law from the Bridge of Allan, which he had reached from
+Glasgow that morning. "Yesterday I was so unwell with an internal malady
+that occasionally at long intervals troubles me a little, and it was
+attended with the sudden loss of so much blood, that I wrote to F. B.
+from whom I shall doubtless hear to-morrow. . . . I felt it a little more
+exertion to read, afterwards, and I passed a sleepless night after that
+again; but otherwise I am in good force and spirits to-day: I may say,
+in the best force. . . . The quiet of this little place is sure to do me
+good." He rallied again from this attack, and, though he still
+complained of sleeplessness, wrote cheerfully from Glasgow on the 21st,
+describing himself indeed as confined to his room, but only because "in
+close hiding from a local poet who has christened his infant son in my
+name, and consequently haunts the building." On getting back to
+Edinburgh he wrote to me, with intimation that many troubles had beset
+him; but that the pleasure of his audiences, and the providence and
+forethought of Messrs. Chappell, had borne him through. "Everything is
+done for me with the utmost liberality and consideration. Every want I
+can have on these journeys is anticipated, and not the faintest spark of
+the tradesman spirit ever peeps out. I have three men in constant
+attendance on me; besides Dolby, who is an agreeable companion, an
+excellent manager, and a good fellow."
+
+On the 4th of March he wrote from Newcastle: "The readings have made an
+immense effect in this place, and it is remarkable that although the
+people are individually rough, collectively they are an unusually tender
+and sympathetic audience; while their comic perception is quite up to
+the high London standard. The atmosphere is so very heavy that yesterday
+we escaped to Tynemouth for a two hours' sea walk. There was a high
+north wind blowing, and a magnificent sea running. Large vessels were
+being towed in and out over the stormy bar, with prodigious waves
+breaking on it; and, spanning the restless uproar of the waters, was a
+quiet rainbow of transcendent beauty. The scene was quite wonderful. We
+were in the full enjoyment of it when a heavy sea caught us, knocked us
+over, and in a moment drenched us and filled even our pockets. We had
+nothing for it but to shake ourselves together (like Dr. Marigold), and
+dry ourselves as well as we could by hard walking in the wind and
+sunshine. But we were wet through for all that, when we came back here
+to dinner after half-an-hour's railway drive. I am wonderfully well, and
+quite fresh and strong." Three days later he was at Leeds; from which he
+was to work himself round through the most important neighbouring places
+to another reading in London, before again visiting Ireland.
+
+This was the time of the Fenian excitements; it was with great
+reluctance he consented to go;[259] and he told us all at his first
+arrival that he should have a complete breakdown. More than 300 stalls
+were gone at Belfast two days before the reading, but on the afternoon
+of the reading in Dublin not 50 were taken. Strange to say however a
+great crowd pressed in at night, he had a tumultuous greeting, and on
+the 22nd of March I had this announcement from him: "You will be
+surprised to be told that we have done WONDERS! Enthusiastic crowds have
+filled the halls to the roof each night, and hundreds have been turned
+away. At Belfast the night before last we had L246 5_s._ In Dublin
+to-night everything is sold out, and people are besieging Dolby to put
+chairs anywhere, in doorways, on my platform, in any sort of hole or
+corner. In short the Readings are a perfect rage at a time when
+everything else is beaten down." He took the Eastern Counties at his
+return, and this brought the series to a close. "The reception at
+Cambridge was something to be proud of in such a place. The colleges
+mustered in full force, from the biggest guns to the smallest; and went
+beyond even Manchester in the roars of welcome and rounds of cheers. The
+place was crammed, and all through the reading everything was taken with
+the utmost heartiness of enjoyment." The temptation of offers from
+America had meanwhile again been presented to him so strongly, and in
+such unlucky connection with immediate family claims threatening excess
+of expenditure even beyond the income he was making, that he was fain to
+write to his sister-in-law: "I begin to feel myself drawn towards
+America as Darnay in the _Tale of Two Cities_ was attracted to Paris. It
+is my Loadstone Rock." Too surely it was to be so; and Dickens was not
+to be saved from the consequence of yielding to the temptation, by any
+such sacrifice as had rescued Darnay.
+
+The letter which told me of the close of his English readings had in it
+no word of the farther enterprise, yet it seemed to be in some sort a
+preparation for it. "Last Monday evening" (14th May) "I finished the 50
+Readings with great success. You have no idea how I have worked at them.
+Feeling it necessary, as their reputation widened, that they should be
+better than at first, I have _learnt them all_, so as to have no
+mechanical drawback in looking after the words. I have tested all the
+serious passion in them by everything I know; made the humorous points
+much more humorous; corrected my utterance of certain words; cultivated
+a self-possession not to be disturbed; and made myself master of the
+situation. Finishing with _Dombey_ (which I had not read for a long
+time) I learnt that, like the rest; and did it to myself, often twice a
+day, with exactly the same pains as at night, over and over and over
+again." . . . Six days later brought his reply to a remark that no degree
+of excellence to which he might have brought his readings could
+reconcile me to what there was little doubt would soon be pressed upon
+him. "It is curious" (20th May) "that you should touch the American
+subject, because I must confess that my mind is in a most disturbed
+state about it. That the people there have set themselves on having the
+readings, there is no question. Every mail brings me proposals, and the
+number of Americans at St. James's Hall has been surprising. A certain
+Mr. Grau, who took Ristori out, and is highly responsible, wrote to me
+by the last mail (for the second time) saying that if I would give him a
+word of encouragement he would come over immediately and arrange on the
+boldest terms for any number I chose, and would deposit a large sum of
+money at Coutts's. Mr. Fields writes to me on behalf of a committee of
+private gentlemen at Boston who wished for the credit of getting me out,
+who desired to hear the readings and did not want profit, and would put
+down as a guarantee L10,000--also to be banked here. Every American
+speculator who comes to London repairs straight to Dolby, with similar
+proposals. And, thus excited, Chappells, the moment this last series was
+over, proposed to treat for America!" Upon the mere question of these
+various offers he had little difficulty in making up his mind. If he
+went at all, he would go on his own account, making no compact with any
+one. Whether he should go at all, was what he had to determine.
+
+One thing with his usual sagacity he saw clearly enough. He must make up
+his mind quickly. "The Presidential election would be in the autumn of
+next year. They are a people whom a fancy does not hold long. They are
+bent upon my reading there, and they believe (on no foundation whatever)
+that I am going to read there. If I ever go, the time would be when the
+Christmas number goes to press. Early in this next November." Every sort
+of enquiry he accordingly set on foot; and so far came to the immediate
+decision, that, if the answers left him no room to doubt that a certain
+sum might be realized, he would go. "Have no fear that anything will
+induce me to make the experiment, if I do not see the most forcible
+reasons for believing that what I could get by it, added to what I have
+got, would leave me with a sufficient fortune. I should be wretched
+beyond expression there. My small powers of description cannot describe
+the state of mind in which I should drag on from day to day." At the end
+of May he wrote: "Poor dear Stanfield!" (our excellent friend had passed
+away the week before). "I cannot think even of him, and of our great
+loss, for this spectre of doubt and indecision that sits at the board
+with me and stands at the bedside. I am in a tempest-tossed condition,
+and can hardly believe that I stand at bay at last on the American
+question. The difficulty of determining amid the variety of statements
+made to me is enormous, and you have no idea how heavily the anxiety of
+it sits upon my soul. But the prize looks so large!" One way at last
+seemed to open by which it was possible to get at some settled opinion.
+"Dolby sails for America" (2nd of July) "on Saturday the 3rd of August.
+It is impossible to come to any reasonable conclusion, without sending
+eyes and ears on the actual ground. He will take out my MS. for the
+_Children's Magazine_. I hope it is droll, and very child-like; though
+the joke is a grown-up one besides. You must try to like the pirate
+story, for I am very fond of it." The allusion is to his pleasant
+_Holiday Romance_ which he had written for Mr. Fields.
+
+Hardly had Mr. Dolby gone when there came that which should have availed
+to dissuade, far more than any of the arguments which continued to
+express my objection to the enterprise. "I am laid up," he wrote on the
+6th of August, "with another attack in my foot, and was on the sofa all
+last night in tortures. I cannot bear to have the fomentations taken off
+for a moment. I was so ill with it on Sunday, and it looked so fierce,
+that I came up to Henry Thompson. He has gone into the case heartily,
+and says that there is no doubt the complaint originates in the action
+of the shoe, in walking, on an enlargement in the nature of a bunion.
+Erysipelas has supervened upon the injury; and the object is to avoid a
+gathering, and to stay the erysipelas where it is. Meantime I am on my
+back, and chafing. . . . I didn't improve my foot by going down to
+Liverpool to see Dolby off, but I have little doubt of its yielding to
+treatment, and repose." A few days later he was chafing still; the
+accomplished physician he consulted having dropped other hints that
+somewhat troubled him. "I could not walk a quarter of a mile to-night
+for L500. I make out so many reasons against supposing it to be gouty
+that I really do not think it is."
+
+So momentous in my judgment were the consequences of the American
+journey to him that it seemed right to preface thus much of the
+inducements and temptations that led to it. My own part in the
+discussion was that of steady dissuasion throughout: though this might
+perhaps have been less persistent if I could have reconciled myself to
+the belief, which I never at any time did, that Public Readings were a
+worthy employment for a man of his genius. But it had by this time
+become clear to me that nothing could stay the enterprise. The result of
+Mr. Dolby's visit to America--drawn up by Dickens himself in a paper
+possessing still the interest of having given to the Readings when he
+crossed the Atlantic much of the form they then assumed[260]--reached me
+when I was staying at Ross; and upon it was founded my last argument
+against the scheme. This he received in London on the 28th of September,
+on which day he thus wrote to his eldest daughter: "As I telegraphed
+after I saw you, I am off to Ross to consult with Mr. Forster and Dolby
+together. You shall hear, either on Monday, or by Monday's post from
+London, how I decide finally." The result he wrote to her three days
+later: "You will have had my telegram that I go to America. After a long
+discussion with Forster, and consideration of what is to be said on both
+sides, I have decided to go through with it. We have telegraphed 'Yes'
+to Boston." Seven days later he wrote to me: "The Scotia being full, I
+do not sail until lord mayor's day; for which glorious anniversary I
+have engaged an officer's cabin on deck in the Cuba. I am not in very
+brilliant spirits at the prospect before me, and am deeply sensible of
+your motive and reasons for the line you have taken; but I am not in the
+least shaken in the conviction that I could never quite have given up
+the idea."
+
+The remaining time was given to preparations; on the 2nd of November
+there was a Farewell Banquet in the Freemasons' Hall over which Lord
+Lytton presided; and on the 9th Dickens sailed for Boston. Before he
+left he had contributed his part to the last of his Christmas Numbers;
+all the writings he lived to complete were done; and the interval of his
+voyage may be occupied by a general review of the literary labour of his
+life.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[253] There had been some estrangement between them since the autumn of
+1858, hardly now worth mention even in a note. Thackeray, justly
+indignant at a published description of himself by the member of a club
+to which both he and Dickens belonged, referred it to the Committee, who
+decided to expel the writer. Dickens, thinking expulsion too harsh a
+penalty for an offence thoughtlessly given, and, as far as might be,
+manfully atoned for by withdrawal and regret, interposed to avert that
+extremity. Thackeray resented the interference, and Dickens was justly
+hurt by the manner in which he did so. Neither was wholly right, nor was
+either altogether in the wrong.
+
+[254] As I have thus fallen on theatrical subjects, I may add one or two
+practical experiences which befell Dickens at theatres in the autumn of
+1864, when he sallied forth from his office upon these night wanderings
+to "cool" a boiling head. "I went the other night" (8th of October) "to
+see the _Streets of London_ at the Princess's. A piece that is really
+drawing all the town, and filling the house with nightly overflows. It
+is the most depressing instance, without exception, of an utterly
+degraded and debased theatrical taste that has ever come under my
+writhing notice. For not only do the audiences--of all classes--go, but
+they are unquestionably delighted. At Astley's there has been much
+puffing at great cost of a certain Miss Ada Isaacs Menkin, who is to be
+seen bound on the horse in _Mazeppa_ 'ascending the fearful precipices
+not as hitherto done by a dummy.' Last night, having a boiling head, I
+went out from here to cool myself on Waterloo Bridge, and I thought I
+would go and see this heroine. Applied at the box-door for a stall.
+'None left sir.' For a box-ticket. 'Only standing-room sir.' Then the
+man (busy in counting great heaps of veritable checks) recognizes me and
+says--'Mr. Smith will be very much concerned when he hears that you went
+away sir'--'Never mind; I'll come again.' 'You never go behind I think
+sir, or--?' 'No thank you, I never go behind.' 'Mr. Smith's box, sir--'
+'No thank you, I'll come again.' Now who do you think the lady is? If
+you don't already know, ask that question of the highest Irish mountains
+that look eternal, and they'll never tell you--_Mrs. Heenan!_" This
+lady, who turned out to be one of Dickens's greatest admirers, addressed
+him at great length on hearing of this occurrence, and afterwards
+dedicated a volume of poems to him! There was a pleasanter close to his
+letter. "Contrariwise I assisted another night at the Adelphi (where I
+couldn't, with careful calculation, get the house up to Nine Pounds),
+and saw quite an admirable performance of Mr. Toole and Mrs.
+Mellon--she, an old servant, wonderfully like Anne--he, showing a power
+of passion very unusual indeed in a comic actor, as such things go, and
+of a quite remarkable kind."
+
+[255] Writing to me three months before, he spoke of the death of one
+whom he had known from his boyhood (_ante_, i. 47-8) and with whom he
+had fought unsuccessfully for some years against the management of the
+Literary Fund. "Poor Dilke! I am very sorry that the capital old
+stout-hearted man is dead." Sorrow may also be expressed that no
+adequate record should remain of a career which for steadfast purpose,
+conscientious maintenance of opinion, and pursuit of public objects with
+disregard of self, was one of very high example. So averse was Mr. Dilke
+to every kind of display that his name appears to none of the literary
+investigations which were conducted by him with an acuteness wonderful
+as his industry, and it was in accordance with his express instructions
+that the literary journal which his energy and self-denial had
+established kept silence respecting him at his death.
+
+[256] One day before, the 8th of June 1865, his old friend Sir Joseph
+Paxton had breathed his last.
+
+[257] Here are allusions to it at that time. "I have got a boot on
+to-day,--made on an Otranto scale, but really not very discernible from
+its ordinary sized companion." After a few days' holiday: "I began to
+feel my foot stronger the moment I breathed the sea air. Still, during
+the ten days I have been away, I have never been able to wear a boot
+after four or five in the afternoon, but have passed all the evenings
+with the foot up, and nothing on it. I am burnt brown and have walked by
+the sea perpetually, yet I feel certain that if I wore a boot this
+evening, I should be taken with those torments again before the night
+was out." This last letter ended thus: "As a relief to my late dismal
+letters, I send you the newest American story. Backwoods Doctor is
+called in to the little boy of a woman-settler. Stares at the child some
+time through a pair of spectacles. Ultimately takes them off, and says
+to the mother: 'Wa'al Marm, this is small-pox. 'Tis Marm, small-pox. But
+I am not posted up in Pustuls, and I do not know as I could bring him
+along slick through it. But I'll tell you wa'at I can do Marm:--I can
+send him a draft as will certainly put him into a most etarnal Fit, and
+I am almighty smart at Fits, and we might git round Old Grisly that
+way.'"
+
+[258] I give one such instance: "The railway people have offered, in the
+case of the young man whom I got out of the carriage just alive, all the
+expenses and a thousand pounds down. The father declines to accept the
+offer. It seems unlikely that the young man, whose destination is India,
+would ever be passed for the Army now by the Medical Board. The question
+is, how far will that contingency tell, under Lord Campbell's Act?"
+
+[259] He wrote to me on the 15th of March from Dublin: "So profoundly
+discouraging were the accounts from here in London last Tuesday that I
+held several councils with Chappell about coming at all; had actually
+drawn up a bill announcing (indefinitely) the postponement of the
+readings; and had meant to give him a reading to cover the charges
+incurred--but yielded at last to his representations the other way. We
+ran through a snow storm nearly the whole way, and in Wales got snowed
+up, came to a stoppage, and had to dig the engine out. . . . We got to
+Dublin at last, found it snowing and raining, and heard that it had been
+snowing and raining since the first day of the year. . . . As to outward
+signs of trouble or preparation, they are very few. At Kingstown our
+boat was waited for by four armed policemen, and some stragglers in
+various dresses who were clearly detectives. But there was no show of
+soldiery. My people carry a long heavy box containing gas-fittings. This
+was immediately laid hold of; but one of the stragglers instantly
+interposed on seeing my name, and came to me in the carriage and
+apologised. . . . The worst looking young fellow I ever saw, turned up at
+Holyhead before we went to bed there, and sat glooming and glowering by
+the coffee-room fire while we warmed ourselves. He said he had been
+snowed up with us (which we didn't believe), and was horribly
+disconcerted by some box of his having gone to Dublin without him. We
+said to one another 'Fenian:' and certainly he disappeared in the
+morning, and let his box go where it would." What Dickens heard and saw
+in Dublin, during this visit, convinced him that Fenianism and
+disaffection had found their way into several regiments.
+
+[260] This renders it worth preservation in a note. He called it
+
+ "THE CASE IN A NUTSHELL.
+
+ "1. I think it may be taken as proved, that
+ general enthusiasm and excitement are awakened
+ in America on the subject of the Readings, and
+ that the people are prepared to give me a great
+ reception. _The New York Herald_, indeed, is of
+ opinion that 'Dickens must apologise first';
+ and where a _New York Herald_ is possible,
+ anything is possible. But the prevailing tone,
+ both of the press and of people of all
+ conditions, is highly favourable. I have an
+ opinion myself that the Irish element in New
+ York is dangerous; for the reason that the
+ Fenians would be glad to damage a conspicuous
+ Englishman. This is merely an opinion of my
+ own.
+
+ "2. All our original calculations were based on
+ 100 Readings. But an unexpected result of
+ careful enquiry on the spot, is the discovery
+ that the month of May is generally considered
+ (in the large cities) bad for such a purpose.
+ Admitting that what governs an ordinary case in
+ this wise, governs mine, this reduces the
+ Readings to 80, and consequently at a blow
+ makes a reduction of 20 per cent., in the means
+ of making money within the half year--unless
+ the objection should not apply in my
+ exceptional instance.
+
+ "3. I dismiss the consideration that the great
+ towns of America could not possibly be
+ exhausted--or even visited--within 6 months,
+ and that a large harvest would be left
+ unreaped. Because I hold a second series of
+ Readings in America is to be set down as out of
+ the question: whether regarded as involving two
+ more voyages across the Atlantic, or a vacation
+ of five months in Canada.
+
+ "4. The narrowed calculation we have made, is
+ this: What is the largest amount of clear
+ profit derivable, under the most advantageous
+ circumstances possible, as to their public
+ reception, from 80 Readings and no more? In
+ making this calculation, the expenses have been
+ throughout taken on the New York scale--which
+ is the dearest; as much as 20 per cent., has
+ been deducted for management, including Mr.
+ Dolby's commission; and no credit has been
+ taken for any extra payment on reserved seats,
+ though a good deal of money is confidently
+ expected from this source. But on the other
+ hand it is to be observed that four Readings
+ (and a fraction over) are supposed to take
+ place every week, and that the estimate of
+ receipts is based on the assumption that the
+ audiences are, on all occasions, as large as
+ the rooms will reasonably hold.
+
+ "5. So considering 80 Readings, we bring out
+ the net profit of that number, remaining to me
+ after payment of all charges whatever, as
+ L15,500.
+
+ "6. But it yet remains to be noted that the
+ calculation assumes New York City, and the
+ State of New York, to be good for a very large
+ proportion of the 80 Readings; and that the
+ calculation also assumes the necessary
+ travelling not to extend beyond Boston and
+ adjacent places, New York City and adjacent
+ places, Philadelphia, Washington, and
+ Baltimore. But, if the calculation should prove
+ too sanguine on this head, and if these places
+ should _not_ be good for so many Readings, then
+ it may prove impracticable to get through 80
+ within the time: by reason of other places that
+ would come into the list, lying wide asunder,
+ and necessitating long and fatiguing journeys.
+
+ "7. The loss consequent on the conversion of
+ paper money into gold (with gold at the present
+ ruling premium) is allowed for in the
+ calculation. It counts seven dollars to the
+ pound."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+DICKENS AS A NOVELIST.
+
+1836-1870.
+
+ THE TALE OF TWO CITIES.
+ GREAT EXPECTATIONS.
+ CHRISTMAS SKETCHES.
+ OUR MUTUAL FRIEND.
+ DR. MARIGOLD AND TALES FOR AMERICA.
+
+ M. Taine's Criticism--What M. Taine
+ overlooks--Anticipatory Reply to M.
+ Taine--Paper by Mr. Lewes--Plea for Objectors
+ to Dickens--Dickens a "Seer of
+ Visions"--Criticised and Critic--An Opinion on
+ Mr. and Mrs. Micawber--Dickens in a Fit of
+ Hallucination--Dickens's Leading
+ Quality--Dickens's Earlier Books--Mastery of
+ Dialogue--Realities of Fiction--Fielding and
+ Dickens--Universality of Micawber
+ Experiences--Dickens's Enjoyment of his Own
+ Humour--Origin of _Tale of Two
+ Cities_--Title-hunting--Success--Method
+ different from his Other Books--Reply to an
+ Objection--Care with which Dickens
+ worked--_Tale of Two Cities_
+ characterized--Opinion of an American
+ Critic--_Great Expectations_--Another Boy-child
+ for Hero--Groundwork of the Story--Masterly
+ Drawing of Character--Christmas Sketches--_Our
+ Mutual Friend_--Germ of Characters for
+ it--Writing Numbers in Advance--Death of
+ Leech--Holiday in France--In the Staplehurst
+ Accident--On a Tale by Edmund About--Doctor
+ Marigold--Minor Stories--Edwin Drood--Purity of
+ Dickens's Writings--True Province of
+ Humour--Dickens's Death--Effect of the News in
+ America--A Far-Western Admirer of Dickens.
+
+
+WHAT I have to say generally of Dickens's genius as a writer may be made
+part of the notice, which still remains to be given, of his writings
+from _The Tale of Two Cities_ to the time at which we have arrived,
+leaving _Edwin Drood_ for mention in its place; and this will be
+accompanied, as in former notices of individual stories, by
+illustrations drawn from his letters and life. His literary work was so
+intensely one with his nature that he is not separable from it, and the
+man and the method throw a singular light on each other. But some
+allusion to what has been said of these books, by writers assuming to
+speak with authority, will properly precede what has to be offered by
+me; and I shall preface this part of my task with the hint of Carlyle,
+that in looking at a man out of the common it is good for common men to
+make sure that they "see" before they attempt to "oversee" him.
+
+Of the French writer, M. Henri Taine, it has before been remarked that
+his inability to appreciate humour is fatal to his pretensions as a
+critic of the English novel. But there is much that is noteworthy in his
+criticism notwithstanding, as well as remarkable in his knowledge of our
+language; his position entitles him to be heard without a suspicion of
+partizanship or intentional unfairness; whatever the value of his
+opinion, the elaboration of its form and expression is itself no common
+tribute; and what is said in it of Dickens's handling in regard to style
+and character, embodies temperately objections which have since been
+taken by some English critics without his impartiality and with less
+than his ability. As to style M. Taine does not find that the natural or
+simple prevails sufficiently. The tone is too passionate. The
+imaginative or poetic side of allusion is so uniformly dwelt on, that
+the descriptions cease to be subsidiary, and the minute details of pain
+or pleasure wrought out by them become active agencies in the tale. So
+vivid and eager is the display of fancy that everything is borne along
+with it; imaginary objects take the precision of real ones; living
+thoughts are controlled by inanimate things; the chimes console the poor
+old ticket-porter; the cricket steadies the rough carrier's doubts; the
+sea waves soothe the dying boy; clouds, flowers, leaves, play their
+several parts; hardly a form of matter without a living quality; no
+silent thing without its voice. Fondling and exaggerating thus what is
+occasional in the subject of his criticism, into what he has evidently
+at last persuaded himself is a fixed and universal practice with
+Dickens, M. Taine proceeds to explain the exuberance by comparing such
+imagination in its vividness to that of a monomaniac. He fails
+altogether to apprehend that property in Humour which involves the
+feeling of subtlest and most affecting analogies, and from which is
+drawn the rare insight into sympathies between the nature of things and
+their attributes or opposites, in which Dickens's fancy revelled with
+such delight. Taking the famous lines which express the lunatic, the
+lover, and the poet as "of Imagination all compact," in a sense that
+would have startled not a little the great poet who wrote them, M. Taine
+places on the same level of creative fancy the phantoms of the lunatic
+and the personages of the artist. He exhibits Dickens as from time to
+time, in the several stages of his successive works of fiction, given up
+to one idea, possessed by it, seeing nothing else, treating it in a
+hundred forms, exaggerating it, and so dazzling and overpowering his
+readers with it that escape is impossible. This he maintains to be
+equally the effect as Mr. Mell the usher plays the flute, as Tom Pinch
+enjoys or exposes his Pecksniff, as the guard blows his bugle while Tom
+rides to London, as Ruth Pinch crosses Fountain Court or makes the
+beefsteak pudding, as Jonas Chuzzlewit commits and returns from the
+murder, and as the storm which is Steerforth's death-knell beats on the
+Yarmouth shore. To the same kind of power he attributes the
+extraordinary clearness with which the commonest objects in all his
+books, the most ordinary interiors, any old house, a parlour, a boat, a
+school, fifty things that in the ordinary tale-teller would pass
+unmarked, are made vividly present and indelible; are brought out with a
+strength of relief, precision, and force, unapproached in any other
+writer of prose fiction; with everything minute yet nothing cold, "with
+all the passion and the patience of the painters of his country." And
+while excitement in the reader is thus maintained to an extent
+incompatible with a natural style or simple narrative, M. Taine yet
+thinks he has discovered, in this very power of awakening a feverish
+sensibility and moving laughter or tears at the commonest things, the
+source of Dickens's astonishing popularity. Ordinary people, he says,
+are so tired of what is always around them, and take in so little of the
+detail that makes up their lives, that when, all of a sudden, there
+comes a man to make these things interesting, and turn them into objects
+of admiration, tenderness, or terror, the effect is enchantment. Without
+leaving their arm-chairs or their firesides, they find themselves
+trembling with emotion, their eyes are filled with tears, their cheeks
+are broad with laughter, and, in the discovery they have thus made that
+they too can suffer, love, and feel, their very existence seems doubled
+to them. It had not occurred to M. Taine that to effect so much might
+seem to leave little not achieved.
+
+So far from it, the critic had satisfied himself that such a power of
+style must be adverse to a just delineation of character. Dickens is not
+calm enough, he says, to penetrate to the bottom of what he is dealing
+with. He takes sides with it as friend or enemy, laughs or cries over
+it, makes it odious or touching, repulsive or attractive, and is too
+vehement and not enough inquisitive to paint a likeness. His imagination
+is at once too vivid and not sufficiently large. Its tenacious quality,
+and the force and concentration with which his thoughts penetrate into
+the details he desires to apprehend, form limits to his knowledge,
+confine him to single traits, and prevent his sounding all the depths of
+a soul. He seizes on one attitude, trick, expression, or grimace; sees
+nothing else; and keeps it always unchanged. Mercy Pecksniff laughs at
+every word, Mark Tapley is nothing but jolly, Mrs. Gamp talks
+incessantly of Mrs. Harris, Mr. Chillip is invariably timid, and Mr.
+Micawber is never tired of emphasizing his phrases or passing with
+ludicrous brusqueness from joy to grief. Each is the incarnation of some
+one vice, virtue, or absurdity; whereof the display is frequent,
+invariable, and exclusive. The language I am using condenses with strict
+accuracy what is said by M. Taine, and has been repeated _ad nauseam_ by
+others, professing admirers as well as open detractors. Mrs. Gamp and
+Mr. Micawber, who belong to the first rank of humorous creation, are
+thus without another word dismissed by the French critic; and he shows
+no consciousness whatever in doing it, of that very fault in himself for
+which Dickens is condemned, of mistaking lively observation for real
+insight.
+
+He has, however much concession in reserve, being satisfied, by his
+observation of England, that it is to the people for whom Dickens wrote
+his deficiencies in art are mainly due. The taste of his nation had
+prohibited him from representing character in a grand style. The English
+require too much morality and religion for genuine art. They made him
+treat love, not as holy and sublime in itself, but as subordinate to
+marriage; forced him to uphold society and the laws, against nature and
+enthusiasm; and compelled him to display, in painting such a seduction
+as in _Copperfield_, not the progress, ardour, and intoxication of
+passion, but only the misery, remorse, and despair. The result of such
+surface religion and morality, combined with the trading spirit, M.
+Taine continues, leads to so many national forms of hypocrisy, and of
+greed as well as worship for money, as to justify this great writer of
+the nation in his frequent choice of those vices for illustration in his
+tales. But his defect of method again comes into play. He does not deal
+with vices in the manner of a physiologist, feeling a sort of love for
+them, and delighting in their finer traits as if they were virtues. He
+gets angry over them. (I do not interrupt M. Taine, but surely, to take
+one instance illustrative of many, Dickens's enjoyment in dealing with
+Pecksniff is as manifest as that he never ceases all the time to make
+him very hateful.) He cannot, like Balzac, leave morality out of
+account, and treat a passion, however loathsome, as that great
+tale-teller did, from the only safe ground of belief, that it is a
+force, and that force of whatever kind is good. It is essential to an
+artist of that superior grade, M. Taine holds, no matter how vile his
+subject, to show its education and temptations, the form of brain or
+habits of mind that have reinforced the natural tendency, to deduce it
+from its cause, to place its circumstances around it, and to develop its
+effects to their extremes. In handling such and such a capital miser,
+hypocrite, debauchee, or what not, he should never trouble himself about
+the evil consequences of the vices. He should be too much of a
+philosopher and artist to remember that he is a respectable citizen. But
+this is what Dickens never forgets, and he renounces all beauties
+requiring so corrupt a soil. M. Taine's conclusion upon the whole
+nevertheless is, that though those triumphs of art which become the
+property of all the earth have not been his, much has yet been achieved
+by him. Out of his unequalled observation, his satire, and his
+sensibility, has proceeded a series of original characters existing
+nowhere but in England, which will exhibit to future generations not the
+record of his own genius only, but that of his country and his times.
+
+Between the judgment thus passed by the distinguished French lecturer,
+and the later comment to be now given from an English critic, certainly
+not in arrest of that judgment, may fitly come a passage from one of
+Dickens's letters saying something of the limitations placed upon the
+artist in England. It may read like a quasi-confession of one of M.
+Taine's charges, though it was not written with reference to his own
+but to one of Scott's later novels. "Similarly" (15th of August 1856) "I
+have always a fine feeling of the honest state into which we have got,
+when some smooth gentleman says to me or to some one else when I am by,
+how odd it is that the hero of an English book is always
+uninteresting--too good--not natural, &c. I am continually hearing this
+of Scott from English people here, who pass their lives with Balzac and
+Sand. But O my smooth friend, what a shining impostor you must think
+yourself and what an ass you must think me, when you suppose that by
+putting a brazen face upon it you can blot out of my knowledge the fact
+that this same unnatural young gentleman (if to be decent is to be
+necessarily unnatural), whom you meet in those other books and in mine,
+_must_ be presented to you in that unnatural aspect by reason of your
+morality, and is not to have, I will not say any of the indecencies you
+like, but not even any of the experiences, trials, perplexities, and
+confusions inseparable from the making or unmaking of all men!"
+
+M. Taine's criticism was written three or four years before Dickens's
+death, and to the same date belong some notices in England which adopted
+more or less the tone of depreciation; conceding the great effects
+achieved by the writer, but disputing the quality and value of his art.
+For it is incident to all such criticism of Dickens to be of necessity
+accompanied by the admission, that no writer has so completely impressed
+himself on the time in which he lived, that he has made his characters a
+part of literature, and that his readers are the world.
+
+But, a little more than a year after his death, a paper was published
+of which the object was to reconcile such seeming inconsistency, to
+expound the inner meanings of "Dickens in relation to Criticism," and to
+show that, though he had a splendid genius and a wonderful imagination,
+yet the objectors were to be excused who called him only a stagy
+sentimentalist and a clever caricaturist. This critical essay appeared
+in the _Fortnightly Review_ for February 1872, with the signature of Mr.
+George Henry Lewes; and the pretentious airs of the performance, with
+its prodigious professions of candour, force upon me the painful task of
+stating what it really is. During Dickens's life, especially when any
+fresh novelist could be found available for strained comparison with
+him, there were plenty of attempts to write him down: but the trick of
+studied depreciation was never carried so far or made so odious as in
+this case, by intolerable assumptions of an indulgent superiority; and
+to repel it in such a form once for all is due to Dickens's memory.
+
+The paper begins by the usual concessions--that he was a writer of vast
+popularity, that he delighted no end of people, that his admirers were
+in all classes and all countries, that he stirred the sympathy of masses
+not easily reached through literature and always to healthy emotion,
+that he impressed a new direction on popular writing, and modified the
+literature of his age in its spirit no less than its form. The very
+splendour of these successes, on the other hand, so deepened the shadow
+of his failures, that to many there was nothing but darkness. Was it
+unnatural? Could greatness be properly ascribed, by the fastidious, to a
+writer whose defects were so glaring, exaggerated, untrue, fantastic,
+and melodramatic? Might they not fairly insist on such defects as
+outweighing all positive qualities, and speak of him with condescending
+patronage or sneering irritation? Why, very often such men, though their
+talk would be seasoned with quotations from, and allusions to, his
+writings, and though they would lay aside their most favourite books to
+bury themselves in his new "number," had been observed by this critic to
+be as niggardly in their praise of him as they were lavish in their
+scorn. He actually heard "_a very distinguished man_," on one occasion,
+express measureless contempt for Dickens, and a few minutes afterwards
+admit that Dickens had "entered into his life." And so the critic betook
+himself to the task of reconciling this immense popularity and this
+critical contempt, which he does after the following manner.
+
+He says that Dickens was so great in "fun" (humour he does not concede
+to him anywhere) that Fielding and Smollett are small in comparison, but
+that this would only have been a passing amusement for the world if he
+had not been "gifted with an imagination of marvellous vividness, and an
+emotional sympathetic nature capable of furnishing that imagination with
+elements of universal power." To people who think that words should
+carry some meaning it might seem, that, if only a man could be "gifted"
+with all this, nothing more need be said. With marvellous imagination,
+and a nature to endow it with elements of universal power, what secrets
+of creative art could possibly be closed to him? But this is reckoning
+without your philosophical critic. The vividness of Dickens's
+imagination M. Taine found to be simply monomaniacal, and his follower
+finds it to be merely hallucinative. Not the less he heaps upon it
+epithet after epithet. He talks of its irradiating splendour; calls it
+glorious as well as imperial and marvellous; and, to make us quite sure
+he is not with these fine phrases puffing-off an inferior article, he
+interposes that such imagination is "common to all great writers."
+Luckily for great writers in general, however, their creations are of
+the old, immortal, commonplace sort; whereas Dickens in his creative
+processes, according to this philosophy of criticism, is tied up hard
+and fast within hallucinative limits.
+
+"He was," we are told, "a seer of visions." Amid silence and darkness,
+we are assured, he heard voices and saw objects; of which the revived
+impressions to him had the vividness of sensations, and the images his
+mind created in explanation of them had the coercive force of
+realities;[261] so that what he brought into existence in this way, no
+matter how fantastic and unreal, was (whatever this may mean)
+universally intelligible. "His types established themselves in the
+public mind like personal experiences. Their falsity was unnoticed in
+the blaze of their illumination. Every humbug seemed a Pecksniff, every
+jovial improvident a Micawber, every stinted serving-wench a
+Marchioness." The critic, indeed, saw through it all, but he gave his
+warnings in vain. "In vain critical reflection showed these figures to
+be merely masks; not characters, but personified characteristics;
+caricatures and distortions of human nature. The vividness of their
+presentation triumphed over reflection; their creator managed to
+communicate to the public his own unhesitating belief." What, however,
+is the public? Mr Lewes goes on to relate. "Give a child a wooden horse,
+with hair for mane and tail, and wafer-spots for colouring, he will
+never be disturbed by the fact that this horse does not move its legs
+but runs on wheels; and this wooden horse, which he can handle and draw,
+is believed in more than a pictured horse by a Wouvermanns or an
+Ansdell(!!) It may be said of Dickens's human figures that they too are
+wooden, and run on wheels; but these are details which scarcely disturb
+the belief of admirers. Just as the wooden horse is brought within the
+range of the child's emotions, and dramatizing tendencies, when he can
+handle and draw it, so Dickens's figures are brought within the range of
+the reader's interests, and receive from these interests a sudden
+illumination, when they are the puppets of a drama every incident of
+which appeals to the sympathies."
+
+_Risum teneatis?_ But the smile is grim that rises to the face of one to
+whom the relations of the writer and his critic, while both writer and
+critic lived, are known; and who sees the drift of now scattering such
+rubbish as this over an established fame. As it fares with the
+imagination that is imperial, so with the drama every incident of which
+appeals to the sympathies. The one being explained by hallucination, and
+the other by the wooden horse, plenty of fine words are to spare by
+which contempt may receive the show of candour. When the characters in a
+play are puppets, and the audiences of the theatre fools or children, no
+wise man forfeits his wisdom by proceeding to admit that the successful
+playwright, "with a fine felicity of instinct," seized upon situations,
+for his wooden figures, having "irresistible hold over the domestic
+affections;" that, through his puppets, he spoke "in the mother-tongue
+of the heart;" that, with his spotted horses and so forth, he "painted
+the life he knew and everyone knew;" that he painted, of course, nothing
+ideal or heroic, and that the world of thought and passion lay beyond
+his horizon; but that, with his artificial performers and his
+feeble-witted audiences, "all the resources of the bourgeois epic were
+in his grasp; the joys and pains of childhood, the petty tyrannies of
+ignoble natures, the genial pleasantries of happy natures, the life of
+the poor, the struggles of the street and back parlour, the insolence of
+office, the sharp social contrasts, east wind and Christmas jollity,
+hunger, misery, and hot punch"--"so that even critical spectators who
+complained that these broadly painted pictures were artistic daubs could
+not wholly resist their effective suggestiveness." Since Trinculo and
+Caliban were under one cloak, there has surely been no such delicate
+monster with two voices. "His forward voice, now, is to speak well of
+his friend; his backward voice is to utter foul speeches and to
+detract." One other of the foul speeches I may not overlook, since it
+contains what is alleged to be a personal revelation of Dickens made to
+the critic himself.
+
+"When one thinks of Micawber always presenting himself in the same
+situation, moved with the same springs and uttering the same sounds,
+always confident of something turning up, always crushed and rebounding,
+always making punch--and his wife always declaring she will never part
+from him, always referring to his talents and her family--when one
+thinks of the 'catchwords' personified as characters, one is reminded of
+the frogs whose brains have been taken out for physiological purposes,
+and whose actions henceforth want the distinctive peculiarity of organic
+action, that of fluctuating spontaneity." Such was that sheer inability
+of Dickens, indeed, to comprehend this complexity of the organism, that
+it quite accounted, in the view of this philosopher, for all his
+unnaturalness, for the whole of his fantastic people, and for the
+strained dialogues of which his books are made up, painfully resembling
+in their incongruity "the absurd and eager expositions which insane
+patients pour into the listener's ear when detailing their wrongs, or
+their schemes. Dickens once declared to me," Mr. Lewes continues, "that
+every word said by his characters was distinctly _heard_ by him; I was
+at first not a little puzzled to account for the fact that he could hear
+language so utterly unlike the language of real feeling, and not be
+aware of its preposterousness; but the surprise vanished when I thought
+of the phenomena of hallucination." Wonderful sagacity! to unravel
+easily such a bewildering "puzzle"! And so to the close. Between the
+uncultivated whom Dickens moved, and the cultivated he failed to move;
+between the power that so worked in delft as to stir the universal
+heart, and the commonness that could not meddle with porcelain or aspire
+to any noble clay; the pitiful see-saw is continued up to the final
+sentence, where, in the impartial critic's eagerness to discredit even
+the value of the emotion awakened in such men as Jeffrey by such
+creations as Little Nell, he reverses all he has been saying about the
+cultivated and uncultivated, and presents to us a cultivated
+philosopher, in his ignorance of the stage, applauding an actor whom
+every uncultivated playgoing apprentice despises as stagey. But the bold
+stroke just exhibited, of bringing forward Dickens himself in the actual
+crisis of one of his fits of hallucination, requires an additional word.
+
+To establish the hallucinative theory, he is said on one occasion to
+have declared to the critic that every word uttered by his characters
+was distinctly _heard_ by him before it was written down. Such an
+averment, not credible for a moment as thus made, indeed simply untrue
+to the extent described, may yet be accepted in the limited and quite
+different sense which a passage in one of Dickens's letters gives to it.
+All writers of genius to whom their art has become as a second nature,
+will be found capable of doing upon occasion what the vulgar may think
+to be "hallucination," but hallucination will never account for. After
+Scott began the _Bride of Lammermoor_ he had one of his terrible
+seizures of cramp, yet during his torment he dictated[262] that fine
+novel; and when he rose from his bed, and the published book was placed
+in his hands, "he did not," James Ballantyne explicitly assured
+Lockhart, "recollect one single incident, character, or conversation it
+contained." When Dickens was under the greatest trial of his life, and
+illness and sorrow were contending for the mastery over him, he thus
+wrote to me. "Of my distress I will say no more than that it has borne a
+terrible, frightful, horrible proportion to the quickness of the gifts
+you remind me of. But may I not be forgiven for thinking it a wonderful
+testimony to my being made for my art, that when, in the midst of this
+trouble and pain, I sit down to my book, some beneficent power shows it
+all to me, and tempts me to be interested, and I don't invent it--really
+do not--_but see it_, and write it down. . . . It is only when it all fades
+away and is gone, that I begin to suspect that its momentary relief has
+cost me something."
+
+Whatever view may be taken of the man who wrote those words, he had the
+claim to be judged by reference to the highest models in the art which
+he studied. In the literature of his time, from 1836 to 1870, he held
+the most conspicuous place, and his claim to the most popular one in
+the literature of fiction was by common consent admitted. He obtained
+this rank by the sheer force of his genius, unhelped in any way, and he
+held it without dispute. As he began he closed. After he had written for
+only four months, and after he had written incessantly for four and
+thirty years, he was of all living writers the most widely read. It is
+of course quite possible that such popularity might imply rather
+littleness in his contemporaries than greatness in him: but his books
+are the test to judge by. Each thus far, as it appeared, has had notice
+in these pages for its illustration of his life, or of his method of
+work, or of the variety and versatility in the manifestations of his
+power. But his latest books remain still for notice, and will properly
+suggest what is farther to be said of his general place in literature.
+
+His leading quality was Humour. It has no mention in either of the
+criticisms cited, but it was his highest faculty; and it accounts for
+his magnificent successes, as well as for his not infrequent failures,
+in characteristic delineation. He was conscious of this himself. Five
+years before he died, a great and generous brother artist, Lord Lytton,
+amid much ungrudging praise of a work he was then publishing, asked him
+to consider, as to one part of it, if the modesties of art were not a
+little overpassed. "I cannot tell you," he replied, "how highly I prize
+your letter, or with what pride and pleasure it inspires me. Nor do I
+for a moment question its criticism (if objection so generous and easy
+may be called by that hard name) otherwise than on this ground--that I
+work slowly and with great care, and never give way to my invention
+recklessly, but constantly restrain it; and that I think it is my
+infirmity to fancy or perceive relations in things which are not
+apparent generally. Also, I have such an inexpressible enjoyment of what
+I see in a droll light, that I dare say I pet it as if it were a spoilt
+child. This is all I have to offer in arrest of judgment." To perceive
+relations in things which are not apparent generally, is one of those
+exquisite properties of humour by which are discovered the affinities
+between the high and the low, the attractive and the repulsive, the
+rarest things and things of every day, which bring us all upon the level
+of a common humanity. It is this which gives humour an immortal touch
+that does not belong of necessity to pictures, even the most exquisite,
+of mere character or manners; the property which in its highest aspects
+Carlyle so subtly described as a sort of inverse sublimity, exalting
+into our affections what is below us as the other draws down into our
+affections what is above us. But it has a danger which Dickens also
+hints at, and into which he often fell. All humour has in it, is indeed
+identical with, what ordinary people are apt to call exaggeration; but
+there is an excess beyond the allowable even here, and to "pet" or
+magnify out of proper bounds its sense of what is droll, is to put the
+merely grotesque in its place. What might have been overlooked in a
+writer with no uncommon powers of invention, was thrown into
+overpowering prominence by Dickens's wealth of fancy; and a splendid
+excess of his genius came to be objected to as its integral and
+essential quality.
+
+It cannot be said to have had any place in his earlier books. His
+powers were not at their highest and the humour was less fine and
+subtle, but there was no such objection to be taken. No misgiving
+interrupted the enjoyment of the wonderful freshness of animal spirits
+in _Pickwick_; but beneath its fun, laughter, and light-heartedness were
+indications of power of the first rank in the delineation of character.
+Some caricature was in the plan; but as the circle of people widened
+beyond the cockney club, and the delightful oddity of Mr. Pickwick took
+more of an independent existence, a different method revealed itself,
+nothing appeared beyond the exaggerations permissible to humorous
+comedy, and the art was seen which can combine traits vividly true to
+particular men or women with propensities common to all mankind. This
+has its highest expression in Fielding: but even the first of Dickens's
+books showed the same kind of mastery; and, by the side of its life-like
+middle-class people universally familiar, there was one figure before
+seen by none but at once knowable by all, delightful for the surprise it
+gave by its singularity and the pleasure it gave by its truth; and,
+though short of the highest in this form of art, taking rank with the
+class in which live everlastingly the dozen unique inventions that have
+immortalized the English novel. The groups in _Oliver Twist_, Fagin and
+his pupils, Sikes and Nancy, Mr. Bumble and his parish-boy, belong to
+the same period; when Dickens also began those pathetic delineations
+that opened to the neglected, the poor, and the fallen, a world of
+compassion and tenderness. Yet I think it was not until the third book,
+_Nickleby_, that he began to have his place as a writer conceded to
+him; and that he ceased to be regarded as a mere phenomenon or marvel
+of fortune, who had achieved success by any other means than that of
+deserving it, and who challenged no criticism better worth the name than
+such as he has received from the Fortnightly reviewer. It is to be added
+to what before was said of _Nickleby_, that it established beyond
+dispute his mastery of dialogue, or that power of making characters real
+existences, not by describing them but by letting them describe
+themselves, which belongs only to story-tellers of the first rank.
+Dickens never excelled the easy handling of the subordinate groups in
+this novel, and he never repeated its mistakes in the direction of
+aristocratic or merely polite and dissipated life. It displayed more
+than before of his humour on the tragic side; and, in close connection
+with its affecting scenes of starved and deserted childhood, were placed
+those contrasts of miser and spendthrift, of greed and generosity, of
+hypocrisy and simple-heartedness, which he handled in later books with
+greater power and fullness, but of which the first formal expression was
+here. It was his first general picture, so to speak, of the character
+and manners of his time, which it was the design more or less of all his
+books to exhibit; and it suffers by comparison with his later
+productions, because the humour is not to the same degree enriched by
+imagination; but it is free from the not infrequent excess into which
+that supreme gift also tempted its possessor. None of the tales is more
+attractive throughout, and on the whole it was a step in advance even of
+the stride previously taken. Nor was the gain lost in the succeeding
+story of the _Old Curiosity Shop_. The humorous traits of Mrs. Nickleby
+could hardly be surpassed: but, in Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness,
+there was a subtlety and lightness of touch that led to finer issues;
+and around Little Nell[263] and her fortunes, surpassingly touching and
+beautiful, let criticism object what it will, were gathered some small
+characters that had a deeper intention and more imaginative insight,
+than anything yet done. Strokes of this kind were also observable in the
+hunted life of the murderer in _Barnaby Rudge_; and his next book,
+_Chuzzlewit_, was, as it still remains, one of his greatest
+achievements. Even so brief a retrospect of the six opening years of
+Dickens's literary labour will help to a clearer judgment of the work of
+the twenty-eight more years that remained to him.
+
+To the special observations already made on the series of stories which
+followed the return from America, _Chuzzlewit_, _Dombey_, _Copperfield_,
+and _Bleak House_, in which attention has been directed to the higher
+purpose and more imaginative treatment that distinguished them,[264] a
+general remark is to be added. Though the range of character they
+traverse is not wide, it is surrounded by a fertility of invention and
+illustration without example in any previous novelist; and it is
+represented in these books, so to speak, by a number and variety of
+existences sufficiently real to have taken places as among the actual
+people of the world. Could half as many known and universally
+recognisable men and women be selected out of one story, by any other
+prose writer of the first rank, as at once rise to the mind from one of
+the masterpieces of Dickens? So difficult of dispute is this, that as
+much perhaps will be admitted; but then it will be added, if the reply
+is by a critic of the school burlesqued by Mr. Lewes, that after all
+they are not individual or special men and women so much as general
+impersonations of men and women, abstract types made up of telling
+catchwords or surface traits, though with such accumulation upon them of
+a wonderful wealth of humorous illustration, itself filled with minute
+and accurate knowledge of life, that the real nakedness of the land of
+character is hidden. Well, what can be rejoined to this, but that the
+poverty or richness of any territory worth survey will for the most part
+lie in the kind of observation brought to it. There was no finer
+observer than Johnson of the manners of his time, and he protested of
+their greatest delineator that he knew only the shell of life. Another
+of his remarks, after a fashion followed by the criticizers of Dickens,
+places Fielding below one of his famous contemporaries; but who will not
+now be eager to reverse such a comparison, as that Fielding tells you
+correctly enough what o'clock it is by looking at the face of the dial,
+but that Richardson shows you how the watch is made? There never was a
+subtler or a more sagacious observer than Fielding, or who better
+deserved what is generously said of him by Smollett, that he painted the
+characters and ridiculed the follies of life with equal strength,
+humour, and propriety. But might it not be said of him, as of Dickens,
+that his range of character was limited; and that his method of
+proceeding from a central idea in all his leading people, exposed him
+equally to the charge of now and then putting human nature itself in
+place of the individual who should only be a small section of it? This
+is in fact but another shape of what I have expressed on a former page,
+that what a character, drawn by a master, will roughly present upon its
+surface, is frequently such as also to satisfy its more subtle
+requirements; and that when only the salient points or sharper
+prominences are thus displayed, the great novelist is using his
+undoubted privilege of showing the large degree to which human
+intercourse is carried on, not by men's habits or ways at their
+commonest, but by the touching of their extremes. A definition of
+Fielding's genius has been made with some accuracy in the saying, that
+he shows common propensities in connection with the identical
+unvarnished adjuncts which are peculiar to the individual, nor could a
+more exquisite felicity of handling than this be any man's aim or
+desire; but it would be just as easy, by employment of the critical
+rules applied to Dickens, to transform it into matter of censure.
+Partridge, Adams, Trulliber, Squire Western, and the rest, present
+themselves often enough under the same aspects, and use with sufficient
+uniformity the same catchwords, to be brought within the charge of
+mannerism; and though M. Taine cannot fairly say of Fielding as of
+Dickens, that he suffers from too much morality, he brings against him
+precisely the charge so strongly put against the later novelist of
+"looking upon the passions not as simple forces but as objects of
+approbation or blame." We must keep in mind all this to understand the
+worth of the starved fancy, that can find in such a delineation as that
+of Micawber only the man described by Mr. Lewes as always in the same
+situation, moved with the same springs and uttering the same sounds,
+always confident of something turning up, always crushed and rebounding,
+always making punch, and his wife always declaring she will never part
+from him. It is not thus that such creations are to be viewed; but by
+the light which enables us to see why the country squires, village
+schoolmasters, and hedge parsons of Fielding became immortal. The later
+ones will live, as the earlier do, by the subtle quality of genius that
+makes their doings and sayings part of those general incentives which
+pervade mankind. Who has not had occasion, however priding himself on
+his unlikeness to Micawber, to think of Micawber as he reviewed his own
+experiences? Who has not himself waited, like Micawber, for something to
+turn up? Who has not at times discovered, in one or other acquaintance
+or friend, some one or other of that cluster of sagacious hints and
+fragments of human life and conduct which the kindly fancy of Dickens
+embodied in this delightful form? If the irrepressible New Zealander
+ever comes over to achieve his long promised sketch of St. Paul's, who
+can doubt that it will be no other than our undying Micawber, who had
+taken to colonisation the last time we saw him, and who will thus again
+have turned up? There are not many conditions of life or society to
+which his and his wife's experiences are not applicable; and when, the
+year after the immortal couple made their first appearance on earth,
+Protection was in one of its then frequent difficulties, declaring it
+could not live without something widely different from existing
+circumstances shortly turning up, and imploring its friends to throw
+down the gauntlet and boldly challenge society to turn up a majority and
+rescue it from its embarrassments, a distinguished wit seized upon the
+likeness to Micawber, showed how closely it was borne out by the jollity
+and gin-punch of the banquets at which the bewailings were heard, and
+asked whether Dickens had stolen from the farmer's friends or the
+farmer's friends had stolen from Dickens. "Corn, said Mr. Micawber, may
+be gentlemanly, but it is not remunerative. . . . I ask myself this
+question: if corn is not to be relied on, what is? We must live. . . ."
+Loud as the general laughter was, I think the laughter of Dickens
+himself was loudest, at this discovery of so exact and unexpected a
+likeness.[265]
+
+A readiness in all forms thus to enjoy his own pleasantry was indeed
+always observable (it is common to great humourists, nor would it be
+easier to carry it farther than Sterne did), and his own confession on
+the point may receive additional illustration before proceeding to the
+later books. He accounted by it, as we have seen, for occasional even
+grotesque extravagances. In another of his letters there is this
+passage: "I can report that I have finished the job I set myself, and
+that it has in it something--to me at all events--so extraordinarily
+droll, that though I have been reading it some hundred times in the
+course of the working, I have never been able to look at it with the
+least composure, but have always roared in the most unblushing manner. I
+leave you to find out what it was." It was the encounter of the major
+and the tax-collector in the second Mrs. Lirriper. Writing previously of
+the papers in _Household Words_ called The Lazy Tour of Two Idle
+Apprentices, after saying that he and Mr. Wilkie Collins had written
+together a story in the second part, "in which I think you would find it
+very difficult to say where I leave off and he comes in," he had said of
+the preceding descriptions: "Some of my own tickle me very much; but
+that may be in great part because I know the originals, and delight in
+their fantastic fidelity." "I have been at work with such a will" he
+writes later of a piece of humour for the holidays, "that I have done
+the opening and conclusion of the Christmas number. They are done in the
+character of a waiter, and I think are exceedingly droll. The thread on
+which the stories are to hang, is spun by this waiter, and is,
+purposely, very slight; but has, I fancy, a ridiculously comical and
+unexpected end. The waiter's account of himself includes (I hope)
+everything you know about waiters, presented humorously." In this last
+we have a hint of the "fantastic fidelity" with which, when a fancy
+"tickled" him, he would bring out what Corporal Nym calls the humour of
+it under so astonishing a variety of conceivable and inconceivable
+aspects of subtle exaggeration, that nothing was left to the subject but
+that special individual illustration of it. In this, however, humour was
+not his servant but his master; because it reproduced too readily, and
+carried too far, the grotesque imaginings to which great humourists are
+prone; which lie indeed deep in their nature; and from which they derive
+their genial sympathy with eccentric characters that enables them to
+find motives for what to other men is hopelessly obscure, to exalt into
+types of humanity what the world turns impatiently aside at, and to
+enshrine in a form for eternal homage and love such whimsical absurdity
+as Captain Toby Shandy's. But Dickens was too conscious of these
+excesses from time to time, not zealously to endeavour to keep the
+leading characters in his more important stories under some strictness
+of discipline. To confine exaggeration within legitimate limits was an
+art he laboriously studied; and, in whatever proportions of failure or
+success, during the vicissitudes of both that attended his later years,
+he continued to endeavour to practise it. In regard to mere description,
+it is true, he let himself loose more frequently, and would sometimes
+defend it even on the ground of art; nor would it be fair to omit his
+reply, on one occasion, to some such remonstrance as M. Taine has
+embodied in his adverse criticism, against the too great imaginative
+wealth thrown by him into mere narrative.[266] "It does not seem to me
+to be enough to say of any description that it is the exact truth. The
+exact truth must be there; but the merit or art in the narrator, is the
+manner of stating the truth. As to which thing in literature, it always
+seems to me that there is a world to be done. And in these times, when
+the tendency is to be frightfully literal and catalogue-like--to make
+the thing, in short, a sort of sum in reduction that any miserable
+creature can do in that way--I have an idea (really founded on the love
+of what I profess), that the very holding of popular literature through
+a kind of popular dark age, may depend on such fanciful treatment."
+
+
+THE TALE OF TWO CITIES.
+
+Dickens's next story to _Little Dorrit_ was the _Tale of Two Cities_, of
+which the first notion occurred to him while acting with his friends and
+his children in the summer of 1857 in Mr. Wilkie Collins's drama of _The
+Frozen Deep_. But it was only a vague fancy, and the sadness and trouble
+of the winter of that year were not favourable to it. Towards the close
+(27th) of January 1858, talking of improvements at Gadshill in which he
+took little interest, it was again in his thoughts. "Growing
+inclinations of a fitful and undefined sort are upon me sometimes to
+fall to work on a new book. Then I think I had better not worry my
+worried mind yet awhile. Then I think it would be of no use if I did,
+for I couldn't settle to one occupation.--And that's all!" "If I can
+discipline my thoughts," he wrote three days later, "into the channel of
+a story, I have made up my mind to get to work on one: always supposing
+that I find myself, on the trial, able to do well. Nothing whatever will
+do me the least 'good' in the way of shaking the one strong possession
+of change impending over us that every day makes stronger; but if I
+could work on with some approach to steadiness, through the summer, the
+anxious toil of a new book would have its neck well broken before
+beginning to publish, next October or November. Sometimes, I think I may
+continue to work; sometimes, I think not. What do you say to the title,
+ONE OF THESE DAYS?" That title held its ground very briefly. "What do
+you think," he wrote after six weeks, "of _this_ name for my
+story--BURIED ALIVE? Does it seem too grim? Or, THE THREAD OF GOLD? Or,
+THE DOCTOR OF BEAUVAIS?" But not until twelve months later did he fairly
+buckle himself to the task he had contemplated so long. _All the Year
+Round_ had taken the place of _Household Words_ in the interval; and the
+tale was then started to give strength to the new weekly periodical for
+whose pages it was designed.
+
+"This is merely to certify," he wrote on the 11th of March 1859, "that I
+have got exactly the name for the story that is wanted; exactly what
+will fit the opening to a T. A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Also, that I have
+struck out a rather original and bold idea. That is, at the end of each
+month to publish the monthly part in the green cover, with the two
+illustrations, at the old shilling. This will give _All the Year Round_
+always the interest and precedence of a fresh weekly portion during the
+month; and will give me my old standing with my old public, and the
+advantage (very necessary in this story) of having numbers of people who
+read it in no portions smaller than a monthly part. . . . My American
+ambassador pays a thousand pounds for the first year, for the privilege
+of republishing in America one day after we publish here. Not bad?" . . .
+He had to struggle at the opening through a sharp attack of illness, and
+on the 9th of July progress was thus reported. "I have been getting on
+in health very slowly and through irksome botheration enough. But I
+think I am round the corner. This cause--and the heat--has tended to my
+doing no more than hold my ground, my old month's advance, with the
+_Tale of Two Cities_. The small portions thereof, drive me frantic; but
+I think the tale must have taken a strong hold. The run upon our
+monthly parts is surprising, and last month we sold 35,000 back numbers.
+A note I have had from Carlyle about it has given me especial pleasure."
+A letter of the following month expresses the intention he had when he
+began the story, and in what respect it differs as to method from all
+his other books. Sending in proof four numbers ahead of the current
+publication, he adds: "I hope you will like them. Nothing but the
+interest of the subject, and the pleasure of striving with the
+difficulty of the form of treatment,--nothing in the way of mere money,
+I mean,--could else repay the time and trouble of the incessant
+condensation. But I set myself the little task of making a _picturesque
+story_, rising in every chapter, with characters true to nature, but
+whom the story should express more than they should express themselves
+by dialogue. I mean in other words, that I fancied a story of incident
+might be written (in place of the odious stuff that is written under
+that pretence), pounding the characters in its own mortar, and beating
+their interest out of them. If you could have read the story all at
+once, I hope you wouldn't have stopped halfway."[267] Another of his
+letters supplies the last illustration I need to give of the design and
+meanings in regard to this tale expressed by himself. It was a reply to
+some objections of which the principal were, a doubt if the feudal
+cruelties came sufficiently within the date of the action to justify his
+use of them, and some question as to the manner of disposing of the
+chief revolutionary agent in the plot. "I had of course full knowledge
+of the formal surrender of the feudal privileges, but these had been
+bitterly felt quite as near to the time of the Revolution as the
+Doctor's narrative, which you will remember dates long before the
+Terror. With the slang of the new philosophy on the one side, it was
+surely not unreasonable or unallowable, on the other, to suppose a
+nobleman wedded to the old cruel ideas, and representing the time going
+out as his nephew represents the time coming in. If there be anything
+certain on earth, I take it that the condition of the French peasant
+generally at that day was intolerable. No later enquiries or provings by
+figures will hold water against the tremendous testimony of men living
+at the time. There is a curious book printed at Amsterdam, written to
+make out no case whatever, and tiresome enough in its literal
+dictionary-like minuteness; scattered up and down the pages of which is
+full authority for my marquis. This is Mercier's _Tableau de Paris_.
+Rousseau is the authority for the peasant's shutting up his house when
+he had a bit of meat. The tax-tables are the authority for the wretched
+creature's impoverishment. . . . I am not clear, and I never have been
+clear, respecting the canon of fiction which forbids the interposition
+of accident in such a case as Madame Defarge's death. Where the accident
+is inseparable from the passion and action of the character; where it is
+strictly consistent with the entire design, and arises out of some
+culminating proceeding on the part of the individual which the whole
+story has led up to; it seems to me to become, as it were, an act of
+divine justice. And when I use Miss Pross (though this is quite another
+question) to bring about such a catastrophe, I have the positive
+intention of making that half-comic intervention a part of the desperate
+woman's failure; and of opposing that mean death, instead of a desperate
+one in the streets which she wouldn't have minded, to the dignity of
+Carton's. Wrong or right, this was all design, and seemed to me to be in
+the fitness of things."
+
+These are interesting intimations of the care with which Dickens worked;
+and there is no instance in his novels, excepting this, of a deliberate
+and planned departure from the method of treatment which had been
+pre-eminently the source of his popularity as a novelist. To rely less
+upon character than upon incident, and to resolve that his actors should
+be expressed by the story more than they should express themselves by
+dialogue, was for him a hazardous, and can hardly be called an entirely
+successful, experiment. With singular dramatic vivacity, much
+constructive art, and with descriptive passages of a high order
+everywhere (the dawn of the terrible outbreak in the journey of the
+marquis from Paris to his country seat, and the London crowd at the
+funeral of the spy, may be instanced for their power), there was
+probably never a book by a great humourist, and an artist so prolific in
+the conception of character, with so little humour and so few
+rememberable figures. Its merits lie elsewhere. Though there are
+excellent traits and touches all through the revolutionary scenes, the
+only full-length that stands out prominently is the picture of the
+wasted life saved at last by heroic sacrifice. Dickens speaks of his
+design to make impressive the dignity of Carton's death, and in this he
+succeeded perhaps even beyond his expectation. Carton suffers himself to
+be mistaken for another, and gives his life that the girl he loves may
+be happy with that other; the secret being known only to a poor little
+girl in the tumbril that takes them to the scaffold, who at the moment
+has discovered it, and whom it strengthens also to die. The incident is
+beautifully told; and it is at least only fair to set against verdicts
+not very favourable as to this effort of his invention, what was said of
+the particular character and scene, and of the book generally, by an
+American critic whose literary studies had most familiarized him with
+the rarest forms of imaginative writing.[268] "Its pourtrayal of the
+noble-natured castaway makes it almost a peerless book in modern
+literature, and gives it a place among the highest examples of literary
+art. . . . The conception of this character shows in its author an ideal of
+magnanimity and of charity unsurpassed. There is not a grander, lovelier
+figure than the self-wrecked, self-devoted Sydney Carton, in literature
+or history; and the story itself is so noble in its spirit, so grand and
+graphic in its style, and filled with a pathos so profound and simple,
+that it deserves and will surely take a place among the great serious
+works of imagination." I should myself prefer to say that its
+distinctive merit is less in any of its conceptions of character, even
+Carton's, than as a specimen of Dickens's power in imaginative
+story-telling. There is no piece of fiction known to me, in which the
+domestic life of a few simple private people is in such a manner knitted
+and interwoven with the outbreak of a terrible public event, that the
+one seems but part of the other. When made conscious of the first sultry
+drops of a thunderstorm that fall upon a little group sitting in an
+obscure English lodging, we are witness to the actual beginning of a
+tempest which is preparing to sweep away everything in France. And, to
+the end, the book in this respect is really remarkable.
+
+
+GREAT EXPECTATIONS.
+
+The _Tale of Two Cities_ was published in 1859; the series of papers
+collected as the _Uncommercial Traveller_ were occupying Dickens in
+1860; and it was while engaged in these, and throwing off in the course
+of them capital "samples" of fun and enjoyment, he thus replied to a
+suggestion that he should let himself loose upon some single humorous
+conception, in the vein of his youthful achievements in that way. "For a
+little piece I have been writing--or am writing; for I hope to finish it
+to-day--such a very fine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon me,
+that I begin to doubt whether I had not better cancel the little paper,
+and reserve the notion for a new book. You shall judge as soon as I get
+it printed. But it so opens out before _me_ that I can see the whole of
+a serial revolving on it, in a most singular and comic manner." This was
+the germ of Pip and Magwitch, which at first he intended to make the
+groundwork of a tale in the old twenty-number form, but for reasons
+perhaps fortunate brought afterwards within the limits of a less
+elaborate novel. "Last week," he wrote on the 4th of October 1860, "I
+got to work on the new story. I had previously very carefully considered
+the state and prospects of _All the Year Round_, and, the more I
+considered them, the less hope I saw of being able to get back, _now_,
+to the profit of a separate publication in the old 20 numbers." (A tale,
+which at the time was appearing in his serial, had disappointed
+expectation.) "However I worked on, knowing that what I was doing would
+run into another groove; and I called a council of war at the office on
+Tuesday. It was perfectly clear that the one thing to be done was, for
+me to strike in. I have therefore decided to begin the story as of the
+length of the _Tale of Two Cities_ on the first of December--begin
+publishing, that is. I must make the most I can out of the book. You
+shall have the first two or three weekly parts to-morrow. The name is
+GREAT EXPECTATIONS. I think a good name?" Two days later he wrote: "The
+sacrifice of _Great Expectations_ is really and truly made for myself.
+The property of _All the Year Round_ is far too valuable, in every way,
+to be much endangered. Our fall is not large, but we have a considerable
+advance in hand of the story we are now publishing, and there is no
+vitality in it, and no chance whatever of stopping the fall; which on
+the contrary would be certain to increase. Now, if I went into a
+twenty-number serial, I should cut off my power of doing anything serial
+here for two good years--and that would be a most perilous thing. On the
+other hand, by dashing in now, I come in when most wanted; and if Reade
+and Wilkie follow me, our course will be shaped out handsomely and
+hopefully for between two and three years. A thousand pounds are to be
+paid for early proofs of the story to America." A few more days brought
+the first instalment of the tale, and explanatory mention of it. "The
+book will be written in the first person throughout, and during these
+first three weekly numbers you will find the hero to be a boy-child,
+like David. Then he will be an apprentice. You will not have to complain
+of the want of humour as in the _Tale of Two Cities_. I have made the
+opening, I hope, in its general effect exceedingly droll. I have put a
+child and a good-natured foolish man, in relations that seem to me very
+funny. Of course I have got in the pivot on which the story will turn
+too--and which indeed, as you remember, was the grotesque tragi-comic
+conception that first encouraged me. To be quite sure I had fallen into
+no unconscious repetitions, I read _David Copperfield_ again the other
+day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe."
+
+It may be doubted if Dickens could better have established his right to
+the front rank among novelists claimed for him, than by the ease and
+mastery with which, in these two books of _Copperfield_ and _Great
+Expectations_, he kept perfectly distinct the two stories of a boy's
+childhood, both told in the form of autobiography. A subtle penetration
+into character marks the unlikeness in the likeness; there is enough at
+once of resemblance and of difference in the position and surroundings
+of each to account for the divergences of character that arise; both
+children are good-hearted, and both have the advantage of association
+with models of tender simplicity and oddity, perfect in their truth and
+quite distinct from each other; but a sudden tumble into distress
+steadies Peggotty's little friend, and as unexpected a stroke of good
+fortune turns the head of the small protege of Joe Gargery. What a deal
+of spoiling nevertheless, a nature that is really good at the bottom of
+it will stand without permanent damage, is nicely shown in Pip; and the
+way he reconciles his determination to act very shabbily to his early
+friends, with a conceited notion that he is setting them a moral
+example, is part of the shading of a character drawn with extraordinary
+skill. His greatest trial comes out of his good luck; and the
+foundations of both are laid at the opening of the tale, in a churchyard
+down by the Thames, as it winds past desolate marshes twenty miles to
+the sea, of which a masterly picture in half a dozen lines will give
+only average example of the descriptive writing that is everywhere one
+of the charms of the book. It is strange, as I transcribe the words,
+with what wonderful vividness they bring back the very spot on which we
+stood when he said he meant to make it the scene of the opening of his
+story--Cooling Castle ruins and the desolate Church, lying out among the
+marshes seven miles from Gadshill! "My first most vivid and broad
+impression . . . on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening . . . was
+. . . that this bleak place, overgrown with nettles, was the churchyard,
+and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected
+with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it,
+was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and
+that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the
+sea. . . . On the edge of the river . . . only two black things in all
+the prospect seemed to be standing upright . . . one, the beacon by
+which the sailors steered, like an unhooped cask upon a pole, an ugly
+thing when you were near it; the other, a gibbet with some chains
+hanging to it which had once held a pirate." Here Magwitch, an escaped
+convict from Chatham, terrifies the child Pip into stealing for him food
+and a file; and though recaptured and transported, he carries with him
+to Australia such a grateful heart for the small creature's service,
+that on making a fortune there he resolves to make his little friend a
+gentleman. This requires circumspection; and is so done, through the
+Old-Bailey attorney who has defended Magwitch at his trial (a character
+of surprising novelty and truth), that Pip imagines his present gifts
+and "great expectations" to have come from the supposed rich lady of
+the story (whose eccentricities are the unattractive part of it, and
+have yet a weird character that somehow fits in with the kind of wrong
+she has suffered). When therefore the closing scenes bring back Magwitch
+himself, who risks his life to gratify his longing to see the gentleman
+he has made, it is an unspeakable horror to the youth to discover his
+benefactor in the convicted felon. If any one doubts Dickens's power of
+so drawing a character as to get to the heart of it, seeing beyond
+surface peculiarities into the moving springs of the human being
+himself, let him narrowly examine those scenes. There is not a grain of
+substitution of mere sentiment, or circumstance, for the inner and
+absolute reality of the position in which these two creatures find
+themselves. Pip's loathing of what had built up his fortune, and his
+horror of the uncouth architect, are apparent in even his most generous
+efforts to protect him from exposure and sentence. Magwitch's convict
+habits strangely blend themselves with his wild pride in, and love for,
+the youth whom his money has turned into a gentleman. He has a craving
+for his good opinion; dreads to offend him by his "heavy grubbing," or
+by the oaths he lets fall now and then; and pathetically hopes his Pip,
+his dear boy, won't think him "low": but, upon a chum of Pip's appearing
+unexpectedly while they are together, he pulls out a jack-knife by way
+of hint he can defend himself, and produces afterwards a greasy little
+clasped black Testament on which the startled new-comer, being found to
+have no hostile intention, is sworn to secrecy. At the opening of the
+story there had been an exciting scene of the wretched man's chase and
+recapture among the marshes, and this has its parallel at the close in
+his chase and recapture on the river while poor Pip is helping to get
+him off. To make himself sure of the actual course of a boat in such
+circumstances, and what possible incidents the adventure might have,
+Dickens hired a steamer for the day from Blackwall to Southend. Eight or
+nine friends and three or four members of his family were on board, and
+he seemed to have no care, the whole of that summer day (22nd of May
+1861), except to enjoy their enjoyment and entertain them with his own
+in shape of a thousand whims and fancies; but his sleepless observation
+was at work all the time, and nothing had escaped his keen vision on
+either side of the river. The fifteenth chapter of the third volume is a
+masterpiece.
+
+The characters generally afford the same evidence as those two that
+Dickens's humour, not less than his creative power, was at its best in
+this book. The Old-Bailey attorney Jaggers, and his clerk Wemmick (both
+excellent, and the last one of the oddities that live in everybody's
+liking for the goodheartedness of its humorous surprises), are as good
+as his earliest efforts in that line; the Pumblechooks and Wopsles are
+perfect as bits of _Nickleby_ fresh from the mint; and the scene in
+which Pip, and Pip's chum Herbert, make up their accounts and schedule
+their debts and obligations, is original and delightful as Micawber
+himself. It is the art of living upon nothing and making the best of it,
+in the most pleasing form. Herbert's intentions to trade east and west,
+and get himself into business transactions of a magnificent extent and
+variety, are as perfectly warranted to us, in his way of putting them,
+by merely "being in a counting-house and looking about you," as Pip's
+means of paying his debts are lightened and made easy by his method of
+simply adding them up with a margin. "The time comes," says Herbert,
+"when you see your opening. And you go in, and you swoop upon it, and
+you make your capital, and then there you are! When you have once made
+your capital you have nothing to do but employ it." In like manner Pip
+tells us "Suppose your debts to be one hundred and sixty four pounds
+four and two-pence, I would say, leave a margin and put them down at two
+hundred; or suppose them to be four times as much, leave a margin and
+put them down at seven hundred." He is sufficiently candid to add, that,
+while he has the highest opinion of the wisdom and prudence of the
+margin, its dangers are that in the sense of freedom and solvency it
+imparts there is a tendency to run into new debt. But the satire that
+thus enforces the old warning against living upon vague hopes, and
+paying ancient debts by contracting new ones, never presented itself in
+more amusing or kindly shape. A word should be added of the father of
+the girl that Herbert marries, Bill Barley, ex-ship's purser, a gouty,
+bed-ridden, drunken old rascal, who lies on his back in an upper floor
+on Mill Pond Bank by Chinks's Basin, where he keeps, weighs, and serves
+out the family stores or provisions, according to old professional
+practice, with one eye at a telescope which is fitted on his bed for the
+convenience of sweeping the river. This is one of those sketches, slight
+in itself but made rich with a wealth of comic observation, in which
+Dickens's humour took especial delight; and to all this part of the
+story, there is a quaint riverside flavour that gives it amusing reality
+and relish.
+
+Sending the chapters that contain it, which open the third division of
+the tale, he wrote thus: "It is a pity that the third portion cannot be
+read all at once, because its purpose would be much more apparent; and
+the pity is the greater, because the general turn and tone of the
+working out and winding up, will be away from all such things as they
+conventionally go. But what must be, must be. As to the planning out
+from week to week, nobody can imagine what the difficulty is, without
+trying. But, as in all such cases, when it is overcome the pleasure is
+proportionate. Two months more will see me through it, I trust. All the
+iron is in the fire, and I have 'only' to beat it out." One other letter
+throws light upon an objection taken not unfairly to the too great speed
+with which the heroine, after being married, reclaimed, and widowed, is
+in a page or two again made love to, and remarried by the hero. This
+summary proceeding was not originally intended. But, over and above its
+popular acceptance, the book had interested some whose opinions Dickens
+specially valued (Carlyle among them, I remember);[269] and upon Bulwer
+Lytton objecting to a close that should leave Pip a solitary man,
+Dickens substituted what now stands. "You will be surprised" he wrote
+"to hear that I have changed the end of _Great Expectations_ from and
+after Pip's return to Joe's, and finding his little likeness there.
+Bulwer, who has been, as I think you know, extraordinarily taken by the
+book, so strongly urged it upon me, after reading the proofs, and
+supported his view with such good reasons, that I resolved to make the
+change. You shall have it when you come back to town. I have put in as
+pretty a little piece of writing as I could, and I have no doubt the
+story will be more acceptable through the alteration." This turned out
+to be the case; but the first ending nevertheless seems to be more
+consistent with the drift, as well as natural working out, of the tale,
+and for this reason it is preserved in a note.[270]
+
+
+
+CHRISTMAS SKETCHES.
+
+Between that fine novel, which was issued in three volumes in the autumn
+of 1861, and the completion of his next serial story, were interposed
+three sketches in his happiest vein at which everyone laughed and cried
+in the Christmas times of 1862, '3, and '4. Of the waiter in _Somebody's
+Luggage_ Dickens has himself spoken; and if any theme is well treated,
+when, from the point of view taken, nothing more is left to say about
+it, that bit of fun is perfect. Call it exaggeration, grotesqueness, or
+by what hard name you will, laughter will always intercept any graver
+criticism. Writing from Paris of what he was himself responsible for in
+the articles left by Somebody with his wonderful Waiter, he said that in
+one of them he had made the story a camera obscura of certain French
+places and styles of people; having founded it on something he had
+noticed in a French soldier. This was the tale of Little Bebelle, which
+had a small French corporal for its hero, and became highly popular. But
+the triumph of the Christmas achievements in these days was Mrs.
+Lirriper. She took her place at once among people known to everybody;
+and all the world talked of Major Jemmy Jackman, and his friend the poor
+elderly lodging-house keeper of the Strand, with her miserable cares
+and rivalries and worries, as if they had both been as long in London
+and as well known as Norfolk-street itself. A dozen volumes could not
+have told more than those dozen pages did. The _Legacy_ followed the
+_Lodgings_ in 1864, and there was no falling off in the fun and
+laughter.
+
+
+OUR MUTUAL FRIEND.
+
+The publication of _Our Mutual Friend_, in the form of the earliest
+stories, extended from May 1864 to November 1865. Four years earlier he
+had chosen this title as a good one, and he held to it through much
+objection. Between that time and his actual commencement there is
+mention, in his letters, of the three leading notions on which he
+founded the story. In his water-side wanderings during his last book,
+the many handbills he saw posted up, with dreary description of persons
+drowned in the river, suggested the 'long shore men and their ghastly
+calling whom he sketched in Hexam and Riderhood, "I think," he had
+written, "a man, young and perhaps eccentric, feigning to be dead, and
+_being_ dead to all intents and purposes external to himself, and for
+years retaining the singular view of life and character so imparted,
+would be a good leading incident for a story;" and this he partly did in
+Rokesmith. For other actors in the tale, he had thought of "a poor
+impostor of a man marrying a woman for her money; she marrying _him_ for
+_his_ money; after marriage both finding out their mistake, and
+entering into a league and covenant against folks in general:" with
+whom he had proposed to connect some Perfectly New people. "Everything
+new about them. If they presented a father and mother, it seemed as if
+THEY must be bran new, like the furniture and the carriages--shining
+with varnish, and just home from the manufacturers." These groups took
+shape in the Lammles and the Veneerings. "I must use somehow," is the
+remark of another letter, "the uneducated father in fustian and the
+educated boy in spectacles whom Leech and I saw at Chatham;" of which a
+hint is in Charley Hexam and his father. The benevolent old Jew whom he
+makes the unconscious agent of a rascal, was meant to wipe out a
+reproach against his Jew in _Oliver Twist_ as bringing dislike upon the
+religion of the race he belonged to.[271]
+
+Having got his title in '61 it was his hope to have begun in '62.
+"Alas!" he wrote in the April of that year, "I have hit upon nothing for
+a story. Again and again I have tried. But this odious little house" (he
+had at this time for a few weeks exchanged Gadshill for a friend's house
+near Kensington) "seems to have stifled and darkened my invention." It
+was not until the autumn of the following year he saw his way to a
+beginning. "The Christmas number has come round again" (30th of August
+1863)--"it seems only yesterday that I did the last--but I am full of
+notions besides for the new twenty numbers. When I can clear the
+Christmas stone out of the road, I think I can dash into it on the
+grander journey." He persevered through much difficulty; which he
+described six weeks later, with characteristic glance at his own ways
+when writing, in a letter from the office of his journal. "I came here
+last night, to evade my usual day in the week--in fact to shirk it--and
+get back to Gad's for five or six consecutive days. My reason is, that I
+am exceedingly anxious to begin my book. I am bent upon getting to work
+at it. I want to prepare it for the spring; but I am determined not to
+begin to publish with less than five numbers done. I see my opening
+perfectly, with the one main line on which the story is to turn; and if
+I don't strike while the iron (meaning myself) is hot, I shall drift off
+again, and have to go through all this uneasiness once more."
+
+He had written, after four months, very nearly three numbers, when upon
+a necessary rearrangement of his chapters he had to hit upon a new
+subject for one of them. "While I was considering" (25th of February)
+"what it should be, Marcus,[272] who has done an excellent cover, came
+to tell me of an extraordinary trade he had found out, through one of
+his painting requirements. I immediately went with him to Saint Giles's
+to look at the place, and found--what you will see." It was the
+establishment of Mr. Venus, preserver of animals and birds, and
+articulator of human bones; and it took the place of the last chapter of
+No. 2, which was then transferred to the end of No. 3. But a start with
+three full numbers done, though more than enough to satisfy the hardest
+self-conditions formerly, did not satisfy him now. With his previous
+thought given to the story, with his Memoranda to help him, with the
+people he had in hand to work it with, and ready as he still was to turn
+his untiring observation to instant use on its behalf, he now moved,
+with the old large canvas before him, somewhat slowly and painfully. "If
+I were to lose" (29th of March) "a page of the five numbers I have
+proposed to myself to be ready by the publication day, I should feel
+that I had fallen short. I have grown hard to satisfy, and write very
+slowly. And I have so much--not fiction--that _will_ be thought of, when
+I don't want to think of it, that I am forced to take more care than I
+once took."
+
+The first number was launched at last, on the first of May; and after
+two days he wrote: "Nothing can be better than _Our Friend_, now in his
+thirtieth thousand, and orders flowing in fast." But between the first
+and second number there was a drop of five thousand, strange to say, for
+the larger number was again reached, and much exceeded, before the book
+closed. "This leaves me" (10th of June) "going round and round like a
+carrier-pigeon before swooping on number seven." Thus far he had held
+his ground; but illness came, with some other anxieties, and on the 29th
+of July he wrote sadly enough. "Although I have not been wanting in
+industry, I have been wanting in invention, and have fallen back with
+the book. Looming large before me is the Christmas work, and I can
+hardly hope to do it without losing a number of _Our Friend_. I have
+very nearly lost one already, and two would take one half of my whole
+advance. This week I have been very unwell; am still out of sorts; and,
+as I know from two days' slow experience, have a very mountain to climb
+before I shall see the open country of my work." The three following
+months brought hardly more favourable report. "I have not done my
+number. This death of poor Leech (I suppose) has put me out woefully.
+Yesterday and the day before I could do nothing; seemed for the time to
+have quite lost the power; and am only by slow degrees getting back into
+the track to-day." He rallied after this, and satisfied himself for a
+while; but in February 1865 that formidable illness in his foot broke
+out which, at certain times for the rest of his life, deprived him more
+or less of his inestimable solace of bodily exercise. In April and May
+he suffered severely; and after trying the sea went abroad for more
+complete change. "Work and worry, without exercise, would soon make an
+end of me. If I were not going away now, I should break down. No one
+knows as I know to-day how near to it I have been."
+
+That was the day of his leaving for France, and the day of his return
+brought these few hurried words. "Saturday, tenth of June, 1865. I was
+in the terrific Staplehurst accident yesterday, and worked for hours
+among the dying and dead. I was in the carriage that did not go over,
+but went off the line, and hung over the bridge in an inexplicable
+manner. No words can describe the scene.[273] I am away to Gads." Though
+with characteristic energy he resisted the effects upon himself of that
+terrible ninth of June, they were for some time evident; and, up to the
+day of his death on its fatal fifth anniversary, were perhaps never
+wholly absent. But very few complaints fell from him. "I am curiously
+weak--weak as if I were recovering from a long illness." "I begin to
+feel it more in my head. I sleep well and eat well; but I write half a
+dozen notes, and turn faint and sick." "I am getting right, though still
+low in pulse and very nervous. Driving into Rochester yesterday I felt
+more shaken than I have since the accident." "I cannot bear railway
+travelling yet. A perfect conviction, against the senses, that the
+carriage is down on one side (and generally that is the left, and _not_
+the side on which the carriage in the accident really went over), comes
+upon me with anything like speed, and is inexpressibly distressing."
+These are passages from his letters up to the close of June. Upon his
+book the immediate result was that another lost number was added to the
+losses of the preceding months, and "alas!" he wrote at the opening of
+July, "for the two numbers you write of! There is only one in existence.
+I have but just begun the other." "Fancy!" he added next day, "fancy my
+having under-written number sixteen by two and a half pages--a thing I
+have not done since _Pickwick_!" He did it once with _Dombey_, and was
+to do it yet again.
+
+The book thus begun and continued under adverse influences, though with
+fancy in it, descriptive power, and characters well designed, will never
+rank with his higher efforts. It has some pictures of a rare veracity of
+soul amid the lowest forms of social degradation, placed beside others
+of sheer falsehood and pretence amid unimpeachable social correctness,
+which lifted the writer to his old place; but the judgment of it on the
+whole must be, that it wants freshness and natural development. This
+indeed will be most freely admitted by those who feel most strongly that
+all the old cunning of the master hand is yet in the wayward loving
+Bella Wilfer, in the vulgar canting Podsnap, and in the dolls'
+dressmaker Jenny Wren, whose keen little quaint weird ways, and
+precocious wit sharpened by trouble, are fitted into a character as
+original and delightfully conceived as it is vividly carried through to
+the last. A dull coarse web her small life seems made of; but even from
+its taskwork, which is undertaken for childhood itself, there are
+glittering threads cast across its woof and warp of care. The
+unconscious philosophy of her tricks and manners has in it more of the
+subtler vein of the satire aimed at in the book, than even the voices of
+society which the tale begins and ends with. In her very kindliness
+there is the touch of malice that shows a childish playfulness familiar
+with unnatural privations; this gives a depth as well as tenderness to
+her humours which entitles them to rank with the writer's happiest
+things; and though the odd little creature's talk is incessant when she
+is on the scene, it has the individuality that so seldom tires. It is
+veritably her own small "trick" and "manner," and is never mistakeable
+for any one else's. "I have been reading," Dickens wrote to me from
+France while he was writing the book, "a capital little story by Edmond
+About--_The Notary's Nose_. I have been trying other books; but so
+infernally conversational, that I forget who the people are before they
+have done talking, and don't in the least remember what they talked
+about before when they begin talking again!" The extreme contrast to his
+own art could not be defined more exactly; and other examples from this
+tale will be found in the differing members of the Wilfer family, in the
+riverside people at the Fellowship Porters, in such marvellous
+serio-comic scenes as that of Rogue Riderhood's restoration from
+drowning, and in those short and simple annals of Betty Higden's life
+and death which might have given saving virtue to a book more likely
+than this to perish prematurely. It has not the creative power which
+crowded his earlier page, and transformed into popular realities the
+shadows of his fancy; but the observation and humour he excelled in are
+not wanting to it, nor had there been, in his first completed work,
+more eloquent or generous pleading for the poor and neglected, than this
+last completed work contains. Betty Higden finishes what Oliver Twist
+began.
+
+
+DR. MARIGOLD AND TALES FOR AMERICA.
+
+He had scarcely closed that book in September, wearied somewhat with a
+labour of invention which had not been so free or self-sustaining as in
+the old facile and fertile days, when his customary contribution to
+Christmas became due from him; and his fancy, let loose in a narrower
+field, resumed its old luxury of enjoyment. Here are notices of it from
+his letters. "If people at large understand a Cheap Jack, my part of the
+Christmas number will do well. It is wonderfully like the real thing, of
+course a little refined and humoured." "I do hope that in the beginning
+and end of this Christmas number you will find something that will
+strike you as being fresh, forcible, and full of spirits." He described
+its mode of composition afterwards. "Tired with _Our Mutual_, I sat down
+to cast about for an idea, with a depressing notion that I was, for the
+moment, overworked. Suddenly, the little character that you will see,
+and all belonging to it, came flashing up in the most cheerful manner,
+and I had only to look on and leisurely describe it." This was _Dr.
+Marigold's Prescriptions_, one of the most popular of all the pieces
+selected for his readings, and a splendid example of his humour, pathos,
+and character. There were three more Christmas pieces before he made his
+last visit to America: _Barbox Brothers_, _The Boy at Mugby Station_,
+and _No Thoroughfare_: the last a joint piece of work with Mr. Wilkie
+Collins, who during Dickens's absence in the States transformed it into
+a play for Mr. Fechter, with a view to which it had been planned
+originally. There were also two papers written for first publication in
+America, _George Silverman's Explanation_, and _Holiday Romance_,
+containing about the quantity of half a shilling number of his ordinary
+serials, and paid for at a rate unexampled in literature. They occupied
+him not many days in the writing, and he received a thousand pounds for
+them.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The year after his return, as the reader knows, saw the commencement of
+the work which death interrupted. The fragment will hereafter be
+described; and here meanwhile may close my criticism--itself a fragment
+left for worthier completion by a stronger hand than mine.
+
+But at least I may hope that the ground has been cleared by it from
+those distinctions and comparisons never safely to be applied to an
+original writer, and which always more or less intercept his fair
+appreciation. It was long the fashion to set up wide divergences between
+novels of incident and manners, and novels of character; the narrower
+range being left to Fielding and Smollett, and the larger to Richardson;
+yet there are not many now who will accept such classification. Nor is
+there more truth in other like distinctions alleged between novelists
+who are assumed to be real, or ideal, in their methods of treatment. To
+any original novelist of the higher grade there is no meaning in these
+contrasted phrases. Neither mode can exist at all perfectly without the
+other. No matter how sensitive the mind to external impressions, or how
+keen the observation to whatever can be seen, without the rarer seeing
+of imagination nothing will be arrived at that is real in any genuine
+artist-sense. Reverse the proposition, and the result is expressed in an
+excellent remark of Lord Lytton's, that the happiest effort of
+imagination, however lofty it may be, is that which enables it to be
+cheerfully at home with the real. I have said that Dickens felt
+criticism, of whatever kind, with too sharp a relish for the
+indifference he assumed to it; but the secret was that he believed
+himself to be entitled to higher tribute than he was always in the habit
+of receiving. It was the feeling which suggested a memorable saying of
+Wordsworth. "I am not at all desirous that any one should write a
+critique on my poems. If they be from above, they will do their own work
+in course of time; if not, they will perish as they ought."
+
+The something "from above" never seems to be absent from Dickens, even
+at his worst. When the strain upon his invention became apparent, and he
+could only work freely in a more confined space than of old, it was
+still able to assert itself triumphantly; and his influence over his
+readers was continued by it to the last day of his life. Looking back
+over the series of his writings, the first reflection that rises to the
+mind of any thoughtful person, is one of thankfulness that the most
+popular of writers, who had carried into the lowest scenes and
+conditions an amount of observation, fun, and humour not approached by
+any of his contemporaries, should never have sullied that world-wide
+influence by a hint of impurity or a possibility of harm. Nor is there
+anything more surprising than the freshness and variety of character
+which those writings include, within the range of the not numerous types
+of character that were the limit of their author's genius. For, this
+also appears, upon any review of them collectively, that the teeming
+life which is in them is that of the time in which his own life was
+passed; and that with the purpose of showing vividly its form and
+pressure, was joined the hope and design to leave it better than he
+found it. It has been objected that humanity receives from him no
+addition to its best types; that the burlesque humourist is always
+stronger in him than the reflective moralist; that the light thrown by
+his genius into out of the way corners of life never steadily shines in
+its higher beaten ways; and that beside his pictures of what man is or
+does, there is no attempt to show, by delineation of an exalted purpose
+or a great career, what man is able to be or to do. In the charge
+abstractedly there is truth; but the fair remark upon it is that
+whatever can be regarded as essential in the want implied by it will be
+found in other forms in his writings, that the perfect innocence of
+their laughter and tears has been itself a prodigious blessing, and that
+it is otherwise incident to so great a humourist to work after the
+fashion most natural to the genius of humour. What kind of work it has
+been in his case, the attempt is made in preceding pages to show; and on
+the whole it can be said with some certainty that the best ideals in
+this sense are obtained, not by presenting with added comeliness or
+grace the figures which life is ever eager to present as of its best,
+but by connecting the singularities and eccentricities, which ordinary
+life is apt to reject or overlook, with the appreciation that is deepest
+and the laws of insight that are most universal. It is thus that all
+things human are happily brought within human sympathy. It was at the
+heart of everything Dickens wrote. It was the secret of the hope he had
+that his books might help to make people better; and it so guarded them
+from evil, that there is scarcely a page of the thousands he has written
+which might not be put into the hands of a little child.[274] It made
+him the intimate of every English household, and a familiar friend
+wherever the language is spoken whose stores of harmless pleasure he has
+so largely increased.
+
+"The loss of no single man during the present generation, if we except
+Abraham Lincoln alone," said Mr. Horace Greeley, describing the profound
+and universal grief of America at his death, "has carried mourning into
+so many families, and been so unaffectedly lamented through all the
+ranks of society." "The terrible news from England," wrote Longfellow to
+me (Cambridge, Mass. 12th of June 1870), "fills us all with
+inexpressible sadness. Dickens was so full of life that it did not seem
+possible he could die, and yet he has gone before us, and we are
+sorrowing for him. . . . I never knew an author's death cause such general
+mourning. It is no exaggeration to say that this whole country is
+stricken with grief . . ." Nor was evidence then wanting, that far beyond
+the limits of society on that vast continent the English writer's
+influence had penetrated. Of this, very touching illustration was given
+in my first volume; and proof even more striking has since been afforded
+to me, that not merely in wild or rude communities, but in life the most
+savage and solitary, his genius had helped to while time away.
+
+"Like all Americans who read," writes an American gentleman, "and that
+takes in nearly all our people, I am an admirer and student of
+Dickens. . . . Its perusal" (that of my second volume) "has recalled an
+incident which may interest you. Twelve or thirteen years ago I crossed
+the Sierra Nevada mountains as a Government surveyor under a famous
+frontiersman and civil engineer--Colonel Lander. We were too early by a
+month, and became snow-bound just on the very summit. Under these
+circumstances it was necessary to abandon the wagons for a time, and
+drive the stock (mules) down the mountains to the valleys where there
+was pasturage and running water. This was a long and difficult task,
+occupying several days. On the second day, in a spot where we expected
+to find nothing more human than a grizzly bear or an elk, we found a
+little hut, built of pine boughs and a few rough boards clumsily hewn
+out of small trees with an axe. The hut was covered with snow many feet
+deep, excepting only the hole in the roof which served for a chimney,
+and a small pit-like place in front to permit egress. The occupant came
+forth to hail us and solicit whisky and tobacco. He was dressed in a
+suit made entirely of flour-sacks, and was curiously labelled on various
+parts of his person _Best Family Flour_. _Extra._ His head was covered
+by a wolf's skin drawn from the brute's head--with the ears standing
+erect in a fierce alert manner. He was a most extraordinary object, and
+told us he had not seen a human being in four months. He lived on bear
+and elk meat and flour laid in during his short summer. Emigrants in
+the season paid him a kind of ferry-toll. I asked him how he passed his
+time, and he went to a barrel and produced _Nicholas Nickleby_ and
+_Pickwick_. I found he knew them almost by heart. He did not know, or
+seem to care, about the author; but he gloried in Sam Weller, despised
+Squeers, and would probably have taken the latter's scalp with great
+skill and cheerfulness. For Mr. Winkle he had no feeling but contempt,
+and in fact regarded a fowling-piece as only a toy for a squaw. He had
+no Bible; and perhaps if he practised in his rude savage way all Dickens
+taught, he might less have felt the want even of that companion."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[261] I hope my readers will find themselves able to understand that, as
+well as this which follows: "What seems preposterous, impossible to us,
+seemed to him simple fact of observation. When he imagined a street, a
+house, a room, a figure, he saw it not in the vague schematic way of
+ordinary imagination, but in the sharp definition of actual perception,
+all the salient details obtruding themselves on his attention. He,
+seeing it thus vividly, made us also see it; and believing in its
+reality however fantastic, he communicated something of his belief to
+us. He presented it in such relief that we ceased to think of it as a
+picture. So definite and insistent was the image, that even while
+knowing it was false we could not help, for a moment, being affected, as
+it were, by his hallucination."
+
+[262] "Though," John Ballantyne told Lockhart, "he often turned himself
+on his pillow with a groan of torment, he usually continued the sentence
+in the same breath. But when dialogue of peculiar animation was in
+progress, spirit seemed to triumph altogether over matter--he arose from
+his couch and walked up and down the room, raising and lowering his
+voice, and as it were acting the parts." _Lockhart_, vi. 67-8. The
+statement of James Ballantyne is at p. 89 of the same volume. The
+original incidents on which Scott had founded the tale he remembered,
+but "not a single character woven by the romancer, not one of the many
+scenes and points of humour, nor anything with which he was connected as
+the writer of the work."
+
+[263] "Do you know _Master Humphrey's Clock_! I admire Nell in the _Old
+Curiosity Shop_ exceedingly. The whole thing is a good deal borrowed
+from _Wilhelm Meister_. But little Nell is a far purer, lovelier, more
+_English_ conception than Mignon, treasonable as the saying would seem
+to some. No doubt it was suggested by Mignon."--Sara Coleridge to Aubrey
+de Vere (_Memoirs and Letters_, ii. 269-70). Expressing no opinion on
+this comparison, I may state it as within my knowledge that the book
+referred to was not then known to Dickens.
+
+[264] The distinction I then pointed out was remarked by Sara Coleridge
+(_Memoirs and Letters_, ii. 169) in writing of her children. "They like
+to talk to me . . . above all about the productions of Dickens, the
+never-to-be-exhausted fun of _Pickwick_, and the capital new strokes of
+_Martin Chuzzlewit_. This last work contains, besides all the fun, some
+very marked and available morals. I scarce know any book in which the
+evil and odiousness of selfishness are more forcibly brought out, or in
+a greater variety of exhibitions. In the midst of the merry quotations,
+or at least on any fair opportunity, I draw the boys' attention to these
+points."
+
+[265] All the remarks in my text had been some time in type when Lord
+Lytton sent me what follows, from one of his father's manuscript (and
+unpublished) note-books. Substantially it agrees with what I have said;
+and such unconscious testimony of a brother novelist of so high a rank,
+careful in the study of his art, is of special value. "The greatest
+masters of the novel of modern manners have generally availed themselves
+of Humour for the illustration of manners; and have, with a deep and
+true, but perhaps unconscious, knowledge of art, pushed the humour
+almost to the verge of caricature. For, as the serious ideal requires a
+certain exaggeration in the proportions of the natural, so also does the
+ludicrous. Thus Aristophanes, in painting the humours of his time,
+resorts to the most poetical extravagance of machinery, and calls the
+Clouds in aid of his ridicule of philosophy, or summons Frogs and Gods
+to unite in his satire on Euripides. The Don Quixote of Cervantes never
+lived, nor, despite the vulgar belief, ever could have lived, in Spain;
+but the art of the portrait is in the admirable exaltation of the
+humorous by means of the exaggerated. With more or less qualification,
+the same may be said of Parson Adams, of Sir Roger de Coverley, and even
+of the Vicar of Wakefield. . . . It follows therefore that art and
+correctness are far from identical, and that the one is sometimes proved
+by the disdain of the other. For the ideal, whether humorous or serious,
+does not consist in the imitation but in the exaltation of nature. And
+we must accordingly enquire of art, not how far it resembles what we
+have seen, so much as how far it embodies what we can imagine."
+
+[266] I cannot refuse myself the satisfaction of quoting, from the best
+criticism of Dickens I have seen since his death, remarks very pertinent
+to what is said in my text. "Dickens possessed an imagination
+unsurpassed, not only in vividness, but in swiftness. I have
+intentionally avoided all needless comparisons of his works with those
+of other writers of his time, some of whom have gone before him to their
+rest, while others survive to gladden the darkness and relieve the
+monotony of our daily life. But in the power of his imagination--of this
+I am convinced--he surpassed them, one and all. That imagination could
+call up at will those associations which, could we but summon them in
+their full number, would bind together the human family, and make that
+expression no longer a name, but a living reality. . . . Such associations
+sympathy alone can warm into life, and imagination alone can at times
+discern. The great humourist reveals them to every one of us; and his
+genius is indeed an inspiration from no human source, in that it enables
+him to render this service to the brotherhood of mankind. But more than
+this. So marvellously has this earth become the inheritance of mankind,
+that there is not a thing upon it, animate or inanimate, with which, or
+with the likeness of which, man's mind has not come into contact; . . .
+with which human feelings, aspirations, thoughts, have not acquired an
+endless variety of single or subtle associations. . . . These also, which
+we imperfectly divine or carelessly pass by, the imagination of genius
+distinctly reveals to us, and powerfully impresses upon us. When they
+appeal directly to the emotions of the heart, it is the power of Pathos
+which has awakened them; and when the suddenness, the unexpectedness,
+the apparent oddity of the one by the side of the other, strike the mind
+with irresistible force, it is the equally divine gift of Humour which
+has touched the spring of laughter by the side of the spring of
+tears."--_Charles Dickens. A Lecture by Professor Ward. Delivered in
+Manchester, 30th November, 1870._
+
+[267] The opening of this letter (25th of August 1859), referring to a
+conviction for murder, afterwards reversed by a Home Office pardon
+against the continued and steadily expressed opinion of the judge who
+tried the case, is much too characteristic of the writer to be lost. "I
+cannot easily tell you how much interested I am by what you tell me of
+our brave and excellent friend. . . . I have often had more than half a
+mind to write and thank that upright judge. I declare to heaven that I
+believe such a service one of the greatest that a man of intellect and
+courage can render to society. . . . Of course I have been driving the
+girls out of their wits here, by incessantly proclaiming that there
+needed no medical evidence either way, and that the case was plain
+without it. . . . Lastly of course (though a merciful man--because a
+merciful man, I mean), I would hang any Home Secretary, Whig, Tory,
+Radical, or otherwise, who should step in between so black a scoundrel
+and the gallows. . . . I am reminded of Tennyson by thinking that King
+Arthur would have made short work of the amiable man! How fine the
+Idylls are! Lord! what a blessed thing it is to read a man who really
+can write. I thought nothing could be finer than the first poem, till I
+came to the third; but when I had read the last, it seemed to me to be
+absolutely unapproachable." Other literary likings rose and fell with
+him, but he never faltered in his allegiance to Tennyson.
+
+[268] Mr. Grant White, whose edition of Shakespeare has been received
+with much respect in England.
+
+[269] A dear friend now gone, used laughingly to relate what outcry
+there used to be, on the night of the week when a number was due, for
+"that Pip nonsense!" and what roars of laughter followed, though at
+first it was entirely put aside as not on any account to have time
+wasted over it.
+
+[270] There was no Chapter xx. as now; but the sentence which opens it
+("For eleven years" in the original, altered to "eight years") followed
+the paragraph about his business partnership with Herbert, and led to
+Biddy's question whether he is sure he does not fret for Estella ("I am
+sure and certain, Biddy" as originally written, altered to "O no--I
+think not, Biddy"): from which point here was the close. "It was two
+years more, before I saw herself. I had heard of her as leading a most
+unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband who had used her
+with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of
+pride, brutality, and meanness. I had heard of the death of her husband
+(from an accident consequent on ill-treating a horse), and of her being
+married again to a Shropshire doctor, who, against his interest, had
+once very manfully interposed, on an occasion when he was in
+professional attendance on Mr. Drummle, and had witnessed some
+outrageous treatment of her. I had heard that the Shropshire doctor was
+not rich, and that they lived on her own personal fortune. I was in
+England again--in London, and walking along Piccadilly with little
+Pip--when a servant came running after me to ask would I step back to a
+lady in a carriage who wished to speak to me. It was a little pony
+carriage, which the lady was driving; and the lady and I looked sadly
+enough on one another. 'I am greatly changed, I know; but I thought you
+would like to shake hands with Estella too, Pip. Lift up that pretty
+child and let me kiss it!' (She supposed the child, I think, to be my
+child.) I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in
+her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance,
+that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching, and had
+given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be."
+
+[271] On this reproach, from a Jewish lady whom he esteemed, he had
+written two years before. "Fagin, in _Oliver Twist_, is a Jew, because
+it unfortunately was true, of the time to which that story refers, that
+that class of criminal almost invariably _was_ a Jew. But surely no
+sensible man or woman of your persuasion can fail to observe--firstly,
+that all the rest of the wicked _dramatis personae_ are Christians; and,
+secondly, that he is called 'The Jew,' not because of his religion, but
+because of his race."
+
+[272] Mr. Marcus Stone had, upon the separate issue of the _Tale of Two
+Cities_, taken the place of Mr. Hablot Browne as his illustrator. _Hard
+Times_ and the first edition of _Great Expectations_ were not
+illustrated; but when Pip's story appeared in one volume, Mr. Stone
+contributed designs for it.
+
+[273] He thus spoke of it in his "Postscript in lieu of Preface" (dated
+2nd of September 1865), which accompanied the last number of the story
+under notice. "On Friday the ninth of June in the present year, Mr. and
+Mrs. Boffin (in their manuscript dress of receiving Mr. and Mrs. Lammle
+at breakfast) were on the South-Eastern Railway with me, in a terribly
+destructive accident. When I had done what I could to help others, I
+climbed back into my carriage--nearly turned over a viaduct, and caught
+aslant upon the turn--to extricate the worthy couple. They were much
+soiled, but otherwise unhurt. The same happy result attended Miss Bella
+Wilfer on her wedding-day, and Mr. Riderhood inspecting Bradley
+Headstone's red neckerchief as he lay asleep. I remember with devout
+thankfulness that I can never be much nearer parting company with my
+readers for ever, than I was then, until there shall be written against
+my life the two words with which I have this day closed this book--THE
+END."
+
+[274] I borrow this language from the Bishop of Manchester, who, on the
+third day after Dickens's death, in the Abbey where he was so soon to be
+laid, closed a plea for the toleration of differences of opinion where
+the foundations of religious truth are accepted, with these words. "It
+will not be out of harmony with the line of thought we have been
+pursuing--certainly it will be in keeping with the associations of this
+place, dear to Englishmen, not only as one of the proudest Christian
+temples, but as containing the memorials of so many who by their genius
+in arts, or arms, or statesmanship, or literature, have made England
+what she is--if in the simplest and briefest words I allude to that sad
+and unexpected death which has robbed English literature of one of its
+highest living ornaments, and the news of which, two mornings ago, must
+have made every household in England feel as though they had lost a
+personal friend. He has been called in one notice an apostle of the
+people. I suppose it is meant that he had a mission, but in a style and
+fashion of his own; a gospel, a cheery, joyous, gladsome message, which
+the people understood, and by which they could hardly help being
+bettered; for it was the gospel of kindliness, of brotherly love, of
+sympathy in the widest sense of the word. I am sure I have felt in
+myself the healthful spirit of his teaching. Possibly we might not have
+been able to subscribe to the same creed in relation to God, but I think
+we should have subscribed to the same creed in relation to man. He who
+has taught us our duty to our fellow men better than we knew it before,
+who knew so well to weep with them that wept, and to rejoice with them
+that rejoiced, who has shown forth in all his knowledge of the dark
+corners of the earth how much sunshine may rest upon the lowliest lot,
+who had such evident sympathy with suffering, and such a natural
+instinct of purity that there is scarcely a page of the thousands he has
+written which might not be put into the hands of a little child, must be
+regarded by those who recognise the diversity of the gifts of the spirit
+as a teacher sent from God. He would have been welcomed as a
+fellow-labourer in the common interests of humanity by Him who asked the
+question 'If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he
+love God whom he hath not seen?'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+AMERICA REVISITED: NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER 1867.
+
+1867.
+
+ In Boston--Warmth of the Greeting--Old and New
+ Friends--Changes since 1842--Sale of Tickets in
+ New York--First Boston Reading--Profits--Scene
+ at First New York Sales--A Fire at the
+ Hotel--Increase of New York City--Story of
+ _Black Crook_--Local and General
+ Politics--Railway Travelling--Police of New
+ York--Again in Boston--More Fires--New York
+ Newspapers generally--Cities chosen for
+ Readings--The Webster Murder in 1849--Again at
+ New York--Illness--Mr. Fields's Account of
+ Dickens while in America--Miseries of American
+ Travel.
+
+
+IT is the intention of this and the following chapter to narrate the
+incidents of the visit to America in Dickens's own language, and in that
+only. They will consist almost exclusively of extracts from his letters
+written home, to members of his family and to myself.
+
+On the night of Tuesday the 19th of November he arrived at Boston, where
+he took up his residence at the Parker House hotel; and his first letter
+(21st) stated that the tickets for the first four Readings, all to that
+time issued, had been sold immediately on their becoming saleable. "An
+immense train of people waited in the freezing street for twelve hours,
+and passed into the office in their turns, as at a French theatre. The
+receipts already taken for these nights exceed our calculation by more
+than L250." Up to the last moment, he had not been able to clear off
+wholly a shade of misgiving that some of the old grudges might make
+themselves felt; but from the instant of his setting foot in Boston not
+a vestige of such fear remained. The greeting was to the full as
+extraordinary as that of twenty-five years before, and was given now, as
+then, to the man who had made himself the most popular writer in the
+country. His novels and tales were crowding the shelves of all the
+dealers in books in all the cities of the Union. In every house, in
+every car, on every steamboat, in every theatre of America, the
+characters, the fancies, the phraseology of Dickens were become familiar
+beyond those of any other writer of books. "Even in England," said one
+of the New York journals, "Dickens is less known than here; and of the
+millions here who treasure every word he has written, there are tens of
+thousands who would make a large sacrifice to see and hear the man who
+has made happy so many hours. Whatever sensitiveness there once was to
+adverse or sneering criticism, the lapse of a quarter of a century, and
+the profound significance of a great war, have modified or removed." The
+point was more pithily, and as truly, put by Mr. Horace Greeley in the
+_Tribune_. "The fame as a novelist which Mr. Dickens had already created
+in America, and which, at the best, has never yielded him anything
+particularly munificent or substantial, is become his capital stock in
+the present enterprise."
+
+The first Reading was appointed for the second of December, and in the
+interval he saw some old friends and made some new ones.[275] Boston he
+was fond of comparing to Edinburgh as Edinburgh was in the days when
+several dear friends of his own still lived there. Twenty-five years had
+changed much in the American city; some genial faces were gone, and on
+ground which he had left a swamp he found now the most princely streets;
+but there was no abatement of the old warmth of kindness, and, with
+every attention and consideration shown to him, there was no intrusion.
+He was not at first completely conscious of the change in this respect,
+or of the prodigious increase in the size of Boston. But the latter grew
+upon him from day to day, and then there was impressed along with it a
+contrast to which it was difficult to reconcile himself. Nothing
+enchanted him so much as what he again saw of the delightful domestic
+life of Cambridge, simple, self-respectful, cordial, and affectionate;
+and it seemed impossible to believe that within half an hour's distance
+of it should be found what might at any time be witnessed in such hotels
+as that which he was staying at: crowds of swaggerers, loafers,
+bar-loungers, and dram-drinkers, that seemed to be making up, from day
+to day, not the least important-part of the human life of the city. But
+no great mercantile resort in the States, such as Boston had now become,
+could be without that drawback; and fortunate should we account any
+place to be, though even so plague-afflicted, that has yet so near it
+the healthier influence of the other life which our older world has
+wellnigh lost altogether.
+
+"The city has increased prodigiously in twenty-five years," he wrote to
+his daughter Mary. "It has grown more mercantile. It is like Leeds mixed
+with Preston, and flavoured with New Brighton. Only, instead of smoke
+and fog, there is an exquisitely bright light air." "Cambridge is
+exactly as I left it," he wrote to me. "Boston more mercantile, and much
+larger. The hotel I formerly stayed at, and thought a very big one, is
+now regarded as a very small affair. I do not yet notice--but a day, you
+know, is not a long time for observation!--any marked change in
+character or habits. In this immense hotel I live very high up, and have
+a hot and cold bath in my bed room, with other comforts not in existence
+in my former day. The cost of living is enormous." "Two of the staff are
+at New York," he wrote to his sister-in-law on the 25th of November,
+"where we are at our wits' end how to keep tickets out of the hands of
+speculators. We have communications from all parts of the country, but
+we take no offer whatever. The young under-graduates of Cambridge have
+made a representation to Longfellow that they are 500 strong and cannot
+get one ticket. I don't know what is to be done, but I suppose I must
+read there, somehow. We are all in the clouds until I shall have broken
+ground in New York." The sale of tickets, there, had begun two days
+before the first reading in Boston. "At the New York barriers," he wrote
+to his daughter on the first of December, "where the tickets were on
+sale and the people ranged as at the Paris theatres, speculators went up
+and down offering twenty dollars for any body's place. The money was in
+no case accepted. But one man sold two tickets for the second, third,
+and fourth nights; his payment in exchange being one ticket for the
+first night, fifty dollars (about L7 10_s._), and a 'brandy-cocktail.'"
+
+On Monday the second of December he read for the first time in Boston,
+his subjects being the _Carol_ and the _Trial from Pickwick_; and his
+reception, from an audience than which perhaps none more remarkable
+could have been brought together, went beyond all expectations formed.
+"It is really impossible," he wrote to me next morning, "to exaggerate
+the magnificence of the reception or the effect of the reading. The
+whole city will talk of nothing else and hear of nothing else to-day.
+Every ticket for those announced here, and in New York, is sold. All are
+sold at the highest price, for which in our calculation we made no
+allowance; and it is impossible to keep out speculators who immediately
+sell at a premium. At the decreased rate of money even, we had above
+L450 English in the house last night; and the New York hall holds 500
+people more. Everything looks brilliant beyond the most sanguine hopes,
+and I was quite as cool last night as though I were reading at Chatham."
+The next night he read again; and also on Thursday and Friday; on
+Wednesday he had rested; and on Saturday he travelled to New York.
+
+He had written, the day before he left, that he was making a clear
+profit of thirteen hundred pounds English a week, even allowing seven
+dollars to the pound; but words were added having no good omen in them,
+that the weather was taking a turn of even unusual severity, and that he
+found the climate, in the suddenness of its changes, "and the wide leaps
+they take," excessively trying. "The work is of course rather trying
+too; but the sound position that everything must be subservient to it
+enables me to keep aloof from invitations. To-morrow," ran the close of
+the letter, "we move to New York. We cannot beat the speculators in our
+tickets. We sell no more than six to any one person for the course of
+four readings; but these speculators, who sell at greatly increased
+prices and make large profits, will employ any number of men to buy. One
+of the chief of them--now living in this house, in order that he may
+move as we move!--can put on 50 people in any place we go to; and thus
+he gets 300 tickets into his own hands." Almost while Dickens was
+writing these words an eye-witness was describing to a Philadelphia
+paper the sale of the New York tickets. The pay-place was to open at
+nine on a Wednesday morning, and at midnight of Tuesday a long line of
+speculators were assembled in _queue_; at two in the morning a few
+honest buyers had begun to arrive; at five there were, of all classes,
+two lines of not less than 800 each; at eight there were at least 5000
+persons in the two lines; at nine each line was more than three-quarters
+of a mile in length, and neither became sensibly shorter during the
+whole morning. "The tickets for the course were all sold before noon.
+Members of families relieved each other in the _queues_; waiters flew
+across the streets and squares from the neighbouring restaurant, to
+serve parties who were taking their breakfast in the open December air;
+while excited men offered five and ten dollars for the mere permission
+to exchange places with other persons standing nearer the head of the
+line!"
+
+The effect of the reading in New York corresponded with this marvellous
+preparation, and Dickens characterised his audience as an unexpected
+support to him; in its appreciation quick and unfailing, and highly
+demonstrative in its satisfactions. On the 11th of December he wrote to
+his daughter: "Amazing success. A very fine audience, far better than at
+Boston. _Carol_ and _Trial_ on first night, great: still greater,
+_Copperfield_ and _Bob Sawyer_ on second. For the tickets of the four
+readings of next week there were, at nine o'clock this morning, 3000
+people in waiting, and they had begun to assemble in the bitter cold as
+early as two o'clock in the morning." To myself he wrote on the 15th,
+adding touches to the curious picture. "Dolby has got into trouble about
+the manner of issuing the tickets for next week's series. He cannot get
+four thousand people into a room holding only two thousand, he cannot
+induce people to pay at the ordinary price for themselves instead of
+giving thrice as much to speculators, and he is attacked in all
+directions . . . I don't much like my hall, for it has two large
+balconies far removed from the platform; but no one ever waylays me as I
+go into it or come out of it, and it is kept as rigidly quiet as the
+Francais at a rehearsal. We have not yet had in it less than L430 per
+night, allowing for the depreciated currency! I send L3000 to England by
+this packet. From all parts of the States, applications and offers
+continually come in. We go to Boston next Saturday for two more
+readings, and come back here on Christmas Day for four more. I am not
+yet bound to go elsewhere, except three times (each time for two nights)
+to Philadelphia; thinking it wisest to keep free for the largest places.
+I have had an action brought against me by a man who considered himself
+injured (and really may have been) in the matter of his tickets.
+Personal service being necessary, I was politely waited on by a marshal
+for that purpose; whom I received with the greatest courtesy, apparently
+very much to his amazement. The action was handsomely withdrawn next
+day, and the plaintiff paid his own costs. . . . Dolby hopes you are
+satisfied with the figures so far; the profit each night exceeding the
+estimated profit by L130 odd. He is anxious I should also tell you that
+he is the most unpopular and best-abused man in America." Next day a
+letter to his sister-in-law related an incident too common in American
+cities to disconcert any but strangers. He had lodged himself, I should
+have said, at the Westminster Hotel in Irving Place. "Last night I was
+getting into bed just at 12 o'clock, when Dolby came to my door to
+inform me that the house was on fire. I got Scott up directly; told him
+first to pack the books and clothes for the Readings; dressed, and
+pocketed my jewels and papers; while the manager stuffed himself out
+with money. Meanwhile the police and firemen were in the house tracing
+the mischief to its source in a certain fire-grate. By this time the
+hose was laid all through from a great tank on the roof, and everybody
+turned out to help. It was the oddest sight, and people had put the
+strangest things on! After chopping and cutting with axes through
+stairs, and much handing about of water, the fire was confined to a
+dining-room in which it had originated; and then everybody talked to
+everybody else, the ladies being particularly loquacious and cheerful. I
+may remark that the second landlord (from both, but especially the
+first, I have had untiring attention) no sooner saw me on this agitating
+occasion, than, with his property blazing, he insisted on taking me down
+into a room full of hot smoke, to drink brandy and water with him! And
+so we got to bed again about 2."
+
+Dickens had been a week in New York before he was able to identify the
+great city which a lapse of twenty-five years had so prodigiously
+increased. "The only portion that has even now come back to me," he
+wrote, "is the part of Broadway in which the Carlton Hotel (long since
+destroyed) used to stand. There is a very fine new park in the
+outskirts, and the number of grand houses and splendid equipages is
+quite surprising. There are hotels close here with 500 bedrooms and I
+don't know how many boarders; but this hotel is quite as quiet as, and
+not much larger than, Mivart's in Brook Street. My rooms are all en
+suite, and I come and go by a private door and private staircase
+communicating with my bed-room. The waiters are French, and one might be
+living in Paris. One of the two proprietors is also proprietor of
+Niblo's Theatre, and the greatest care is taken of me. Niblo's great
+attraction, the _Black Crook_, has now been played every night for 16
+months(!), and is the most preposterous peg to hang ballets on that was
+ever seen. The people who act in it have not the slightest idea of what
+it is about, and never had; but, after taxing my intellectual powers to
+the utmost, I fancy that I have discovered Black Crook to be a malignant
+hunchback leagued with the Powers of Darkness to separate two lovers;
+and that the Powers of Lightness coming (in no skirts whatever) to the
+rescue, he is defeated. I am quite serious in saying that I do not
+suppose there are two pages of _All the Year Round_ in the whole piece
+(which acts all night); the whole of the rest of it being ballets of all
+sorts, perfectly unaccountable processions, and the Donkey out of last
+year's Covent Garden pantomime! At the other theatres, comic operas,
+melodramas, and domestic dramas prevail all over the city, and my
+stories play no inconsiderable part in them. I go nowhere, having laid
+down the rule that to combine visiting with my work would be absolutely
+impossible. . . . The Fenian explosion at Clerkenwell was telegraphed here
+in a few hours. I do not think there is any sympathy whatever with the
+Fenians on the part of the American people, though political
+adventurers may make capital out of a show of it. But no doubt large
+sections of the Irish population of this State are themselves Fenian;
+and the local politics of the place are in a most depraved condition, if
+half of what is said to me be true. I prefer not to talk of these
+things, but at odd intervals I look round for myself. Great social
+improvements in respect of manners and forbearance have come to pass
+since I was here before, but in public life I see as yet but little
+change."
+
+He had got through half of his first New York readings when a winter
+storm came on, and from this time until very near his return the
+severity of the weather was exceptional even for America. When the first
+snow fell, the railways were closed for some days; and he described New
+York crowded with sleighs, and the snow piled up in enormous walls the
+whole length of the streets. "I turned out in a rather gorgeous sleigh
+yesterday with any quantity of buffalo robes, and made an imposing
+appearance." "If you were to behold me driving out," he wrote to his
+daughter, "furred up to the moustache, with an immense white
+red-and-yellow-striped rug for a covering, you would suppose me to be of
+Hungarian or Polish nationality." These protections nevertheless availed
+him little; and when the time came for getting back to Boston, he found
+himself at the close of his journey with a cold and cough that never
+again left him until he had quitted the country, and of which the
+effects became more and more disastrous. For the present there was
+little allusion to this, his belief at the first being strong that he
+should overmaster it; but it soon forced itself into all his letters.
+
+His railway journey otherwise had not been agreeable. "The railways are
+truly alarming. Much worse (because more worn I suppose) than when I was
+here before. We were beaten about yesterday, as if we had been aboard
+the Cuba. Two rivers have to be crossed, and each time the whole train
+is banged aboard a big steamer. The steamer rises and falls with the
+river, which the railroad don't do; and the train is either banged up
+hill or banged down hill. In coming off the steamer at one of these
+crossings yesterday, we were banged up such a height that the rope
+broke, and one carriage rushed back with a run down-hill into the boat
+again. I whisked out in a moment, and two or three others after me; but
+nobody else seemed to care about it. The treatment of the luggage is
+perfectly outrageous. Nearly every case I have is already broken. When
+we started from Boston yesterday, I beheld, to my unspeakable amazement,
+Scott, my dresser, leaning a flushed countenance against the wall of the
+car, and _weeping bitterly_. It was over my smashed writing-desk. Yet
+the arrangements for luggage are excellent, if the porters would not be
+beyond description reckless." The same excellence of provision, and
+flinging away of its advantages, are observed in connection with another
+subject in the same letter. "The halls are excellent. Imagine one
+holding two thousand people, seated with exact equality for every one of
+them, and every one seated separately. I have nowhere, at home or
+abroad, seen so fine a police as the police of New York; and their
+bearing in the streets is above all praise. On the other hand, the laws
+for regulation of public vehicles, clearing of streets, and removal of
+obstructions, are wildly outraged by the people for whose benefit they
+are intended. Yet there is undoubtedly improvement in every direction,
+and I am taking time to make up my mind on things in general. Let me add
+that I have been tempted out at three in the morning to visit one of the
+large police station-houses, and was so fascinated by the study of a
+horrible photograph-book of thieves' portraits that I couldn't shut it
+up."
+
+A letter of the same date (22nd) to his sister-in-law told of personal
+attentions awaiting him on his return to Boston by which he was greatly
+touched. He found his rooms garnished with flowers and holly, with real
+red berries, and with festoons of moss; and the homely Christmas look of
+the place quite affected him. "There is a certain Captain Dolliver
+belonging to the Boston custom-house, who came off in the little steamer
+that brought me ashore from the Cuba; and he took it into his head that
+he would have a piece of English mistletoe brought out in this week's
+Cunard, which should be laid upon my breakfast-table. And there it was
+this morning. In such affectionate touches as this, these New England
+people are especially amiable. . . . As a general rule you may lay it down
+that whatever you see about me in the papers is not true; but you may
+generally lend a more believing ear to the Philadelphia correspondent of
+the _Times_, a well-informed gentleman. Our hotel in New York was on
+fire again the other night. But fires in this country are quite matters
+of course. There was a large one in Boston at four this morning; and I
+don't think a single night has passed, since I have been under the
+protection of the Eagle, that I have not heard the Fire Bells dolefully
+clanging all over both cities." The violent abuse of his manager by
+portions of the press is the subject of the rest of the letter, and
+receives farther illustration in one of the same date to me. "A good
+specimen of the sort of newspaper you and I know something of, came out
+in Boston here this morning. The editor had applied for our
+advertisements, saying that 'it was at Mr. D's disposal for paragraphs.'
+The advertisements were not sent; Dolby did not enrich its columns
+paragraphically; and among its news to-day is the item that 'this chap
+calling himself Dolby got drunk down town last night, and was taken to
+the police station for fighting an Irishman!' I am sorry to say that I
+don't find anybody to be much shocked by this liveliness." It is right
+to add what was said to me a few days later. "The _Tribune_ is an
+excellent paper. Horace Greeley is editor in chief, and a considerable
+shareholder too. All the people connected with it whom I have seen are
+of the best class. It is also, a very fine property--but here the _New
+York Herald_ beats it hollow, hollow, hollow! Another able and well
+edited paper is the _New York Times_. A most respectable journal too is
+Bryant's _Evening Post_, excellently written. There is generally a much
+more responsible and respectable tone than prevailed formerly, however
+small may be the literary merit, among papers pointed out to me as of
+large circulation. In much of the writing there is certainly
+improvement, but it might be more widely spread."
+
+The time had now come when the course his Readings were to take
+independently of the two leading cities must be settled, and the general
+tour made out. His agent's original plan was that they should be in New
+York every week. "But I say No. By the 10th of January I shall have read
+to 35,000 people in that city alone. Put the readings out of the reach
+of all the people behind them, for the time. It is that one of the
+popular peculiarities which I most particularly notice, that they must
+not have a thing too easily. Nothing in the country lasts long; and a
+thing is prized the more, the less easy it is made. Reflecting therefore
+that I shall want to close, in April, with farewell readings here and in
+New York, I am convinced that the crush and pressure upon these
+necessary to their adequate success is only to be got by absence; and
+that the best thing I can do is not to give either city as much reading
+as it wants now, but to be independent of both while both are most
+enthusiastic. I have therefore resolved presently to announce in New
+York so many readings (I mean a certain number) as the last that can be
+given there, before I travel to promised places; and that we select the
+best places, with the largest halls, on our list. This will include,
+East here--the two or three best New England towns; South--Baltimore and
+Washington; West--Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis; and
+towards Niagara--Cleveland and Buffalo. Philadelphia we are already
+pledged to, for six nights; and the scheme will pretty easily bring us
+here again twice before the farewells. I feel convinced that this is the
+sound policy." (It was afterwards a little modified, as will be seen, by
+public occurrences and his own condition of health; the West, as well
+as a promise to Canada, having to be abandoned; but otherwise it was
+carried out.) "I read here to-morrow and Tuesday; all tickets being sold
+to the end of the series, even for subjects not announced. I have not
+read a single time at a lower clear profit per night (all deductions
+made) than L315. But rely upon it I shall take great care not to read
+oftener than four times a week--after this next week, when I stand
+committed to five. The inevitable tendency of the staff, when these
+great houses excite them, is, in the words of an old friend of ours, to
+'hurge the hartist hon;' and a night or two ago I had to cut away five
+readings from _their_ list."
+
+An incident at Boston should have mention before he resumes his readings
+in New York. In the interval since he was first in America, the Harvard
+professor of chemistry, Dr. Webster, whom he had at that visit met among
+the honoured men who held chairs in their Cambridge University, had been
+hanged for the murder, committed in his laboratory in the college, of a
+friend who had lent him money, portions of whose body lay concealed
+under the lid of the lecture-room table where the murderer continued to
+meet his students. "Being in Cambridge," Dickens wrote to Lord Lytton,
+"I thought I would go over the Medical School, and see the exact
+localities where Professor Webster did that amazing murder, and worked
+so hard to rid himself of the body of the murdered man. (I find there is
+of course no rational doubt that the Professor was always a secretly
+cruel man.) They were horribly grim, private, cold, and quiet; the
+identical furnace smelling fearfully (some anatomical broth in it I
+suppose) as if the body were still there; jars of pieces of sour
+mortality standing about, like the forty robbers in _Ali Baba_ after
+being scalded to death; and bodies near us ready to be carried in to
+next morning's lecture. At the house where I afterwards dined I heard an
+amazing and fearful story; told by one who had been at a dinner-party of
+ten or a dozen, at Webster's, less than a year before the murder. They
+began rather uncomfortably, in consequence of one of the guests (the
+victim of an instinctive antipathy) starting up with the sweat pouring
+down his face, and crying out, 'O Heaven! There's a cat somewhere in the
+room!' The cat was found and ejected, but they didn't get on very well.
+Left with their wine, they were getting on a little better; when Webster
+suddenly told the servants to turn the gas off and bring in that bowl of
+burning minerals which he had prepared, in order that the company might
+see how ghastly they looked by its weird light. All this was done, and
+every man was looking, horror-stricken, at his neighbour; when Webster
+was seen bending over the bowl with a rope round his neck, holding up
+the end of the rope, with his head on one side and his tongue lolled
+out, to represent a hanged man!"
+
+Dickens read at Boston on the 23rd and the 24th of December, and on
+Christmas day travelled back to New York where he was to read on the
+26th. The last words written before he left were of illness. "The low
+action of the heart, or whatever it is, has inconvenienced me greatly
+this last week. On Monday night, after the reading, I was laid upon a
+bed, in a very faint and shady state; and on the Tuesday I did not get
+up till the afternoon." But what in reality was less grave took
+outwardly the form of a greater distress; and the effects of the cold
+which had struck him in travelling to Boston, as yet not known to his
+English friends, appear most to have alarmed those about him. I depart
+from my rule in this narrative, otherwise strictly observed, in singling
+out one of those friends for mention by name: but a business connection
+with the Readings, as well as untiring offices of personal kindness and
+sympathy, threw Mr. Fields into closer relations with Dickens from
+arrival to departure, than any other person had; and his description of
+the condition of health in which Dickens now quitted Boston and went
+through the rest of the labour he had undertaken, will be a sad though
+fit prelude to what the following chapter has to tell. "He went from
+Boston to New York carrying with him a severe catarrh contracted in our
+climate. He was quite ill from the effects of the disease; but he fought
+courageously against them. . . . His spirit was wonderful, and, although he
+lost all appetite and could partake of very little food, he was always
+cheerful and ready for his work when the evening came round. A dinner
+was tendered to him by some of his literary friends in Boston; but he
+was so ill the day before that the banquet had to be given up. The
+strain upon his strength and nerves was very great during all the months
+he remained, and only a man of iron will could have accomplished what he
+did. He was accustomed to talk and write a good deal about eating and
+drinking, but I have rarely seen a man eat and drink less. He liked to
+dilate in imagination over the brewing of a bowl of punch, but when the
+punch was ready he drank less of it than any one who might be present.
+It was the sentiment of the thing and not the thing itself that engaged
+his attention. I scarcely saw him eat a hearty meal during his whole
+stay. Both at Parker's hotel in Boston, and at the Westminster in New
+York, everything was arranged by the proprietors for his comfort, and
+tempting dishes to pique his invalid appetite were sent up at different
+hours of the day; but the influenza had seized him with masterful power,
+and held the strong man down till he left the country."
+
+When he arrived in New York on the evening of Christmas Day he found a
+letter from his daughter. Answering her next day he told her: "I wanted
+it much, for I had a frightful cold (English colds are nothing to those
+of this country) and was very miserable. . . . It is a bad country to be
+unwell and travelling in. You are one of, say, a hundred people in a
+heated car with a great stove in it, all the little windows being
+closed; and the bumping and banging about are indescribable, the
+atmosphere detestable, the ordinary motion all but intolerable." The
+following day this addition was made to the letter. "I managed to read
+last night, but it was as much as I could do. To-day I am so very unwell
+that I have sent for a doctor. He has just been, and is in doubt whether
+I shall not have to stop reading for a while."
+
+His stronger will prevailed, and he went on without stopping. On the
+last day of the year he announced to us that though he had been very low
+he was getting right again; that in a couple of days he should have
+accomplished a fourth of the entire Readings; and that the first month
+of the new year would see him through Philadelphia and Baltimore, as
+well as through two more nights in Boston. He also prepared his English
+friends for the startling intelligence they might shortly expect, of
+four readings coming off in a church, before an audience of two thousand
+people accommodated in pews, and with himself emerging from a vestry.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[275] Among these I think he was most delighted with the great
+naturalist and philosopher, Agassiz, whose death is unhappily announced
+while I write, and as to whom it will no longer be unbecoming to quote
+his allusion. "Agassiz, who married the last Mrs. Felton's sister, is
+not only one of the most accomplished but the most natural and jovial of
+men." Again he says: "I cannot tell you how pleased I was by Agassiz, a
+most charming fellow, or how I have regretted his seclusion for a while
+by reason of his mother's death." A valued correspondent, Mr. Grant
+Wilson, sends me a list of famous Americans who greeted Dickens at his
+first visit, and in the interval had passed away. "It is melancholy to
+contemplate the large number of American authors who had, between the
+first and second visits of Mr. Dickens, 'gone hence, to be no more
+seen.' The sturdy Cooper, the gentle Irving, his friend and kinsman
+Paulding, Prescott the historian and Percival the poet, the eloquent
+Everett, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar A. Poe, N. P. Willis, the genial
+Halleck, and many lesser lights, including Prof. Felton and Geo. P.
+Morris, had died during the quarter of a century that elapsed between
+Dickens's visits to this country, leaving a new generation of writers to
+extend the hand of friendship to him on his second coming."--Let me add
+to this that Dickens was pleased, at this second visit, to see his old
+secretary who had travelled so agreeably with him through his first tour
+of triumph. "He would have known him anywhere."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+AMERICA REVISITED: JANUARY TO APRIL 1868.
+
+1868.
+
+ Speculators and the Public--Republican
+ Self-help--Receipts affected by
+ Speculators--Again at Boston--Hit of _Marigold_
+ and of _Boots at Holly Tree_--Chapel Readings
+ at Brooklyn--Energy of New York Speculators--At
+ Philadelphia--Irish Element in New
+ York--Improved Social Ways--Result of
+ Thirty-four Readings--Shadow to the
+ Sunshine--Arrangements for Washington--At
+ Baltimore--Success in Philadelphia--Value of a
+ Vote--Objections to Coloured People--At
+ Washington--With Sumner and Stanton--Lincoln's
+ last Cabinet Council--Lincoln's
+ Dream--Interview with President
+ Johnson--Incident at First Reading--One of the
+ Audience--A Day at the Readings--Proposed
+ Walking-match--In his Hotel at
+ Philadelphia--Providence and New
+ Haven--North-west Tour--President's
+ Impeachment--Political Excitement--Boston
+ Audiences--Struggle for Tickets in Remote
+ Places--At Rochester--At Syracuse and
+ Buffalo--American Female Beauty--Suspension
+ Bridge at Niagara--Final Impression of the
+ Falls--At Utica--Reading at Albany--New England
+ Engagements--Again attacked by
+ Lameness--Reading at New Bedford--"Nearly used
+ up"--Farewell Readings--Last Boston
+ Readings--New York Farewells--Receipts
+ throughout--Public Dinner to Dickens.
+
+
+THE Reading on the third of January closed a fourth of the entire
+series, and on that day Dickens wrote of the trouble brought on them by
+the "speculators," which to some extent had affected unfavourably the
+three previous nights in New York. When adventurers buy up the best
+places, the public resent it by refusing the worst; to prevent it by
+first helping themselves, being the last thing they ever think of doing.
+"We try to withhold the best seats from the speculators, but the
+unaccountable thing is that the great mass of the public buy of them
+(prefer it), and the rest of the public are injured if we have not got
+those very seats to sell them. We have now a travelling staff of six
+men, in spite of which Dolby, who is leaving me to-day to sell tickets
+in Philadelphia to-morrow morning, will no doubt get into a tempest of
+difficulties. Of course also, in such a matter, as many obstacles as
+possible are thrown in an Englishman's way; and he may himself be a
+little injudicious into the bargain. Last night, for instance, he met
+one of the 'ushers' (who show people to their seats) coming in with one
+of our men. It is against orders that any one employed in front should
+go out during the reading, and he took this man to task in the British
+manner. Instantly, the free and independent usher put on his hat and
+walked off. Seeing which, all the other free and independent ushers
+(some 20 in number) put on _their_ hats and walked off; leaving us
+absolutely devoid and destitute of a staff for to-night. One has since
+been improvised: but it was a small matter to raise a stir and ill-will
+about, especially as one of our men was equally in fault; and really
+there is little to be done at night. American people are so accustomed
+to take care of themselves, that one of these immense audiences will
+fall into their places with an ease amazing to a frequenter of St.
+James's Hall; and the certainty with which they are all in, before I go
+on, is a very acceptable mark of respect. Our great labour is outside;
+and we have been obliged to bring our staff up to six, besides a boy or
+two, by employment of a regular additional clerk, a Bostonian. The
+speculators buying the front-seats (we have found instances of this
+being done by merchants in good position), the public won't have the
+back seats; return their tickets; write and print volumes on the
+subject; and deter others from coming. You are not to suppose that this
+prevails to any great extent, as our lowest house here has been L300;
+but it does hit us. There is no doubt about it. Fortunately I saw the
+danger when the trouble began, and changed the list at the right
+time. . . . You may get an idea of the staff's work, by what is in hand
+now. They are preparing, numbering, and stamping, 6000 tickets for
+Philadelphia, and 8000 tickets for Brooklyn. The moment those are done,
+another 8000 tickets will be wanted for Baltimore, and probably another
+6000 for Washington; and all this in addition to the correspondence,
+advertisements, accounts, travelling, and the nightly business of the
+Readings four times a week. . . . I cannot get rid of this intolerable
+cold! My landlord invented for me a drink of brandy, rum, and snow,
+called it a 'Rocky Mountain Sneezer,' and said it was to put down all
+less effectual sneezing; but it has not yet had the effect. Did I tell
+you that the favourite drink before you get up is an Eye-Opener? There
+has been another fall of snow, succeeded by a heavy thaw."
+
+The day after (the 4th) he went back to Boston, and next day wrote to
+me: "I am to read here on Monday and Tuesday, return to New York on
+Wednesday, and finish there (except the farewells in April) on Thursday
+and Friday. The New York reading of _Doctor Marigold_ made really a
+tremendous hit. The people doubted at first, having evidently not the
+least idea what could be done with it, and broke out at last into a
+perfect chorus of delight. At the end they made a great shout, and gave
+a rush towards the platform as if they were going to carry me off. It
+puts a strong additional arrow into my quiver. Another extraordinary
+success has been _Nickleby_ and _Boots at the Holly Tree_ (appreciated
+here in Boston, by the bye, even more than _Copperfield_); and think of
+our last New York night bringing L500 English into the house, after
+making more than the necessary deduction for the present price of gold!
+The manager is always going about with an immense bundle that looks like
+a sofa-cushion, but is in reality paper-money, and it had risen to the
+proportions of a sofa on the morning he left for Philadelphia. Well, the
+work is hard, the climate is hard, the life is hard: but so far the gain
+is enormous. My cold steadily refuses to stir an inch. It distresses me
+greatly at times, though it is always good enough to leave me for the
+needful two hours. I have tried allopathy, homoeopathy, cold things,
+warm things, sweet things, bitter things, stimulants, narcotics, all
+with the same result. Nothing will touch it."
+
+In the same letter, light was thrown on the ecclesiastical mystery. "At
+Brooklyn I am going to read in Mr. Ward Beecher's chapel: the only
+building there available for the purpose. You must understand that
+Brooklyn is a kind of sleeping-place for New York, and is supposed to be
+a great place in the money way. We let the seats pew by pew! the pulpit
+is taken down for my screen and gas! and I appear out of the vestry in
+canonical form! These ecclesiastical entertainments come off on the
+evenings of the 16th, 17th, 20th, and 21st, of the present month." His
+first letter after returning to New York (9th of January) made additions
+to the Brooklyn picture. "Each evening an enormous ferry-boat will
+convey me and my state-carriage (not to mention half a dozen wagons and
+any number of people and a few score of horses) across the river to
+Brooklyn, and will bring me back again. The sale of tickets there was an
+amazing scene. The noble army of speculators are now furnished (this is
+literally true, and I am quite serious) each man with a straw mattress,
+a little bag of bread and meat, two blankets, and a bottle of whiskey.
+With this outfit, _they lie down in line on the pavement_ the whole of
+the night before the tickets are sold: generally taking up their
+position at about 10. It being severely cold at Brooklyn, they made an
+immense bonfire in the street--a narrow street of wooden houses--which
+the police turned out to extinguish. A general fight then took place;
+from which the people farthest off in the line rushed bleeding when they
+saw any chance of ousting others nearer the door, put their mattresses
+in the spots so gained, and held on by the iron rails. At 8 in the
+morning Dolby appeared with the tickets in a portmanteau. He was
+immediately saluted with a roar of Halloa! Dolby! So Charley has let you
+have the carriage, has he, Dolby? How is he, Dolby? Don't drop the
+tickets, Dolby! Look alive, Dolby! &c. &c. &c. in the midst of which he
+proceeded to business, and concluded (as usual) by giving universal
+dissatisfaction. He is now going off upon a little journey to look over
+the ground and cut back again. This little journey (to Chicago) is
+twelve hundred miles on end, by railway, besides the back again!" It
+might tax the Englishman, but was nothing to the native American. It was
+part of his New York landlord's ordinary life in a week, Dickens told
+me, to go to Chicago and look at his theatre there on a Monday; to pelt
+back to Boston and look at his theatre there on a Thursday; and to come
+rushing to New York on a Friday, to apostrophize his enormous ballet.
+
+Three days later, still at New York, he wrote to his sister-in-law. "I
+am off to Philadelphia this evening for the first of three visits of two
+nights each, tickets for all being sold. My cold steadily refuses to
+leave me, but otherwise I am as well as I can hope to be under this
+heavy work. My New York readings are over (except the farewell nights),
+and I look forward to the relief of being out of my hardest hall. On
+Friday I was again dead beat at the end, and was once more laid upon a
+sofa. But the faintness went off after a little while. We have now cold
+bright frosty weather, without snow; the best weather for me." Next day
+from Philadelphia he wrote to his daughter that he was lodged in The
+Continental, one of the most immense of American hotels, but that he
+found himself just as quiet as elsewhere. "Everything is very good, my
+waiter is German, and the greater part of the servants seem to be
+coloured people. The town is very clean, and the day as blue and bright
+as a fine Italian day. But it freezes very very hard, and my cold is not
+improved; for the cars were so intolerably hot that I was often obliged
+to stand upon the brake outside, and then the frosty air bit me indeed.
+I find it necessary (so oppressed am I with this American catarrh as
+they call it) to dine at three o'clock instead of four, that I may have
+more time to get voice; so that the days are cut short and
+letter-writing not easy."
+
+He nevertheless found time in this city to write to me (14th of January)
+the most interesting mention he had yet made of such opinions as he had
+been able to form during his present visit, apart from the pursuit that
+absorbed him. Of such of those opinions as were given on a former page,
+it is only necessary to repeat that while the tone of party politics
+still impressed him unfavourably, he had thus far seen everywhere great
+changes for the better socially. I will add other points from the same
+letter. That he was unfortunate in his time of visiting New York, as far
+as its politics were concerned, what has since happened conclusively
+shows. "The Irish element is acquiring such enormous influence in New
+York city, that when I think of it, and see the large Roman Catholic
+cathedral rising there, it seems unfair to stigmatise as 'American'
+other monstrous things that one also sees. But the general corruption in
+respect of the local funds appears to be stupendous, and there is an
+alarming thing as to some of the courts of law which I am afraid is
+native-born. A case came under my notice the other day in which it was
+perfectly plain, from what was said to me by a person interested in
+resisting an injunction, that his first proceeding had been to 'look up
+the Judge.'" Of such occasional provincial oddity, harmless in itself
+but strange in large cities, as he noticed in the sort of half
+disappointment at the small fuss made by himself about the Readings, and
+in the newspaper references to "Mr. Dickens's extraordinary composure"
+on the platform, he gives an illustration. "Last night here in
+Philadelphia (my first night), a very impressible and responsive
+audience were so astounded by my simply walking in and opening my book
+that I wondered what was the matter. They evidently thought that there
+ought to have been a flourish, and Dolby sent in to prepare for me. With
+them it is the simplicity of the operation that raises wonder. With the
+newspapers 'Mr. Dickens's extraordinary composure' is not reasoned out
+as being necessary to the art of the thing, but is sensitively watched
+with a lurking doubt whether it may not imply disparagement of the
+audience. Both these things strike me as drolly expressive.". . .
+
+His testimony as to improved social habits and ways was expressed very
+decidedly. "I think it reasonable to expect that as I go westward, I
+shall find the old manners going on before me, and may tread upon their
+skirts mayhap. But so far, I have had no more intrusion or boredom than
+I have when I lead the same life in England. I write this in an immense
+hotel, but I am as much at peace in my own rooms, and am left as wholly
+undisturbed, as if I were at the Station Hotel in York. I have now read
+in New York city to 40,000 people, and am quite as well known in the
+streets there as I am in London. People will turn back, turn again and
+face me, and have a look at me, or will say to one another 'Look here!
+Dickens coming!' But no one ever stops me or addresses me. Sitting
+reading in the carriage outside the New York post-office while one of
+the staff was stamping the letters inside, I became conscious that a few
+people who had been looking at the turn-out had discovered me within.
+On my peeping out good-humouredly, one of them (I should say a
+merchant's book-keeper) stepped up to the door, took off his hat, and
+said in a frank way: 'Mr. Dickens, I should very much like to have the
+honour of shaking hands with you'--and, that done, presented two others.
+Nothing could be more quiet or less intrusive. In the railway cars, if I
+see anybody who clearly wants to speak to me, I usually anticipate the
+wish by speaking myself. If I am standing on the brake outside (to avoid
+the intolerable stove), people getting down will say with a smile: 'As I
+am taking my departure, Mr. Dickens, and can't trouble you for more than
+a moment, I should like to take you by the hand sir.' And so we shake
+hands and go our ways. . . . Of course many of my impressions come through
+the readings. Thus I find the people lighter and more humorous than
+formerly; and there must be a great deal of innocent imagination among
+every class, or they never could pet with such extraordinary pleasure as
+they do, the Boots' story of the elopement of the two little children.
+They seem to see the children; and the women set up a shrill
+undercurrent of half-pity and half-pleasure that is quite affecting.
+To-night's reading is my 26th; but as all the Philadelphia tickets for
+four more are sold, as well as four at Brooklyn, you must assume that I
+am at--say--my 35th reading. I have remitted to Coutts's in English gold
+L10,000 odd; and I roughly calculate that on this number Dolby will have
+another thousand pounds profit to pay me. These figures are of course
+between ourselves, at present; but are they not magnificent? The
+expenses, always recollect, are enormous. On the other hand we never
+have occasion to print a bill of any sort (bill-printing and posting are
+great charges at home); and have just now sold off L90 worth of
+bill-paper, provided beforehand, as a wholly useless incumbrance."
+
+Then came, as ever, the constant shadow that still attended him, the
+slave in the chariot of his triumph. "The work is very severe. There is
+now no chance of my being rid of this American catarrh until I embark
+for England. It is very distressing. It likewise happens, not seldom,
+that I am so dead beat when I come off that they lay me down on a sofa
+after I have been washed and dressed, and I lie there, extremely faint,
+for a quarter of an hour. In that time I rally and come right." One week
+later from New York, where he had become due on the 16th for the first
+of his four Brooklyn readings, he wrote to his sister-in-law. "My cold
+sticks to me, and I can scarcely exaggerate what I undergo from
+sleeplessness. I rarely take any breakfast but an egg and a cup of
+tea--not even toast or bread and butter. My small dinner at 3, and a
+little quail or some such light thing when I come home at night, is my
+daily fare; and at the hall I have established the custom of taking an
+egg beaten up in sherry before going in, and another between the parts,
+which I think pulls me up. . . . It is snowing hard now, and I begin to
+move to-morrow. There is so much floating ice in the river, that we are
+obliged to have a pretty wide margin of time for getting over the ferry
+to read." The last of the readings over the ferry was on the day when
+this letter was written. "I finished at my church to-night. It is Mrs.
+Stowe's brother's, and a most wonderful place to speak in. We had it
+enormously full last night (_Marigold_ and _Trial_), but it scarcely
+required an effort. Mr. Ward Beecher being present in his pew, I sent to
+invite him to come round before he left. I found him to be an
+unostentatious, evidently able, straightforward, and agreeable man;
+extremely well-informed, and with a good knowledge of art."
+
+Baltimore and Washington were the cities in which he was now, on
+quitting New York, to read for the first time; and as to the latter some
+doubts arose. The exceptional course had been taken in regard to it, of
+selecting a hall with space for not more than 700 and charging everybody
+five dollars; to which Dickens, at first greatly opposed, had yielded
+upon use of the argument, "you have more people at New York, thanks to
+the speculators, paying more than five dollars every night." But now
+other suggestions came. "Horace Greeley dined with me last Saturday," he
+wrote on the 20th, "and didn't like my going to Washington, now full of
+the greatest rowdies and worst kind of people in the States. Last night
+at eleven came B. expressing like doubts; and though they may be absurd
+I thought them worth attention, B. coming so close on Greeley." Mr.
+Dolby was in consequence sent express to Washington with power to
+withdraw or go on, as enquiry on the spot might dictate; and Dickens
+took the additional resolve so far to modify the last arrangements of
+his tour as to avoid the distances of Chicago, St. Louis, and
+Cincinnati, to content himself with smaller places and profits, and
+thereby to get home nearly a month earlier. He was at Philadelphia on
+the 23rd of January, when he announced this intention. "The worst of it
+is, that everybody one advises with has a monomania respecting Chicago.
+'Good heavens sir,' the great Philadelphia authority said to me this
+morning, 'if you don't read in Chicago the people will go into fits!'
+Well, I answered, I would rather they went into fits than I did. But he
+didn't seem to see it at all."
+
+From Baltimore he wrote to his sister-in-law on the 29th, in the hour's
+interval he had to spare before going back to Philadelphia. "It has been
+snowing hard for four and twenty hours--though this place is as far
+south as Valentia in Spain; and my manager, being on his way to New
+York, has a good chance of being snowed up somewhere. This is one of the
+places where Butler carried it with a high hand during the war, and
+where the ladies used to spit when they passed a Northern soldier. They
+are very handsome women, with an Eastern touch in them, and dress
+brilliantly. I have rarely seen so many fine faces in an audience. They
+are a bright responsive people likewise, and very pleasant to read to.
+My hall is a charming little opera house built by a society of Germans;
+quite a delightful place for the purpose. I stand on the stage, with the
+drop curtain down, and my screen before it. The whole scene is very
+pretty and complete, and the audience have a 'ring' in them that sounds
+deeper than the ear. I go from here to Philadelphia, to read to-morrow
+night and Friday; come through here again on Saturday on my way back to
+Washington; come back here on Saturday week for two finishing nights;
+then go to Philadelphia for two farewells--and so turn my back on the
+southern part of the country. Our new plan will give 82 readings in
+all." (The real number was 76, six having been dropped on subsequent
+political excitements.) "Of course I afterwards discovered that we had
+finally settled the list on a Friday. I shall be halfway through it at
+Washington; of course on a Friday also, and my birthday." To myself he
+wrote on the following day from Philadelphia, beginning with a thank
+Heaven that he had struck off Canada and the West, for he found the wear
+and tear "enormous." "Dolby decided that the croakers were wrong about
+Washington, and went on; the rather as his raised prices, which he put
+finally at three dollars each, gave satisfaction. Fields is so confident
+about Boston, that my remaining list includes, in all, 14 more readings
+there. I don't know how many more we might not have had here (where I
+have had attentions otherwise that have been very grateful to me), if we
+had chosen. Tickets are now being resold at ten dollars each. At
+Baltimore I had a charming little theatre, and a very apprehensive
+impulsive audience. It is remarkable to see how the Ghost of Slavery
+haunts the town; and how the shambling, untidy, evasive, and postponing
+Irrepressible proceeds about his free work, going round and round it,
+instead of at it. The melancholy absurdity of giving these people votes,
+at any rate at present, would glare at one out of every roll of their
+eyes, chuckle in their mouths, and bump in their heads, if one did not
+see (as one cannot help seeing in the country) that their
+enfranchisement is a mere party trick to get votes. Being at the
+Penitentiary the other day (this, while we mention votes), and looking
+over the books, I noticed that almost every man had been 'pardoned' a
+day or two before his time was up. Why? Because, if he had served his
+time out, he would have been _ipso facto_ disfranchised. So, this form
+of pardon is gone through to save his vote; and as every officer of the
+prison holds his place only in right of his party, of course his hopeful
+clients vote for the party that has let them out! When I read in Mr.
+Beecher's church at Brooklyn, we found the trustees had suppressed the
+fact that a certain upper gallery holding 150 was 'the Coloured
+Gallery,' On the first night not a soul could be induced to enter it;
+and it was not until it became known next day that I was certainly not
+going to read there more than four times, that we managed to fill it.
+One night at New York, on our second or third row, there were two
+well-dressed women with a tinge of colour--I should say, not even
+quadroons. But the holder of one ticket who found his seat to be next
+them, demanded of Dolby 'what he meant by fixing him next to those two
+Gord darmed cusses of niggers?' and insisted on being supplied with
+another good place. Dolby firmly replied that he was perfectly certain
+Mr. Dickens would not recognize such an objection on any account, but he
+could have his money back, if he chose. Which, after some squabbling, he
+had. In a comic scene in the New York Circus one night, when I was
+looking on, four white people sat down upon a form in a barber's shop to
+be shaved. A coloured man came as the fifth customer, and the four
+immediately ran away. This was much laughed at and applauded. In the
+Baltimore Penitentiary, the white prisoners dine on one side of the
+room, the coloured prisoners on the other; and no one has the slightest
+idea of mixing them. But it is indubitably the fact that exhalations
+not the most agreeable arise from a number of coloured people got
+together, and I was obliged to beat a quick retreat from their
+dormitory. I strongly believe that they will die out of this country
+fast. It seems, looking at them, so manifestly absurd to suppose it
+possible that they can ever hold their own against a restless, shifty,
+striving, stronger race."
+
+On the fourth of February he wrote from Washington. "You may like to
+have a line to let you know that it is all right here, and that the
+croakers were simply ridiculous. I began last night. A charming
+audience, no dissatisfaction whatever at the raised prices, nothing
+missed or lost, cheers at the end of the _Carol_, and rounds upon rounds
+of applause all through. All the foremost men and their families had
+taken tickets for the series of four. A small place to read in. L300 in
+it." It will be no violation of the rule of avoiding private detail if
+the very interesting close of this letter is given. Its anecdote of
+President Lincoln was repeatedly told by Dickens after his return, and I
+am under no necessity to withhold from it the authority of Mr. Sumner's
+name. "I am going to-morrow to see the President, who has sent to me
+twice. I dined with Charles Sumner last Sunday, against my rule; and as
+I had stipulated for no party, Mr. Secretary Stanton was the only other
+guest, besides his own secretary. Stanton is a man with a very
+remarkable memory, and extraordinarily familiar with my books. . . . He and
+Sumner having been the first two public men at the dying President's
+bedside, and having remained with him until he breathed his last, we
+fell into a very interesting conversation after dinner, when, each of
+them giving his own narrative separately, the usual discrepancies about
+details of time were observable. Then Mr. Stanton told me a curious
+little story which will form the remainder of this short letter.
+
+"On the afternoon of the day on which the President was shot, there was
+a cabinet council at which he presided. Mr. Stanton, being at the time
+commander-in-chief of the Northern troops that were concentrated about
+here, arrived rather late. Indeed they were waiting for him, and on his
+entering the room, the President broke off in something he was saying,
+and remarked: 'Let us proceed to business, gentlemen.' Mr. Stanton then
+noticed, with great surprise, that the President sat with an air of
+dignity in his chair instead of lolling about it in the most ungainly
+attitudes, as his invariable custom was; and that instead of telling
+irrelevant or questionable stories, he was grave and calm, and quite a
+different man. Mr. Stanton, on leaving the council with the
+Attorney-General, said to him, 'That is the most satisfactory cabinet
+meeting I have attended for many a long day! What an extraordinary
+change in Mr. Lincoln!' The Attorney-General replied, 'We all saw it,
+before you came in. While we were waiting for you, he said, with his
+chin down on his breast, "Gentlemen, something very extraordinary is
+going to happen, and that very soon."' To which the Attorney-General had
+observed, 'Something good, sir, I hope?' when the President answered
+very gravely: 'I don't know; I don't know. But it will happen, and
+shortly too!' As they were all impressed by his manner, the
+Attorney-General took him up again: 'Have you received any information,
+sir, not yet disclosed to us?' 'No,' answered the President: 'but I have
+had a dream. And I have now had the same dream three times. Once, on the
+night preceding the Battle of Bull Run. Once, on the night preceding'
+such another (naming a battle also not favourable to the North). His
+chin sank on his breast again, and he sat reflecting. 'Might one ask the
+nature of this dream, sir?' said the Attorney-General. 'Well,' replied
+the President, without lifting his head or changing his attitude, 'I am
+on a great broad rolling river--and I am in a boat--and I drift--and I
+drift!--But this is not business--' suddenly raising his face and
+looking round the table as Mr. Stanton entered, 'let us proceed to
+business, gentlemen.' Mr. Stanton and the Attorney-General said, as they
+walked on together, it would be curious to notice whether anything
+ensued on this; and they agreed to notice. He was shot that night."
+
+On his birthday, the seventh of February, Dickens had his interview with
+President Andrew Johnson. "This scrambling scribblement is resumed this
+morning, because I have just seen the President: who had sent to me very
+courteously asking me to make my own appointment. He is a man with a
+remarkable face, indicating courage, watchfulness, and certainly
+strength of purpose. It is a face of the Webster type, but without the
+'bounce' of Webster's face. I would have picked him out anywhere as a
+character of mark. Figure, rather stoutish for an American; a trifle
+under the middle size; hands clasped in front of him; manner,
+suppressed, guarded, anxious. Each of us looked at the other very
+hard. . . . It was in his own cabinet that I saw him. As I came away,
+Thornton drove up in a sleigh--turned out for a state occasion--to
+deliver his credentials. There was to be a cabinet council at 12. The
+room was very like a London club's ante-drawing room. On the walls, two
+engravings only: one, of his own portrait; one, of Lincoln's. . . . In the
+outer room was sitting a certain sunburnt General Blair, with many
+evidences of the war upon him. He got up to shake hands with me, and
+then I found that he had been out on the Prairie with me five-and-twenty
+years ago. . . . The papers having referred to my birthday's falling
+to-day, my room is filled with most exquisite flowers.[276] They came
+pouring in from all sorts of people at breakfast time. The audiences
+here are really very fine. So ready to laugh or cry, and doing both so
+freely, that you would suppose them to be Manchester shillings rather
+than Washington half-sovereigns. Alas! alas! my cold worse than ever."
+So he had written too at the opening of his letter.
+
+The first reading had been four days earlier, and was described to his
+daughter in a letter on the 4th, with a comical incident that occurred
+in the course of it. "The gas was very defective indeed last night, and
+I began with a small speech to the effect that I must trust to the
+brightness of their faces for the illumination of mine. This was taken
+greatly. In the _Carol_ a most ridiculous incident occurred. All of a
+sudden, I saw a dog leap out from among the seats in the centre aisle,
+and look very intently at me. The general attention being fixed on me, I
+don't think anybody saw this dog; but I felt so sure of his turning up
+again and barking, that I kept my eye wandering about in search of him.
+He was a very comic dog, and it was well for me that I was reading a
+comic part of the book. But when he bounced out into the centre aisle
+again, in an entirely new place, and (still looking intently at me)
+tried the effect of a bark upon my proceedings, I was seized with such a
+paroxysm of laughter that it communicated itself to the audience, and we
+roared at one another, loud and long." Three days later the sequel came,
+in a letter to his sister-in-law. "I mentioned the dog on the first
+night here? Next night, I thought I heard (in _Copperfield_) a
+suddenly-suppressed bark. It happened in this wise:--One of our people,
+standing just within the door, felt his leg touched, and looking down
+beheld the dog, staring intently at me, and evidently just about to
+bark. In a transport of presence of mind and fury, he instantly caught
+him up in both hands, and threw him over his own head, out into the
+entry, where the check-takers received him like a game at ball. Last
+night he came again, _with another dog_; but our people were so sharply
+on the look-out for him that he didn't get in. He had evidently
+promised to pass the other dog, free."
+
+What is expressed in these letters, of a still active, hopeful,
+enjoying, energetic spirit, able to assert itself against illness of the
+body and in some sort to overmaster it, was also so strongly impressed
+upon those who were with him, that, seeing his sufferings as they did,
+they yet found it difficult to understand the extent of them. The
+sadness thus ever underlying his triumph makes it all very tragical.
+"That afternoon of my birthday," he wrote from Baltimore on the 11th,
+"my catarrh was in such a state that Charles Sumner, coming in at five
+o'clock, and finding me covered with mustard poultice, and apparently
+voiceless, turned to Dolby and said: 'Surely, Mr. Dolby, it is
+impossible that he can read to-night!' Says Dolby: 'Sir, I have told Mr.
+Dickens so, four times to-day, and I have been very anxious. But you
+have no idea how he will change, when he gets to the little table.'
+After five minutes of the little table I was not (for the time) even
+hoarse. The frequent experience of this return of force when it is
+wanted, saves me a vast amount of anxiety; but I am not at times without
+the nervous dread that I may some day sink altogether." To the same
+effect in another letter he adds: "Dolby and Osgood" (the latter
+represented the publishing firm of Mr. Fields and was one of the
+travelling staff), "who do the most ridiculous things to keep me in
+spirits[277] (I am often very heavy, and rarely sleep much), are
+determined to have a walking match at Boston on the last day of February
+to celebrate the arrival of the day when I can say '_next_ month!' for
+home." The match ended in the Englishman's defeat; which Dickens doubly
+commemorated, by a narrative of the American victory in
+sporting-newspaper style, and by a dinner in Boston to a party of dear
+friends there.
+
+After Baltimore he was reading again at Philadelphia, from which he
+wrote to his sister-in-law on the 13th as to a characteristic trait
+observed in both places. "Nothing will induce the people to believe in
+the farewells. At Baltimore on Tuesday night (a very brilliant night
+indeed), they asked as they came out: 'When will Mr. Dickens read here
+again?' 'Never.' 'Nonsense! Not come back, after such houses as these?
+Come. Say when he'll read again.' Just the same here. We could as soon
+persuade them that I am the President, as that to-morrow night I am
+going to read here for the last time. . . . There is a child in this
+house--a little girl--to whom I presented a black doll when I was here
+last; and as I have just seen her eye at the keyhole since I began
+writing this, I think she and the doll must be outside still. 'When you
+sent it up to me by the coloured boy,' she said after receiving it
+(coloured boy is the term for black waiter), 'I gave such a cream that
+Ma come running in and creamed too, 'cos she fort I'd hurt myself. But I
+creamed a cream of joy.' She had a friend to play with her that day, and
+brought the friend with her--to my infinite confusion. A friend all
+stockings and much too tall, who sat on the sofa very far back with her
+stockings sticking stiffly out in front of her, and glared at me, and
+never spake a word. Dolby found us confronted in a sort of fascination,
+like serpent and bird."
+
+On the 15th he was again at New York, in the thick of more troubles with
+the speculators. They involved even charges of fraud in ticket-sales at
+Newhaven and Providence; indignation meetings having been held by the
+Mayors, and unavailing attempts made by his manager to turn the wrath
+aside. "I expect him back here presently half bereft of his senses, and
+I should be wholly bereft of mine if the situation were not comical as
+well as disagreeable. We can sell at our own box-office to any extent;
+but we cannot buy back of the speculators, because we have informed the
+public that all the tickets are gone; and even if we made the sacrifice
+of buying at their price and selling at ours, we should be accused of
+treating with them and of making money by it." It ended in Providence by
+his going himself to the town and making a speech; and in Newhaven it
+ended by his sending back the money taken, with intimation that he would
+not read until there had been a new distribution of the tickets approved
+by all the town. Fresh disturbance broke out upon this; but he stuck to
+his determination to delay the reading until the heats had cooled down,
+and what should have been given in the middle of February he did not
+give until the close of March.
+
+The Readings he had promised at the smaller outlying places by the
+Canadian frontier and Niagara district, including Syracuse, Rochester,
+and Buffalo, were appointed for that same March month which was to be
+the interval between the close of the ordinary readings and the
+farewells in the two leading cities. All that had been promised in New
+York were closed when he returned to Boston on the 23rd of February,
+ready for the increase he had promised there; but the check of a sudden
+political excitement came. It was the month when the vote was taken for
+impeachment of President Johnson. "It is well" (25th of February) "that
+the money has flowed in hitherto so fast, for I have a misgiving that
+the great excitement about the President's impeachment will damage our
+receipts. . . . The vote was taken at 5 last night. At 7 the three large
+theatres here, all in a rush of good business, were stricken with
+paralysis. At 8 our long line of outsiders waiting for unoccupied
+places, was nowhere. To-day you hear all the people in the streets
+talking of only one thing. I shall suppress my next week's promised
+readings (by good fortune, not yet announced), and watch the course of
+events. Nothing in this country, as I before said, lasts long; and I
+think it likely that the public may be heartily tired of the President's
+name by the 9th of March, when I read at a considerable distance from
+here. So behold me with a whole week's holiday in view!" Two days later
+he wrote pleasantly to his sister-in-law of his audiences. "They have
+come to regard the Readings and the Reader as their peculiar property;
+and you would be both amused and pleased if you could see the curious
+way in which they show this increased interest in both. Whenever they
+laugh or cry, they have taken to applauding as well; and the result is
+very inspiriting. I shall remain here until Saturday the 7th; but after
+to-morrow night shall not read here until the 1st of April, when I begin
+my farewells--six in number." On the 28th he wrote: "To-morrow
+fortnight we purpose being at the Falls of Niagara, and then we shall
+come back and really begin to wind up. I have got to know the _Carol_ so
+well that I can't remember it, and occasionally go dodging about in the
+wildest manner, to pick up lost pieces. They took it so tremendously
+last night that I was stopped every five minutes. One poor young girl in
+mourning burst into a passion of grief about Tiny Tim, and was taken
+out. We had a fine house, and, in the interval while I was out, they
+covered the little table with flowers. The cough has taken a fresh start
+as if it were a novelty, and is even worse than ever to-day. There is a
+lull in the excitement about the President: but the articles of
+impeachment are to be produced this afternoon, and then it may set in
+again. Osgood came into camp last night from selling in remote places,
+and reports that at Rochester and Buffalo (both places near the
+frontier), tickets were bought by Canada people, who had struggled
+across the frozen river and clambered over all sorts of obstructions to
+get them. Some of those distant halls turn out to be smaller than
+represented; but I have no doubt--to use an American expression--that we
+shall 'get along.' The second half of the receipts cannot reasonably be
+expected to come up to the first; political circumstances, and all other
+surroundings, considered."
+
+His old ill luck in travel pursued him. On the day his letter was
+written a snow-storm began, with a heavy gale of wind; and "after all
+the hard weather gone through," he wrote on the 2nd of March, "this is
+the worst day we have seen. It is telegraphed that the storm prevails
+over an immense extent of country, and is just the same at Chicago as
+here. I hope it may prove a wind up. We are getting sick of the very
+sound of sleigh-bells even." The roads were so bad and the trains so
+much out of time, that he had to start a day earlier; and on the 6th of
+March his tour north-west began, with the gale still blowing and the
+snow falling heavily. On the 13th he wrote to me from Buffalo.
+
+"We go to the Falls of Niagara to-morrow for our own pleasure; and I
+take all the men, as a treat. We found Rochester last Tuesday in a very
+curious state. Perhaps you know that the Great Falls of the Genessee
+River (really very fine, even so near Niagara) are at that place. In the
+height of a sudden thaw, an immense bank of ice above the rapids refused
+to yield; so that the town was threatened (for the second time in four
+years) with submersion. Boats were ready in the streets, all the people
+were up all night, and none but the children slept. In the dead of the
+night a thundering noise was heard, the ice gave way, the swollen river
+came raging and roaring down the Falls, and the town was safe. Very
+picturesque! but 'not very good for business,' as the manager says.
+Especially as the hall stands in the centre of danger, and had ten feet
+of water in it on the last occasion of flood. But I think we had above
+L200 English. On the previous night at Syracuse--a most out of the way
+and unintelligible-looking place, with apparently no people in it--we
+had L375 odd. Here, we had last night, and shall have to-night, whatever
+we can cram into the hall.
+
+"This Buffalo has become a large and important town, with numbers of
+German and Irish in it. But it is very curious to notice, as we touch
+the frontier, that the American female beauty dies out; and a woman's
+face clumsily compounded of German, Irish, Western America, and
+Canadian, not yet fused together, and not yet moulded, obtains instead.
+Our show of Beauty at night is, generally, remarkable; but we had not a
+dozen pretty women in the whole throng last night, and the faces were
+all blunt. I have just been walking about, and observing the same thing
+in the streets. . . . The winter has been so severe, that the hotel on the
+English side at Niagara (which has the best view of the Falls, and is
+for that reason very preferable) is not yet open. So we go, perforce, to
+the American: which telegraphs back to our telegram: 'all Mr. Dickens's
+requirements perfectly understood.' I have not yet been in more than two
+_very bad_ inns. I have been in some, where a good deal of what is
+popularly called 'slopping round' has prevailed; but have been able to
+get on very well. 'Slopping round,' so used, means untidyness and
+disorder. It is a comically expressive phrase, and has many meanings.
+Fields was asking the price of a quarter-cask of sherry the other day.
+'Wa'al Mussr Fields,' the merchant replies, 'that varies according to
+quality, as is but nay'tral. If yer wa'ant a sherry just to slop round
+with it, I can fix you some at a very low figger.'"
+
+His letter was resumed at Rochester on the 18th. "After two most
+brilliant days at the Falls of Niagara, we got back here last night.
+To-morrow morning we turn out at 6 for a long railway journey back to
+Albany. But it is nearly all 'back' now, thank God! I don't know how
+long, though, before turning, we might have gone on at Buffalo. . . . We
+went everywhere at the Falls, and saw them in every aspect. There is a
+suspension bridge across, now, some two miles or more from the Horse
+Shoe; and another, half a mile nearer, is to be opened in July. They are
+very fine but very ticklish, hanging aloft there, in the continual
+vibration of the thundering water: nor is one greatly reassured by the
+printed notice that troops must not cross them at step, that bands of
+music must not play in crossing, and the like. I shall never forget the
+last aspect in which we saw Niagara yesterday. We had been everywhere,
+when I thought of struggling (in an open carriage) up some very
+difficult ground for a good distance, and getting where we could stand
+above the river, and see it, as it rushes forward to its tremendous
+leap, coming for miles and miles. All away to the horizon on our right
+was a wonderful confusion of bright green and white water. As we stood
+watching it with our faces to the top of the Falls, our backs were
+towards the sun. The majestic valley below the Falls, so seen through
+the vast cloud of spray, was made of rainbow. The high banks, the riven
+rocks, the forests, the bridge, the buildings, the air, the sky, were
+all made of rainbow. Nothing in Turner's finest water-colour drawings,
+done in his greatest day, is so ethereal, so imaginative, so gorgeous in
+colour, as what I then beheld. I seemed to be lifted from the earth and
+to be looking into Heaven. What I once said to you, as I witnessed the
+scene five and twenty years ago, all came back at this most affecting
+and sublime sight. The 'muddy vesture of our clay' falls from us as we
+look. . . . I chartered a separate carriage for our men, so that they might
+see all in their own way, and at their own time.
+
+"There is a great deal of water out between Rochester and New York, and
+travelling is very uncertain, as I fear we may find to-morrow. There is
+again some little alarm here on account of the river rising too fast.
+But our to-night's house is far ahead of the first. Most charming halls
+in these places; excellent for sight and sound. Almost invariably built
+as theatres, with stage, scenery, and good dressing-rooms. Audience
+seated to perfection (every seat always separate), excellent doorways
+and passages, and brilliant light. My screen and gas are set up in front
+of the drop-curtain, and the most delicate touches will tell anywhere.
+No creature but my own men ever near me."
+
+His anticipation of the uncertainty that might beset his travel back had
+dismal fulfilment. It is described in a letter written on the 21st from
+Springfield to his valued friend, Mr. Frederic Ouvry, having much
+interest of its own, and making lively addition to the picture which
+these chapters give. The unflagging spirit that bears up under all
+disadvantages is again marvellously shown. "You can hardly imagine what
+my life is with its present conditions--how hard the work is, and how
+little time I seem to have at my disposal. It is necessary to the daily
+recovery of my voice that I should dine at 3 when not travelling; I
+begin to prepare for the evening at 6; and I get back to my hotel,
+pretty well knocked up, at half-past 10. Add to all this, perpetual
+railway travelling in one of the severest winters ever known; and you
+will descry a reason or two for my being an indifferent correspondent.
+Last Sunday evening I left the Falls of Niagara for this and two
+intervening places. As there was a great thaw, and the melted snow was
+swelling all the rivers, the whole country for three hundred miles was
+flooded. On the Tuesday afternoon (I had read on the Monday) the train
+gave in, as under circumstances utterly hopeless, and stopped at a place
+called Utica; the greater part of which was under water, while the high
+and dry part could produce nothing particular to eat. Here, some of the
+wretched passengers passed the night in the train, while others stormed
+the hotel. I was fortunate enough to get a bed-room, and garnished it
+with an enormous jug of gin-punch; over which I and the manager played a
+double-dummy rubber. At six in the morning we were knocked up: 'to come
+aboard and try it.' At half-past six we were knocked up again with the
+tidings 'that it was of no use coming aboard or trying it.' At eight all
+the bells in the town were set agoing, to summon us to 'come aboard'
+instantly. And so we started, through the water, at four or five miles
+an hour; seeing nothing but drowned farms, barns adrift like Noah's
+arks, deserted villages, broken bridges, and all manner of ruin. I was
+to read at Albany that night, and all the tickets were sold. A very
+active superintendent of works assured me that if I could be 'got along'
+he was the man to get me along: and that if I couldn't be got along, I
+might conclude that it couldn't possibly be fixed. He then turned on a
+hundred men in seven-league boots, who went ahead of the train, each
+armed with a long pole and pushing the blocks of ice away. Following
+this cavalcade, we got to land at last, and arrived in time for me to
+read the _Carol_ and _Trial_ triumphantly. My people (I had five of the
+staff with me) turned to at their work with a will, and did a day's
+labour in a couple of hours. If we had not come in as we did, I should
+have lost L350, and Albany would have gone distracted. You may conceive
+what the flood was, when I hint at the two most notable incidents of our
+journey:--1, We took the passengers out of two trains, who had been in
+the water, immovable all night and all the previous day. 2, We released
+a large quantity of sheep and cattle from trucks that had been in the
+water I don't know how long, but so long that the creatures in them had
+begun to eat each other, and presented a most horrible spectacle."[278]
+
+Beside Springfield, he had engagements at Portland, New Bedford, and
+other places in Massachusetts, before the Boston farewells began; and
+there wanted but two days to bring him to that time, when he thus
+described to his daughter the labour which was to occupy them. His
+letter was from Portland on the 29th of March, and it will be observed
+that he no longer compromises or glozes over what he was and had been
+suffering. During his terrible travel to Albany his cough had somewhat
+spared him, but the old illness had broken out in his foot; and, though
+he persisted in ascribing it to the former supposed origin ("having been
+lately again wet, from walking in melted snow, which I suppose to be the
+occasion of its swelling in the old way"), it troubled him sorely,
+extended now at intervals to the right foot also, and lamed him for all
+the time he remained in the States. "I should have written to you by the
+last mail, but I really was too unwell to do it. The writing day was
+last Friday, when I ought to have left Boston for New Bedford (55 miles)
+before eleven in the morning. But I was so exhausted that I could not be
+got up, and had to take my chance of an evening train's producing me in
+time to read--which it just did. With the return of snow, nine days ago,
+my cough became as bad as ever. I have coughed every morning from two or
+three till five or six, and have been absolutely sleepless. I have had
+no appetite besides, and no taste.[279] Last night here, I took some
+laudanum; and it is the only thing that has done me good, though it made
+me sick this morning. But the life, in this climate, is so very hard!
+When I did manage to get to New Bedford, I read with my utmost force and
+vigour. Next morning, well or ill, I must turn out at seven, to get
+back to Boston on my way here. I dined at Boston at three, and at five
+had to come on here (a hundred and thirty miles or so) for to-morrow
+night: there being no Sunday train. To-morrow night I read here in a
+very large place; and Tuesday morning at six I must again start, to get
+back to Boston once more. But after to-morrow night I have only the
+farewells, thank God! Even as it is, however, I have had to write to
+Dolby (who is in New York) to see my doctor there, and ask him to send
+me some composing medicine that I can take at night, inasmuch as without
+sleep I cannot get through. However sympathetic and devoted the people
+are about one, they CAN NOT be got to comprehend, seeing me able to do
+the two hours when the time comes round, that it may also involve much
+misery." To myself on the 30th he wrote from the same place, making like
+confession. No comment could deepen the sadness of the story of
+suffering, revealed in his own simple language. "I write in a town three
+parts of which were burnt down in a tremendous fire three years ago. The
+people lived in tents while their city was rebuilding. The charred
+trunks of the trees with which the streets of the old city were planted,
+yet stand here and there in the new thoroughfares like black spectres.
+The rebuilding is still in progress everywhere. Yet such is the
+astonishing energy of the people that the large hall in which I am to
+read to-night (its predecessor was burnt) would compare very favourably
+with the Free Trade Hall at Manchester! . . . I am nearly used up. Climate,
+distance, catarrh, travelling, and hard work, have begun (I may say so,
+now they are nearly all over) to tell heavily upon me. Sleeplessness
+besets me; and if I had engaged to go on into May, I think I must have
+broken down. It was well that I cut off the Far West and Canada when I
+did. There would else have been a sad complication. It is impossible to
+make the people about one understand, however zealous and devoted (it is
+impossible even to make Dolby understand until the pinch comes), that
+the power of coming up to the mark every night, with spirits and spirit,
+may coexist with the nearest approach to sinking under it. When I got
+back to Boston on Thursday, after a very hard three weeks, I saw that
+Fields was very grave about my going on to New Bedford (55 miles) next
+day, and then coming on here (180 miles) _next_ day. But the stress is
+over, and so I can afford to look back upon it, and think about it, and
+write about it." On the 31st he closed his letter at Boston, and he was
+at home when I heard of him again. "The latest intelligence, my dear old
+fellow, is, that I have arrived here safely, and that I am certainly
+better. I consider my work virtually over, now. My impression is, that
+the political crisis will damage the farewells by about one half. I
+cannot yet speak by the card; but my predictions here, as to our
+proceedings, have thus far been invariably right. We took last night at
+Portland, L360 English; where a costly Italian troupe, using the same
+hall to-night, had not booked L14! It is the same all over the country,
+and the worst is not seen yet. Everything is becoming absorbed in the
+Presidential impeachment, helped by the next Presidential election.
+Connecticut is particularly excited. The night after I read at Hartford
+this last week, there were two political meetings in the town; meetings
+of two parties; and the hotel was full of speakers coming in from
+outlying places. So at Newhaven: the moment I had finished, carpenters
+came in to prepare for next night's politics. So at Buffalo. So
+everywhere very soon."
+
+In the same tone he wrote his last letter to his sister-in-law from
+Boston. "My notion of the farewells is pretty certain now to turn out
+right. We had L300 English here last night. To-day is a Fast Day, and
+to-night we shall probably take much less. Then it is likely that we
+shall pull up again, and strike a good reasonable average; but it is not
+at all probable that we shall do anything enormous. Every pulpit in
+Massachusetts will resound with violent politics to-day and to-night."
+That was on the second of April, and a postscript was added. "Friday
+afternoon the 3rd. Catarrh worse than ever! and we don't know (at four
+o'clock) whether I can read to-night or must stop. Otherwise, all well."
+
+Dickens's last letter from America was written to his daughter Mary from
+Boston on the 9th of April, the day before his sixth and last farewell
+night. "I not only read last Friday when I was doubtful of being able to
+do so, but read as I never did before, and astonished the audience quite
+as much as myself. You never saw or heard such a scene of excitement.
+Longfellow and all the Cambridge men have urged me to give in. I have
+been very near doing so, but feel stronger to-day. I cannot tell whether
+the catarrh may have done me any lasting injury in the lungs or other
+breathing organs, until I shall have rested and got home. I hope and
+believe not. Consider the weather! There have been two snow storms since
+I wrote last, and to-day the town is blotted out in a ceaseless whirl of
+snow and wind. Dolby is as tender as a woman, and as watchful as a
+doctor. He never leaves me during the reading, now, but sits at the side
+of the platform, and keeps his eye upon me all the time. Ditto George
+the gasman, steadiest and most reliable man I ever employed. I have
+_Dombey_ to do to-night, and must go through it carefully; so here ends
+my report. The personal affection of the people in this place is
+charming to the last. Did I tell you that the New York Press are going
+to give me a public dinner on Saturday the 18th?"
+
+In New York, where there were five farewell nights, three thousand two
+hundred and ninety-eight dollars were the receipts of the last, on the
+20th of April; those of the last at Boston, on the 8th, having been
+three thousand four hundred and fifty-six dollars. But on earlier nights
+in the same cities respectively, these sums also had been reached; and
+indeed, making allowance for an exceptional night here and there, the
+receipts varied so wonderfully little, that a mention of the highest
+average returns from other places will give no exaggerated impression of
+the ordinary receipts throughout. Excluding fractions of dollars, the
+lowest were New Bedford ($1640), Rochester ($1906), Springfield ($1970),
+and Providence ($2140). Albany and Worcester averaged something less
+than $2400; while Hartford, Buffalo, Baltimore, Syracuse, Newhaven, and
+Portland rose to $2600. Washington's last night was $2610, no night
+there having less than $2500. Philadelphia exceeded Washington by $300,
+and Brooklyn went ahead of Philadelphia by $200. The amount taken at the
+four Brooklyn readings was 11,128 dollars.
+
+The New York public dinner was given at Delmonico's, the hosts were more
+than two hundred, and the chair was taken by Mr. Horace Greeley. Dickens
+attended with great difficulty,[280] and spoke in pain. But he used the
+occasion to bear his testimony to the changes of twenty-five years; the
+rise of vast new cities; growth in the graces and amenities of life;
+much improvement in the press, essential to every other advance; and
+changes in himself leading to opinions more deliberately formed. He
+promised his kindly entertainers that no copy of his _Notes_, or his
+_Chuzzlewit_, should in future be issued by him without accompanying
+mention of the changes to which he had referred that night; of the
+politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, and consideration in
+all ways for which he had to thank them; and of his gratitude for the
+respect shown, during all his visit, to the privacy enforced upon him by
+the nature of his work and the condition of his health.
+
+He had to leave the room before the proceedings were over. On the
+following Monday he read to his last American audience, telling them at
+the close that he hoped often to recall them, equally by his winter fire
+and in the green summer weather, and never as a mere public audience but
+as a host of personal friends. He sailed two days later in the "Russia,"
+and reached England in the first week of May 1868.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[276] few days later he described it to his daughter. "I couldn't help
+laughing at myself on my birthday at Washington; it was observed so much
+as though I were a little boy. Flowers and garlands of the most
+exquisite kind, arranged in all manner of green baskets, bloomed over
+the room; letters radiant with good wishes poured in; a shirt pin, a
+handsome silver travelling bottle, a set of gold shirt studs, and a set
+of gold sleeve links, were on the dinner table. Also, by hands unknown,
+the hall at night was decorated; and after _Boots at the Holly Tree_,
+the whole audience rose and remained, great people and all, standing and
+cheering, until I went back to the table and made them a little speech."
+
+[277] Mr. Dolby unconsciously contributed at this time to the same happy
+result by sending out some advertisements in these exact words: "The
+Reading will be comprised within _two minutes_, and the audience are
+earnestly entreated to be seated _ten hours_ before its commencement."
+He had transposed the minutes and the hours.
+
+[278] What follows is from the close of the letter. "On my return, I
+have arranged with Chappell to take my leave of reading for good and
+all, in a hundred autumnal and winter Farewells _for ever_. I return by
+the Cunard steam-ship 'Russia.' I had the second officer's cabin on
+deck, when I came out; and I am to have the chief steward's going home.
+Cunard was so considerate as to remember that it will be on the sunny
+side of the vessel."
+
+[279] Here was his account of his mode of living for his last ten weeks
+in America. "I cannot eat (to anything like the necessary extent) and
+have established this system. At 7 in the morning, in bed, a tumbler of
+new cream and two tablespoonsful of rum. At 12, a sherry cobbler and a
+biscuit. At 3 (dinner time) a pint of champagne. At five minutes to 8,
+an egg beaten up with a glass of sherry. Between the parts, the
+strongest beef tea that can be made, drunk hot. At a quarter past 10,
+soup, and any little thing to drink that I can fancy. I do not eat more
+than half a pound of solid food in the whole four-and-twenty hours, if
+so much."
+
+[280] Here is the newspaper account: "At about five o'clock on Saturday
+the hosts began to assemble, but at 5.30 news was received that the
+expected guest had succumbed to a painful affection of the foot. In a
+short time, however, another bulletin announced Mr. Dickens's intention
+to attend the dinner at all hazards. At a little after six, having been
+assisted up the stairs, he was joined by Mr. Greeley, and the hosts
+forming in two lines silently permitted the distinguished gentlemen to
+pass through. Mr. Dickens limped perceptibly; his right foot was
+swathed, and he leaned heavily on the arm of Mr. Greeley. He evidently
+suffered great pain."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+LAST READINGS.
+
+1868-1870.
+
+ At Home--Project for Last Readings--What the
+ Readings did and undid--Profit from all the
+ Readings--Noticeable Changes--Proposed Reading
+ from _Oliver Twist_--Parting from his Youngest
+ Son--Death of his Brother Frederick--Old
+ Friends--_Sikes and Nancy_ Reading--Reading
+ stopped--Mr. Syme's Opinion of the
+ Lameness--Emerson Tennent's Funeral--Public
+ Dinner in Liverpool--His Description of his
+ Illness--Brought to Town--Sir Thomas Watson's
+ Note of the Case--Close of Career as Public
+ Reader.
+
+
+FAVOURABLE weather helped him pleasantly home. He had profited greatly
+by the sea voyage, perhaps greatly more by its repose; and on the 25th
+of May he described himself to his Boston friends as brown beyond
+belief, and causing the greatest disappointment in all quarters by
+looking so well. "My doctor was quite broken down in spirits on seeing
+me for the first time last Saturday. _Good Lord! seven years younger!_
+said the doctor, recoiling." That he gave all the credit to "those fine
+days at sea," and none to the rest from such labours as he had passed
+through, the close of the letter too sadly showed. "We are already
+settling--think of this!--the details of my farewell course of
+readings."
+
+Even on his way out to America that enterprise was in hand. From Halifax
+he had written to me. "I told the Chappells that when I got back to
+England, I would have a series of farewell readings in town and country;
+and then read No More. They at once offer in writing to pay all expenses
+whatever, to pay the ten per cent. for management, and to pay me, for a
+series of 75, six thousand pounds." The terms were raised and settled
+before the first Boston readings closed. The number was to be a hundred;
+and the payment, over and above expenses and per centage, eight thousand
+pounds. Such a temptation undoubtedly was great; and though it was a
+fatal mistake which Dickens committed in yielding to it, it was not an
+ignoble one. He did it under no excitement from the American gains, of
+which he knew nothing when he pledged himself to the enterprise. No man
+could care essentially less for mere money than he did. But the
+necessary provision for many sons was a constant anxiety; he was proud
+of what the Readings had done to abridge this care; and the very strain
+of them under which it seems certain that his health had first given
+way, and which he always steadily refused to connect especially with
+them, had also broken the old confidence of being at all times available
+for his higher pursuit. What affected his health only he would not
+regard as part of the question either way. That was to be borne as the
+lot more or less of all men; and the more thorough he could make his
+feeling of independence, and of ability to rest, by what was now in
+hand, the better his final chances of a perfect recovery would be. That
+was the spirit in which he entered on this last engagement. It was an
+opportunity offered for making a particular work really complete before
+he should abandon it for ever. Something of it will not be
+indiscernible even in the summary of his past acquisitions, which with a
+pardonable exultation he now sent me.
+
+"We had great difficulty in getting our American accounts squared to the
+point of ascertaining what Dolby's commission amounted to in English
+money. After all, we were obliged to call in the aid of a money-changer,
+to determine what he should pay as his share of the average loss of
+conversion into gold. With this deduction made, I think his commission
+(I have not the figures at hand) was L2,888; Ticknor and Fields had a
+commission of L1,000, besides 5 per cent. on all Boston receipts. The
+expenses in America to the day of our sailing were 38,948
+dollars;--roughly 39,000 dollars, or L13,000. The preliminary expenses
+were L614. The average price of gold was nearly 40 per cent., and yet my
+profit was within a hundred or so of L20,000. Supposing me to have got
+through the present engagement in good health, I shall have made by the
+Readings, _in two years_, L33,000: that is to say, L13,000 received from
+the Chappells, and L20,000 from America. What I had made by them before,
+I could only ascertain by a long examination of Coutts's books. I should
+say, certainly not less than L10,000: for I remember that I made half
+that money in the first town and country campaign with poor Arthur
+Smith. These figures are of course between ourselves; but don't you
+think them rather remarkable? The Chappell bargain began with L50 a
+night and everything paid; then became L60; and now rises to L80."
+
+The last readings were appointed to begin with October; and at the
+request of an old friend, Chauncy Hare Townshend, who died during his
+absence in the States, he had accepted the trust, which occupied him
+some part of the summer, of examining and selecting for publication a
+bequest of some papers on matters of religious belief, which were issued
+in a small volume the following year. There came also in June a visit
+from Longfellow and his daughters, with later summer visits from the
+Eliot Nortons; and at the arrival of friends whom he loved and honoured
+as he did these, from the great country to which he owed so much,
+infinite were the rejoicings of Gadshill. Nothing could quench his old
+spirit in this way. But in the intervals of my official work I saw him
+frequently that summer, and never without the impression that America
+had told heavily upon him. There was manifest abatement of his natural
+force, the elasticity of bearing was impaired, and the wonderful
+brightness of eye was dimmed at times. One day, too, as he walked from
+his office with Miss Hogarth to dine at our house, he could read only
+the halves of the letters over the shop doors that were on his right as
+he looked. He attributed it to medicine. It was an additional
+unfavourable symptom that his right foot had become affected as well as
+the left, though not to anything like the same extent, during the
+journey from the Canada frontier to Boston. But all this disappeared,
+upon any special cause for exertion; and he was never unprepared to
+lavish freely for others the reserved strength that should have been
+kept for himself. This indeed was the great danger, for it dulled the
+apprehension of us all to the fact that absolute and pressing danger did
+positively exist.
+
+He had scarcely begun these last readings than he was beset by a
+misgiving, that, for a success large enough to repay Messrs. Chappell's
+liberality, the enterprise would require a new excitement to carry him
+over the old ground; and it was while engaged in Manchester and
+Liverpool at the outset of October that this announcement came. "I have
+made a short reading of the murder in _Oliver Twist_. I cannot make up
+my mind, however, whether to do it or not. I have no doubt that I could
+perfectly petrify an audience by carrying out the notion I have of the
+way of rendering it. But whether the impression would not be so horrible
+as to keep them away another time, is what I cannot satisfy myself upon.
+What do you think? It is in three short parts: 1, Where Fagin sets Noah
+Claypole on to watch Nancy. 2, The scene on London Bridge. 3, Where
+Fagin rouses Claypole from his sleep, to tell his perverted story to
+Sikes. And the Murder, and the Murderer's sense of being haunted. I have
+adapted and cut about the text with great care, and it is very powerful.
+I have to-day referred the book and the question to the Chappells as so
+largely interested." I had a strong dislike to this proposal, less
+perhaps on the ground which ought to have been taken of the physical
+exertion it would involve, than because such a subject seemed to be
+altogether out of the province of reading; and it was resolved, that,
+before doing it, trial should be made to a limited private audience in
+St. James's Hall. The note announcing this, from Liverpool on the 25th
+of October, is for other reasons worth printing. "I give you earliest
+notice that the Chappells suggest to me the 18th of November" (the 14th
+was chosen) "for trial of the _Oliver Twist_ murder, when everything in
+use for the previous day's reading can be made available. I hope this
+may suit you? We have been doing well here; and how it was arranged,
+nobody knows, but we had L410 at St. James's Hall last Tuesday, having
+advanced from our previous L360. The expenses are such, however, on the
+princely scale of the Chappells, that we never begin at a smaller, often
+at a larger, cost than L180. . . . I have not been well, and have been
+heavily tired. However, I have little to complain of--nothing, nothing;
+though, like Mariana, I am aweary. But think of this. If all go well,
+and (like Mr. Dennis) I 'work off' this series triumphantly, I shall
+have made of these readings L28,000 in a year and a half." This did not
+better reconcile me to what had been too clearly forced upon him by the
+supposed necessity of some new excitement to ensure a triumphant result;
+and even the private rehearsal only led to a painful correspondence
+between us, of which a few words are all that need now be preserved. "We
+might have agreed," he wrote, "to differ about it very well, because we
+only wanted to find out the truth if we could, and because it was quite
+understood that I wanted to leave behind me the recollection of
+something very passionate and dramatic, done with simple means, if the
+art would justify the theme." Apart from mere personal considerations,
+the whole question lay in these last words. It was impossible for me to
+admit that the effect to be produced was legitimate, or such as it was
+desirable to associate with the recollection of his readings.
+
+Mention should not be omitted of two sorrows which affected him at this
+time. At the close of the month before the readings began his youngest
+son went forth from home to join an elder brother in Australia. "These
+partings are hard hard things" (26th of September), "but they are the
+lot of us all, and might have to be done without means or influence, and
+then would be far harder. God bless him!" Hardly a month later, the last
+of his surviving brothers, Frederick, the next to himself, died at
+Darlington. "He had been tended" (24th of October) "with the greatest
+care and affection by some local friends. It was a wasted life, but God
+forbid that one should be hard upon it, or upon anything in this world
+that is not deliberately and coldly wrong."
+
+Before October closed the renewal of his labour had begun to tell upon
+him. He wrote to his sister-in-law on the 29th of sickness and sleepless
+nights, and of its having become necessary, when he had to read, that he
+should lie on the sofa all day. After arrival at Edinburgh in December
+he had been making a calculation that the railway travelling over such a
+distance involved something more than thirty thousand shocks to the
+nerves; but he went on to Christmas, alternating these far-off places
+with nights regularly intervening in London, without much more complaint
+than of an inability to sleep. Trade reverses at Glasgow had checked the
+success there,[281] but Edinburgh made compensation. "The affectionate
+regard of the people exceeds all bounds and is shown in every way. The
+audiences do everything but embrace me, and take as much pains with the
+readings as I do. . . . The keeper of the Edinburgh hall, a fine old
+soldier, presented me on Friday night with the most superb red camellia
+for my button-hole that ever was seen. Nobody can imagine how he came by
+it, as the florists had had a considerable demand for that colour, from
+ladies in the stalls, and could get no such thing."
+
+The second portion of the enterprise opened with the New Year, and the
+_Sikes and Nancy_ scenes, everywhere his prominent subject, exacted the
+most terrible physical exertion from him. In January he was at Clifton,
+where he had given, he told his sister-in-law, "by far the best Murder
+yet done;" while at the same date he wrote to his daughter: "At Clifton
+on Monday night we had a contagion of fainting; and yet the place was
+not hot. I should think we had from a dozen to twenty ladies taken out
+stiff and rigid, at various times! It became quite ridiculous." He was
+afterwards at Cheltenham. "Macready is of opinion that the Murder is two
+Macbeths. He declares that he heard every word of the reading, but I
+doubt it. Alas! he is sadly infirm." On the 27th he wrote to his
+daughter from Torquay that the place into which they had put him to
+read, and where a pantomime had been played the night before, was
+something between a Methodist chapel, a theatre, a circus, a
+riding-school, and a cow-house. That day he wrote to me from Bath:
+"Landor's ghost goes along the silent streets here before me. . . . The
+place looks to me like a cemetery which the Dead have succeeded in
+rising and taking. Having built streets, of their old gravestones, they
+wander about scantly trying to 'look alive.' A dead failure."
+
+In the second week of February he was in London, under engagement to
+return to Scotland (which he had just left) after the usual weekly
+reading at St. James's Hall, when there was a sudden interruption. "My
+foot has turned lame again!" was his announcement to me on the 15th,
+followed next day by this letter. "Henry Thompson will not let me read
+to-night, and will not let me go to Scotland to-morrow. Tremendous house
+here, and also in Edinburgh. Here is the certificate he drew up for
+himself and Beard to sign. 'We the undersigned hereby certify that Mr.
+C. D. is suffering from inflammation of the foot (caused by
+over-exertion), and that we have forbidden his appearance on the
+platform this evening, as he must keep his room for a day or two.' I
+have sent up to the Great Western Hotel for apartments, and, if I can
+get them, shall move there this evening. Heaven knows what engagements
+this may involve in April! It throws us all back, and will cost me some
+five hundred pounds."
+
+A few days' rest again brought so much relief, that, against the urgent
+entreaties of members of his family as well as other friends, he was in
+the railway carriage bound for Edinburgh on the morning of the 20th of
+February, accompanied by Mr. Chappell himself. "I came down lazily on a
+sofa," he wrote to me from Edinburgh next day, "hardly changing my
+position the whole way. The railway authorities had done all sorts of
+things, and I was more comfortable than on the sofa at the hotel. The
+foot gave me no uneasiness, and has been quiet and steady all
+night."[282] He was nevertheless under the necessity, two days later, of
+consulting Mr. Syme; and he told his daughter that this great authority
+had warned him against over-fatigue in the readings, and given him some
+slight remedies, but otherwise reported him in "joost pairfactly
+splendid condition." With care he thought the pain might be got rid of.
+"'Wa'at mad' Thompson think it was goot?' he said often, and seemed to
+take that opinion extremely ill." Again before leaving Scotland he saw
+Mr. Syme, and wrote to me on the second of March of the indignation with
+which he again treated the gout diagnosis, declaring the disorder to be
+an affection of the delicate nerves and muscles originating in cold. "I
+told him that it had shewn itself in America in the other foot as well.
+'Noo I'll joost swear,' said he, 'that ayond the fatigue o' the readings
+ye'd been tramping i' th' snaw, within twa or three days.' I certainly
+had. 'Wa'al,' said he triumphantly, 'and hoo did it first begin? I' th'
+snaw. Goot! Bah!--Thompson knew no other name for it, and just ca'd it
+Goot--Boh!' For which he took two guineas." Yet the famous pupil, Sir
+Henry Thompson, went certainly nearer the mark than the distinguished
+master, Mr. Syme, in giving to it a more than local character.
+
+The whole of that March month he went on with the scenes from _Oliver
+Twist_. "The foot goes famously," he wrote to his daughter. "I feel the
+fatigue in it (four Murders in one week[283]) but not overmuch. It
+merely aches at night; and so does the other, sympathetically I
+suppose." At Hull on the 8th he heard of the death of the old and dear
+friend, Emerson Tennent, to whom he had inscribed his last book; and on
+the morning of the 12th I met him at the funeral. He had read the
+_Oliver Twist_ scenes the night before at York; had just been able to
+get to the express train, after shortening the pauses in the reading, by
+a violent rush when it was over; and had travelled through the night. He
+appeared to, me "dazed" and worn. No man could well look more so than he
+did, that sorrowful morning.
+
+The end was near. A public dinner, which will have mention on a later
+page, had been given him in Liverpool on the 10th of April, with Lord
+Dufferin in the chair, and a reading was due from him in Preston on the
+22nd of that month. But on Sunday the 18th we had ill report of him from
+Chester, and on the 21st he wrote from Blackpool to his sister-in-law.
+"I have come to this Sea-Beach Hotel (charming) for a day's rest. I am
+much better than I was on Sunday; but shall want careful looking to, to
+get through the readings. My weakness and deadness are all on the left
+side; and if I don't look at anything I try to touch with my left hand,
+I don't know where it is. I am in (secret) consultation with Frank
+Beard, who says that I have given him indisputable evidences of overwork
+which he could wish to treat immediately; and so I have telegraphed for
+him. I have had a delicious walk by the sea to-day, and I sleep soundly,
+and have picked up amazingly in appetite. My foot is greatly better too,
+and I wear my own boot." Next day was appointed for the reading at
+Preston; and from that place he wrote to me, while waiting the arrival
+of Mr. Beard. "Don't say anything about it, but the tremendously severe
+nature of this work is a little shaking me. At Chester last Sunday I
+found myself extremely giddy, and extremely uncertain of my sense of
+touch, both in the left leg and the left hand and arms. I had been
+taking some slight medicine of Beard's; and immediately wrote to him
+describing exactly what I felt, and asking him whether those feelings
+_could be_ referable to the medicine? He promptly replied: 'There can be
+no mistaking them from your exact account. The medicine cannot possibly
+have caused them. I recognise indisputable symptoms of overwork, and I
+wish to take you in hand without any loss of time.' They have greatly
+modified since, but he is coming down here this afternoon. To-morrow
+night at Warrington I shall have but 25 more nights to work through. If
+he can coach me up for them, I do not doubt that I shall get all right
+again--as I did when I became free in America. The foot has given me
+very little trouble. Yet it is remarkable that it is _the left foot
+too_; and that I told Henry Thompson (before I saw his old master Syme)
+that I had an inward conviction that whatever it was, it was not gout. I
+also told Beard, a year after the Staplehurst accident, that I was
+certain that my heart had been fluttered, and wanted a little helping.
+This the stethoscope confirmed; and considering the immense exertion I
+am undergoing, and the constant jarring of express trains, the case
+seems to me quite intelligible. Don't say anything in the Gad's
+direction about my being a little out of sorts. I have broached the
+matter of course; but very lightly. Indeed there is no reason for
+broaching it otherwise."
+
+Even to the close of that letter he had buoyed himself up with the hope
+that he might yet be "coached" and that the readings need not be
+discontinued. But Mr. Beard stopped them at once, and brought his
+patient to London. On Friday morning the 23rd, the same envelope brought
+me a note from himself to say that he was well enough, but tired; in
+perfectly good spirits, not at all uneasy, and writing this himself that
+I should have it under his own hand; with a note from his eldest son to
+say that his father appeared to him to be very ill, and that a
+consultation had been appointed with Sir Thomas Watson. The statement of
+that distinguished physician, sent to myself in June 1872, completes for
+the present the sorrowful narrative.
+
+"It was, I think, on the 23rd of April 1869 that I was asked to see
+Charles Dickens, in consultation with Mr. Carr Beard. After I got home I
+jotted down, from their joint account, what follows.
+
+"After unusual irritability, C. D. found himself, last Saturday or
+Sunday, giddy, with a tendency to go backwards, and to turn round.
+Afterwards, desiring to put something on a small table, he pushed it and
+the table forwards, undesignedly. He had some odd feeling of insecurity
+about his left leg, as if there was something unnatural about his heel;
+but he could lift, and he did not drag, his leg. Also he spoke of some
+strangeness of his left hand and arm; missed the spot on which he wished
+to lay that hand, unless he carefully looked at it; felt an unreadiness
+to lift his hands towards his head, especially his left hand--when, for
+instance, he was brushing his hair.
+
+"He had written thus to Mr. Carr Beard.
+
+"'Is it possible that anything in my medicine can have made me extremely
+giddy, extremely uncertain of my footing, especially on the left side,
+and extremely indisposed to raise my hands to my head. These symptoms
+made me very uncomfortable on Saturday (qy. Sunday?) night, and all
+yesterday, &c.'
+
+"The state thus described showed plainly that C. D. had been on the
+brink of an attack of paralysis of his left side, and possibly of
+apoplexy. It was, no doubt, the result of extreme hurry, overwork, and
+excitement, incidental to his Readings.
+
+"On hearing from him Mr. Carr Beard had gone at once to Preston, or
+Blackburn (I am not sure which), had forbidden his reading that same
+evening, and had brought him to London.
+
+"When I saw him he _appeared_ to be well. His mind was unclouded, his
+pulse quiet. His heart was beating with some slight excess of the
+natural impulse. He told me he had of late sometimes, but rarely, lost
+or misused a word; that he forgot names, and numbers, but had always
+done that; and he promised implicit obedience to our injunctions.
+
+"We gave him the following certificate.
+
+"'The undersigned certify that Mr. Charles Dickens has been seriously
+unwell, through great exhaustion and fatigue of body and mind consequent
+upon his public Readings and long and frequent railway journeys. In our
+judgment Mr. Dickens will not be able with safety to himself to resume
+his Readings for several months to come.
+
+ "'THOS. WATSON, M.D.
+ "'F. CARR BEARD.'
+
+
+"However, after some weeks, he expressed a wish for my sanction to his
+endeavours to redeem, in a careful and moderate way, some of the reading
+engagements to which he had been pledged before those threatenings of
+brain-mischief in the North of England.
+
+"As he had continued uniformly to seem and to feel perfectly well, I did
+not think myself warranted to refuse that sanction: and in writing to
+enforce great caution in the trials, I expressed some apprehension that
+he might fancy we had been too peremptory in our injunctions of mental
+and bodily repose in April; and I quoted the following remark, which
+occurs somewhere in one of Captain Cook's Voyages. 'Preventive measures
+are always invidious, for when most successful, the necessity for them
+is the least apparent.'
+
+"I mention this to explain the letter which I send herewith,[284] and
+which I must beg you to return to me, as a precious remembrance of the
+writer with whom I had long enjoyed very friendly and much valued
+relations.
+
+"I scarcely need say that if what I have now written can, _in any way_,
+be of use to you, it is entirely at your service and disposal--nor need
+I say with how much interest I have read the first volume of your late
+friend's Life. I cannot help regretting that a great pressure of
+professional work at the time, prevented my making a fuller record of a
+case so interesting."
+
+The twelve readings to which Sir Thomas Watson consented, with the
+condition that railway travel was not to accompany them, were farther to
+be delayed until the opening months of 1870. They were an offering from
+Dickens by way of small compensation to Messrs. Chappell for the
+breakdown of the enterprise on which they had staked so much. But here
+practically he finished his career as a public reader, and what remains
+will come with the end of what is yet to be told. One effort only
+intervened, by which he hoped to get happily back to his old pursuits;
+but to this, as to that which preceded it, sterner Fate said also No,
+and his Last Book, like his Last Readings, prematurely closed.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[281] "I think I shall be pretty correct in both places as to the run
+being on the Final readings. We had an immense house here" (Edinburgh,
+12th of December) "last night, and a very large turnaway. But Glasgow
+being shady and the charges very great, it will be the most we can do, I
+fancy, on these first Scotch readings, to bring the Chappells safely
+home (as to them) without loss."
+
+[282] The close of the letter has an amusing picture which I may be
+excused for printing in a note. "The only news that will interest you is
+that the good-natured Reverdy Johnson, being at an Art Dinner in Glasgow
+the other night, and falling asleep over the post-prandial speeches
+(only too naturally), woke suddenly on hearing the name of 'Johnson' in
+a list of Scotch painters which one of the orators was enumerating; at
+once plunged up, under the impression that somebody was drinking his
+health; and immediately, and with overflowing amiability, began
+returning thanks. The spectacle was then presented to the astonished
+company, of the American Eagle being restrained by the coat tails from
+swooping at the moon, while the smaller birds endeavoured to explain to
+it how the case stood, and the cock robin in possession of the
+chairman's eye twittered away as hard as he could split. I am told that
+it was wonderfully droll."
+
+[283] I take from the letter a mention of the effect on a friend. "The
+night before last, unable to get in, B. had a seat behind the screen,
+and was nearly frightened off it, by the Murder. Every vestige of colour
+had left his face when I came off, and he sat staring over a glass of
+champagne in the wildest way."
+
+[284] In this letter Dickens wrote: "I thank you heartily" (23rd of June
+1869) "for your great kindness and interest. It would really pain me if
+I thought you could seriously doubt my implicit reliance on your
+professional skill and advice. I feel as certain now as I felt when you
+came to see me on my breaking down through over fatigue, that the
+injunction you laid upon me to stop in my course of Readings was
+necessary and wise. And to its firmness I refer (humanly speaking) my
+speedy recovery from that moment. I would on no account have resumed,
+even on the turn of this year, without your sanction. Your friendly aid
+will never be forgotten by me; and again I thank you for it with all my
+heart."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+LAST BOOK.
+
+1869-1870.
+
+ First Fancy for _Edwin Drood_--Story as planned
+ in his Mind--Nothing written of his
+ Intentions--Merits of the Fragment--Comparison
+ of his Early and his Late MSS.--Discovery of
+ Unpublished Scene--Probable Reason for writing
+ it in Advance--How Mr. Sapsea ceased to be a
+ Member of the Eight Club.
+
+
+THE last book undertaken by Dickens was to be published, in illustrated
+monthly numbers, of the old form, but to close with the twelfth.[285] It
+closed, unfinished, with the sixth number, which was itself
+underwritten by two pages.
+
+His first fancy for the tale was expressed in a letter in the middle of
+July. "What should you think of the idea of a story beginning in this
+way?--Two people, boy and girl, or very young, going apart from one
+another, pledged to be married after many years--at the end of the book.
+The interest to arise out of the tracing of their separate ways, and the
+impossibility of telling what will be done with that impending fate."
+This was laid aside; but it left a marked trace on the story as
+afterwards designed, in the position of Edwin Drood and his betrothed.
+
+I first heard of the later design in a letter dated "Friday the 6th of
+August 1869," in which after speaking, with the usual unstinted praise
+he bestowed always on what moved him in others, of a little tale he had
+received for his journal,[286] he spoke of the change that had occurred
+to him for the new tale by himself. "I laid aside the fancy I told you
+of, and have a very curious and new idea for my new story. Not a
+communicable idea (or the interest of the book would be gone), but a
+very strong one, though difficult to work." The story, I learnt
+immediately afterward, was to be that of the murder of a nephew by his
+uncle; the originality of which was to consist in the review of the
+murderer's career by himself at the close, when its temptations were to
+be dwelt upon as if, not he the culprit, but some other man, were the
+tempted. The last chapters were to be written in the condemned cell, to
+which his wickedness, all elaborately elicited from him as if told of
+another, had brought him. Discovery by the murderer of the utter
+needlessness of the murder for its object, was to follow hard upon
+commission of the deed; but all discovery of the murderer was to be
+baffled till towards the close, when, by means of a gold ring which had
+resisted the corrosive effects of the lime into which he had thrown the
+body, not only the person murdered was to be identified but the locality
+of the crime and the man who committed it.[287] So much was told to me
+before any of the book was written; and it will be recollected that the
+ring, taken by Drood to be given to his betrothed only if their
+engagement went on, was brought away with him from their last
+interview. Rosa was to marry Tartar, and Crisparkle the sister of
+Landless, who was himself, I think, to have perished in assisting Tartar
+finally to unmask and seize the murderer.
+
+Nothing had been written, however, of the main parts of the design
+excepting what is found in the published numbers; there was no hint or
+preparation for the sequel in any notes of chapters in advance; and
+there remained not even what he had himself so sadly written of the book
+by Thackeray also interrupted by death. The evidence of matured designs
+never to be accomplished, intentions planned never to be executed, roads
+of thought marked out never to be traversed, goals shining in the
+distance never to be reached, was wanting here. It was all a blank.
+Enough had been completed nevertheless to give promise of a much greater
+book than its immediate predecessor. "I hope his book is finished,"
+wrote Longfellow when the news of his death was flashed to America. "It
+is certainly one of his most beautiful works, if not the most beautiful
+of all. It would be too sad to think the pen had fallen from his hand,
+and left it incomplete." Some of its characters were touched with
+subtlety, and in its descriptions his imaginative power was at its best.
+Not a line was wanting to the reality, in the most minute local detail,
+of places the most widely contrasted; and we saw with equal vividness
+the lazy cathedral town and the lurid opium-eater's den.[288] Something
+like the old lightness and buoyancy of animal spirits gave a new
+freshness to the humour; the scenes of the child-heroine and her
+luckless betrothed had both novelty and nicety of character in them; and
+Mr. Grewgious in chambers with his clerk and the two waiters, the
+conceited fool Sapsea, and the blustering philanthropist Honeythunder,
+were first-rate comedy. Miss Twinkleton was of the family of Miss La
+Creevy; and the lodging-house keeper, Miss Billickin, though she gave
+Miss Twinkleton but a sorry account of her blood, had that of Mrs.
+Todgers in her veins. "I was put in life to a very genteel
+boarding-school, the mistress being no less a lady than yourself, of
+about your own age, or it may be, some years younger, and a poorness of
+blood flowed from the table which has run through my life." Was ever
+anything better said of a school-fare of starved gentility?
+
+The last page of _Edwin Drood_ was written in the Chalet in the
+afternoon of his last day of consciousness; and I have thought there
+might be some interest in a facsimile of the greater part of this final
+page of manuscript that ever came from his hand, at which he had worked
+unusually late in order to finish the chapter. It has very much the
+character, in its excessive care of correction and interlineation, of
+all his later manuscripts; and in order that comparison may be made
+with his earlier and easier method, I place beside it a portion of a
+page of the original of _Oliver Twist_. His greater pains and
+elaboration of writing, it may be mentioned, become first very obvious
+in the later parts of _Martin Chuzzlewit_; but not the least remarkable
+feature in all his manuscripts, is the accuracy with which the portions
+of each representing the several numbers are exactly adjusted to the
+space the printer had to fill. Whether without erasure or so interlined
+as to be illegible, nothing is wanting, and there is nothing in excess.
+So assured was the habit, that he has himself remarked upon an instance
+the other way, in _Our Mutual Friend_, as not having happened to him for
+thirty years. But _Edwin Drood_ more startlingly showed him how
+unsettled the habit he most prized had become, in the clashing of old
+and new pursuits. "When I had written" (22nd of December 1869) "and, as
+I thought, disposed of the first two Numbers of my story, Clowes
+informed me to my horror that they were, together, _twelve printed pages
+too short_!!! Consequently I had to transpose a chapter from number two
+to number one, and remodel number two altogether! This was the more
+unlucky, that it came upon me at the time when I was obliged to leave
+the book, in order to get up the Readings" (the additional twelve for
+which Sir Thomas Watson's consent had been obtained), "quite gone out of
+my mind since I left them off. However, I turned to it and got it done,
+and both numbers are now in type. Charles Collins has designed an
+excellent cover." It was his wish that his son-in-law should have
+illustrated the story; but, this not being practicable, upon an opinion
+expressed by Mr. Millais which the result thoroughly justified, choice
+was made of Mr. S. L. Fildes.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+[Illustration: Handwritten Notes]
+
+[Illustration: Handwritten Notes]
+
+This reference to the last effort of Dickens's genius had been written
+as it thus stands, when a discovery of some interest was made by the
+writer. Within the leaves of one of Dickens's other manuscripts were
+found some detached slips of his writing, on paper only half the size of
+that used for the tale, so cramped, interlined, and blotted as to be
+nearly illegible, which on close inspection proved to be a scene in
+which Sapsea the auctioneer is introduced as the principal figure, among
+a group of characters new to the story. The explanation of it perhaps
+is, that, having become a little nervous about the course of the tale,
+from a fear that he might have plunged too soon into the incidents
+leading on to the catastrophe, such as the Datchery assumption in the
+fifth number (a misgiving he had certainly expressed to his
+sister-in-law), it had occurred to him to open some fresh veins of
+character incidental to the interest, though not directly part of it,
+and so to handle them in connection with Sapsea as a little to suspend
+the final development even while assisting to strengthen it. Before
+beginning any number of a serial he used, as we have seen in former
+instances, to plan briefly what he intended to put into it chapter by
+chapter; and his first number-plan of _Drood_ had the following: "Mr.
+Sapsea. Old Tory jackass. Connect Jasper with him. (He will want a
+solemn donkey by and by):" which was effected by bringing together
+both Durdles and Jasper, for connection with Sapsea, in the matter of
+the epitaph for Mrs. Sapsea's tomb. The scene now discovered might in
+this view have been designed to strengthen and carry forward that
+element in the tale; and otherwise it very sufficiently expresses
+itself. It would supply an answer, if such were needed, to those who
+have asserted that the hopeless decadence of Dickens as a writer had set
+in before his death. Among the lines last written by him, these are the
+very last we can ever hope to receive; and they seem to me a delightful
+specimen of the power possessed by him in his prime, and the rarest
+which any novelist can have, of revealing a character by a touch. Here
+are a couple of people, Kimber and Peartree, not known to us before,
+whom we read off thoroughly in a dozen words; and as to Sapsea himself,
+auctioneer and mayor of Cloisterham, we are face to face with what
+before we only dimly realised, and we see the solemn jackass, in his
+business pulpit, playing off the airs of Mr. Dean in his Cathedral
+pulpit, with Cloisterham laughing at the impostor.
+
+
+ "HOW MR. SAPSEA CEASED TO BE A MEMBER OF THE EIGHT CLUB.
+
+ "TOLD BY HIMSELF.
+
+"Wishing to take the air, I proceeded by a circuitous route to the Club,
+it being our weekly night of meeting. I found that we mustered our full
+strength. We were enrolled under the denomination of the Eight Club. We
+were eight in number; we met at eight o'clock during eight months of the
+year; we played eight games of four-handed cribbage, at eightpence the
+game; our frugal supper was composed of eight rolls, eight mutton chops,
+eight pork sausages, eight baked potatoes, eight marrow-bones, with
+eight toasts, and eight bottles of ale. There may, or may not, be a
+certain harmony of colour in the ruling idea of this (to adopt a phrase
+of our lively neighbours) reunion. It was a little idea of mine.
+
+"A somewhat popular member of the Eight Club, was a member by the name
+of Kimber. By profession, a dancing-master. A commonplace, hopeful sort
+of man, wholly destitute of dignity or knowledge of the world.
+
+"As I entered the Club-room, Kimber was making the remark: 'And he still
+half-believes him to be very high in the Church.'
+
+"In the act of hanging up my hat on the eighth peg by the door, I caught
+Kimber's visual ray. He lowered it, and passed a remark on the next
+change of the moon. I did not take particular notice of this at the
+moment, because the world was often pleased to be a little shy of
+ecclesiastical topics in my presence. For I felt that I was picked out
+(though perhaps only through a coincidence) to a certain extent to
+represent what I call our glorious constitution in Church and State. The
+phrase may be objected to by captious minds; but I own to it as mine. I
+threw it off in argument some little time back. I said: 'OUR GLORIOUS
+CONSTITUTION in CHURCH and STATE.'
+
+"Another member of the Eight Club was Peartree; also member of the Royal
+College of Surgeons. Mr. Peartree is not accountable to me for his
+opinions, and I say no more of them here than that he attends the poor
+gratis whenever they want him, and is not the parish doctor. Mr.
+Peartree may justify it to the grasp of _his_ mind thus to do his
+republican utmost to bring an appointed officer into contempt. Suffice
+it that Mr. Peartree can never justify it to the grasp of _mine_.
+
+"Between Peartree and Kimber there was a sickly sort of feeble-minded
+alliance. It came under my particular notice when I sold off Kimber by
+auction. (Goods taken in execution). He was a widower in a white
+under-waistcoat, and slight shoes with bows, and had two daughters not
+ill-looking. Indeed the reverse. Both daughters taught dancing in
+scholastic establishments for Young Ladies--had done so at Mrs.
+Sapsea's; nay, Twinkleton's--and both, in giving lessons, presented the
+unwomanly spectacle of having little fiddles tucked under their chins.
+In spite of which, the younger one might, if I am correctly informed--I
+will raise the veil so far as to say I KNOW she might--have soared for
+life from this degrading taint, but for having the class of mind
+allotted to what I call the common herd, and being so incredibly devoid
+of veneration as to become painfully ludicrous.
+
+"When I sold off Kimber without reserve, Peartree (as poor as he can
+hold together) had several prime household lots knocked down to him. I
+am not to be blinded; and of course it was as plain to me what he was
+going to do with them, as it was that he was a brown hulking sort of
+revolutionary subject who had been in India with the soldiers, and ought
+(for the sake of society) to have his neck broke. I saw the lots shortly
+afterwards in Kimber's lodgings--through the window--and I easily made
+out that there had been a sneaking pretence of lending them till better
+times. A man with a smaller knowledge of the world than myself might
+have been led to suspect that Kimber had held back money from his
+creditors, and fraudulently bought the goods. But, besides that I knew
+for certain he had no money, I knew that this would involve a species of
+forethought not to be made compatible with the frivolity of a caperer,
+inoculating other people with capering, for his bread.
+
+"As it was the first time I had seen either of those two since the sale,
+I kept myself in what I call Abeyance. When selling him up, I had
+delivered a few remarks--shall I say a little homely?--concerning
+Kimber, which the world did regard as more than usually worth notice. I
+had come up into my pulpit;, it was said, uncommonly like--and a murmur
+of recognition had repeated his (I will not name whose) title, before I
+spoke. I had then gone on to say that all present would find, in the
+first page of the catalogue that was lying before them, in the last
+paragraph before the first lot, the following words: 'Sold in pursuance
+of a writ of execution issued by a creditor.' I had then proceeded to
+remind my friends, that however frivolous, not to say contemptible, the
+business by which a man got his goods together, still his goods were as
+dear to him, and as cheap to society (if sold without reserve), as
+though his pursuits had been of a character that would bear serious
+contemplation. I had then divided my text (if I may be allowed so to
+call it) into three heads: firstly, Sold; secondly, In pursuance of a
+writ of execution; thirdly, Issued by a creditor; with a few moral
+reflections on each, and winding up with, 'Now to the first lot' in a
+manner that was complimented when I afterwards mingled with my hearers.
+
+"So, not being certain on what terms I and Kimber stood, I was grave, I
+was chilling. Kimber, however, moving to me, I moved to Kimber. (I was
+the creditor who had issued the writ. Not that it matters.)
+
+"'I was alluding, Mr. Sapsea,' said Kimber, 'to a stranger who entered
+into conversation with me in the street as I came to the Club. He had
+been speaking to you just before, it seemed, by the churchyard; and
+though you had told him who you were, I could hardly persuade him that
+you were not high in the Church.'
+
+"'Idiot!' said Peartree.
+
+"'Ass!' said Kimber.
+
+"'Idiot and Ass!" said the other five members.
+
+"'Idiot and Ass, gentlemen,' I remonstrated, looking around me, 'are
+strong expressions to apply to a young man of good appearance and
+address.' My generosity was roused; I own it.
+
+"'You'll admit that he must be a Fool,' said Peartree.
+
+"'You can't deny that he must be a Blockhead, said Kimber.
+
+"Their tone of disgust amounted to being offensive. Why should the young
+man be so calumniated? What had he done? He had only made an innocent
+and natural mistake. I controlled my generous indignation, and said so.
+
+"'Natural?' repeated Kimber; '_He's_ a Natural!'
+
+"The remaining six members of the Eight Club laughed unanimously. It
+stung me. It was a scornful laugh. My anger was roused in behalf of an
+absent, friendless stranger. I rose (for I had been sitting down).
+
+"'Gentlemen,' I said with dignity, 'I will not remain one of this Club
+allowing opprobrium to be cast on an unoffending person in his absence.
+I will not so violate what I call the sacred rites of hospitality.
+Gentlemen, until you know how to behave yourselves better, I leave you.
+Gentlemen, until then I withdraw, from this place of meeting, whatever
+personal qualifications I may have brought into it. Gentlemen, until
+then you cease to be the Eight Club, and must make the best you can of
+becoming the Seven.'
+
+"I put on my hat and retired. As I went down stairs I distinctly heard
+them give a suppressed cheer. Such is the power of demeanour and
+knowledge of mankind. I had forced it out of them.
+
+
+"II.
+
+"Whom should I meet in the street, within a few yards of the door of the
+inn where the Club was held, but the self-same young man whose cause I
+had felt it my duty so warmly--and I will add so disinterestedly--to
+take up.
+
+"Is it Mr. Sapsea,' he said doubtfully, 'or is it----'
+
+"'It is Mr. Sapsea,' I replied.
+
+"'Pardon me, Mr. Sapsea; you appear warm, sir,'
+
+"'I have been warm,' I said, 'and on your account.' Having stated the
+circumstances at some length (my generosity almost overpowered him), I
+asked him his name.
+
+"'Mr. Sapsea,' he answered, looking down, 'your penetration is so acute,
+your glance into the souls of your fellow men is so penetrating, that if
+I was hardy enough to deny that my name is Poker, what would it avail
+me?'
+
+"I don't know that I had quite exactly made out to a fraction that his
+name _was_ Poker, but I daresay I had been pretty near doing it.
+
+"'Well, well,' said I, trying to put him at his ease by nodding my head
+in a soothing way. 'Your name is Poker, and there is no harm in being
+named Poker.'
+
+"'Oh Mr. Sapsea!' cried the young man, in a very well-behaved manner.
+'Bless you for those words!' He then, as if ashamed of having given way
+to his feelings, looked down again.
+
+"'Come, Poker,' said I, 'let me hear more about you. Tell me. Where are
+you going to, Poker? and where do you come from?'
+
+"'Ah Mr. Sapsea!' exclaimed the young man. 'Disguise from you is
+impossible. You know already that I come from somewhere, and am going
+somewhere else. If I was to deny it, what would it avail me?'
+
+"'Then don't deny it,' was my remark.
+
+"'Or,' pursued Poker, in a kind of despondent rapture, 'or if I was to
+deny that I came to this town to see and hear you sir, what would it
+avail me? Or if I was to deny----'"
+
+The fragment ends there, and the hand that could alone have completed it
+is at rest for ever.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Some personal characteristics remain for illustration before the end is
+briefly told.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[285] In drawing the agreement for the publication, Mr. Ouvry had, by
+Dickens's wish, inserted a clause thought to be altogether needless, but
+found to be sadly pertinent. It was the first time such a clause had
+been inserted in one of his agreements. "That if the said Charles
+Dickens shall die during the composition of the said work of the
+_Mystery of Edwin Drood_, or shall otherwise become incapable of
+completing the said work for publication in twelve monthly numbers as
+agreed, it shall be referred to John Forster, Esq, one of Her Majesty's
+Commissioners in Lunacy, or in the case of his death, incapacity, or
+refusal to act, then to such person as shall be named by Her Majesty's
+Attorney-General for the time being, to determine the amount which shall
+be repaid by the said Charles Dickens, his executors or administrators,
+to the said Frederic Chapman as a fair compensation for so much of the
+said work as shall not have been completed for publication." The sum to
+be paid at once for 25,000 copies was L7500; publisher and author
+sharing equally in the profit of all sales beyond that impression; and
+the number reached, while the author yet lived, was 50,000. The sum paid
+for early sheets to America was L1000; and Baron Tauchnitz paid
+liberally, as he always did, for his Leipzig reprint. "All Mr. Dickens's
+works," M. Tauchnitz writes to me, "have been published under agreement
+by me. My intercourse with him lasted nearly twenty-seven years. The
+first of his letters dates in October 1843, and his last at the close of
+March 1870. Our long relations were not only never troubled by the least
+disagreement, but were the occasion of most hearty personal feeling; and
+I shall never lose the sense of his kind and friendly nature. On my
+asking him his terms for _Edwin Drood_, he replied 'Your terms shall be
+mine.'"
+
+[286] "I have a very remarkable story indeed for you to read. It is in
+only two chapters. A thing never to melt into other stories in the mind,
+but always to keep itself apart." The story was published in the 37th
+number of the new series of _All the Year Round_, with the title of "An
+Experience." The "new series" had been started to break up the too great
+length of volumes in sequence, and the only change it announced was the
+discontinuance of Christmas Numbers. He had tired of them himself; and,
+observing the extent to which they were now copied in all directions (as
+usual with other examples set by him), he supposed them likely to become
+tiresome to the public.
+
+[287] The reader curious in such matters will be helped to the clue for
+much of this portion of the plot by reference to pp. 90, 103, and 109,
+in Chapters XII, XIII, and XIV.
+
+[288] I subjoin what has been written to me by an American
+correspondent. "I went lately with the same inspector who accompanied
+Dickens to see the room of the opium-smokers, old Eliza and her Lascar
+or Bengalee friend. There a fancy seized me to buy the bedstead which
+figures so accurately in _Edwin Drood_, in narrative and picture. I gave
+the old woman a pound for it, and have it now packed and ready for
+shipment to New York. Another American bought a pipe. So you see we have
+heartily forgiven the novelist his pleasantries at our expense. Many
+military men who came to England from America refuse to register their
+titles, especially if they be Colonels; all the result of the basting we
+got on that score in _Martin Chuzzlewit_."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS.
+
+1836-1870.
+
+ Dickens not a Bookish Man--Character of his
+ Talk--Dickens made to tell his Own Story--Lord
+ Russell on Dickens's Letters--No Self-conceit
+ in Dickens--Letter to his Youngest
+ Son--Personal Prayer--Hymn in a Christmas
+ Tale--Objection to Posthumous Honours--Source
+ of Quarrel with Literary Fund--Small Poets--On
+ "Royalty" Bargains--Editorship--Relations with
+ Contributors--Foreign Views of English
+ People--Editorial Pleasures--Adverse Influences
+ of Periodical Writing--Anger and Satire--No
+ desire to enter the House of Commons--Reforms
+ he took most Interest in--The Liverpool Dinner
+ in 1869--Tribute to Lord Russell--The People
+ governing and the People governed--Tone of Last
+ Book--Alleged Offers from the Queen--The
+ Queen's Desire to see Dickens act--Her
+ Majesty's Wish to hear Dickens read--Interview
+ with the Queen--Dickens's Grateful Impression
+ from it--"In Memoriam" by Arthur Helps--Rural
+ Enjoyments--A Winner in the Games--Dickens's
+ Habits of Life everywhere--Centre and Soul of
+ his Home--Daily Habits--London Haunts--First
+ Attack of Lameness--How it affected his Large
+ Dogs--His Hatred of Indifference--At Social
+ Meetings--Agreeable Pleasantries--Ghost
+ Stories--Marvels of Coincidence--Predominant
+ Impression of his Life--Effects on his Career.
+
+
+OBJECTION has been taken to this biography as likely to disappoint its
+readers in not making them "talk to Dickens as Boswell makes them talk
+to Johnson." But where will the blame lie if a man takes up _Pickwick_
+and is disappointed to find that he is not reading _Rasselas_? A book
+must be judged for what it aims to be, and not for what it cannot by
+possibility be. I suppose so remarkable an author as Dickens hardly ever
+lived who carried so little of authorship into ordinary social
+intercourse. Potent as the sway of his writings was over him, it
+expressed itself in other ways. Traces or triumphs of literary labour,
+displays of conversational or other personal predominance, were no part
+of the influence he exerted over friends. To them he was only the
+pleasantest of companions, with whom they forgot that he had ever
+written anything, and felt only the charm which a nature of such
+capacity for supreme enjoyment causes every one around it to enjoy. His
+talk was unaffected and natural, never bookish in the smallest degree.
+He was quite up to the average of well read men, but as there was no
+ostentation of it in his writing, so neither was there in his
+conversation. This was so attractive because so keenly observant, and
+lighted up with so many touches of humorous fancy; but, with every
+possible thing to give relish to it, there were not many things to bring
+away.
+
+Of course a book must stand or fall by its contents. Macaulay said very
+truly that the place of books in the public estimation is fixed, not by
+what is written about them, but by what is written in them. I offer no
+complaint of any remark made upon these volumes, but there have been
+some misapprehensions. Though Dickens bore outwardly so little of the
+impress of his writings, they formed the whole of that inner life which
+essentially constituted the man; and as in this respect he was actually,
+I have thought that his biography should endeavour to present him. The
+story of his books, therefore, at all stages of their progress, and of
+the hopes or designs connected with them, was my first care. With that
+view, and to give also to the memoir what was attainable of the value of
+autobiography, letters to myself, such as were never addressed to any
+other of his correspondents, and covering all the important incidents in
+the life to be retraced, were used with few exceptions exclusively; and
+though the exceptions are much more numerous in the present volume, this
+general plan has guided me to the end. Such were my limits indeed, that
+half even of those letters had to be put aside; and to have added all
+such others as were open to me would have doubled the size of my book,
+not contributed to it a new fact of life or character, and altered
+materially its design. It would have been so much lively illustration
+added to the subject, but out of place here. The purpose here was to
+make Dickens the sole central figure in the scenes revived, narrator as
+well as principal actor; and only by the means employed could
+consistency or unity be given to the self-revelation, and the picture
+made definite and clear. It is the peculiarity of few men to be to their
+most intimate friend neither more nor less than they are to themselves,
+but this was true of Dickens; and what kind or quality of nature such
+intercourse expressed in him, of what strength, tenderness, and delicacy
+susceptible, of what steady level warmth, of what daily unresting
+activity of intellect, of what unbroken continuity of kindly impulse
+through the change and vicissitude of three-and-thirty years, the
+letters to myself given in these volumes could alone express. Gathered
+from various and differing sources, their interest could not have been
+as the interest of these; in which everything comprised in the
+successive stages of a most attractive career is written with unexampled
+candour and truthfulness, and set forth in definite pictures of what he
+saw and stood in the midst of, unblurred by vagueness or reserve. Of the
+charge of obtruding myself to which their publication has exposed me, I
+can only say that I studied nothing so hard as to suppress my own
+personality, and have to regret my ill success where I supposed I had
+even too perfectly succeeded. But we have all of us frequent occasion to
+say, parodying Mrs. Peachem's remark, that we are bitter bad judges of
+ourselves.
+
+The other properties of these letters are quite subordinate to this main
+fact that the man who wrote them is thus perfectly seen in them. But
+they do not lessen the estimate of his genius. Admiration rises higher
+at the writer's mental forces, who, putting so much of himself into his
+work for the public, had still so much overflowing for such private
+intercourse. The sunny health of nature in them is manifest; its
+largeness, spontaneity, and manliness; but they have also that which
+highest intellects appreciate best. "I have read them," Lord Russell
+wrote to me, "with delight and pain. His heart, his imagination, his
+qualities of painting what is noble, and finding diamonds hidden far
+away, are greater here than even his works convey to me. How I lament he
+was not spared to us longer. I shall have a fresh grief when he dies in
+your volumes." Shallower people are more apt to find other things. If
+the bonhommie of a man's genius is obvious to all the world, there are
+plenty of knowing ones ready to take the shine out of the genius, to
+discover that after all it is not so wonderful, that what is grave in it
+wants depth, and the humour has something mechanical. But it will be
+difficult even for these to look over letters so marvellous in the art
+of reproducing to the sight what has once been seen, so natural and
+unstudied in their wit and fun, and with such a constant well-spring of
+sprightly runnings of speech in them, point of epigram, ingenuity of
+quaint expression, absolute freedom from every touch of affectation, and
+to believe that the source of this man's humour, or of whatever gave
+wealth to his genius, was other than habitual, unbounded, and
+resistless.
+
+There is another consideration of some importance. Sterne did not more
+incessantly fall back from his works upon himself than Dickens did, and
+undoubtedly one of the impressions left by the letters is that of the
+intensity and tenacity with which he recognized, realized, contemplated,
+cultivated, and thoroughly enjoyed, his own individuality in even its
+most trivial manifestations. But if any one is led to ascribe this to
+self-esteem, to a narrow exclusiveness, or to any other invidious form
+of egotism, let him correct the impression by observing how Dickens bore
+himself amid the universal blazing-up of America, at the beginning and
+at the end of his career. Of his hearty, undisguised, and unmistakeable
+enjoyment of his astonishing and indeed quite bewildering popularity,
+there can be as little doubt as that there is not a particle of vanity
+in it, any more than of false modesty or grimace.[289] While realizing
+fully the fact of it, and the worth of the fact, there is not in his
+whole being a fibre that answers falsely to the charmer's voice. Few men
+in the world, one fancies, could have gone through such grand displays
+of fireworks, not merely with so marvellous an absence of what the
+French call _pose_, but unsoiled by the smoke of a cracker. No man's
+strong individuality was ever so free from conceit.
+
+Other personal incidents and habits, and especially some matters of
+opinion of grave importance, will help to make his character better
+known. Much questioning followed a brief former reference to his
+religious belief, but, inconsistent or illogical as the conduct
+described may be, there is nothing to correct or to modify in my
+statement of it;[290] and, to what otherwise appeared to be in doubt,
+explicit answer will be afforded by a letter, written upon the youngest
+of his children leaving home in September 1868 to join his brother in
+Australia, than which none worthier appears in his story. "I write this
+note to-day because your going away is much upon my mind, and because I
+want you to have a few parting words from me, to think of now and then
+at quiet times. I need not tell you that I love you dearly, and am very,
+very sorry in my heart to part with you. But this life is half made up
+of partings, and these pains must be borne. It is my comfort and my
+sincere conviction that you are going to try the life for which you are
+best fitted. I think its freedom and wildness more suited to you than
+any experiment in a study or office would have been; and without that
+training, you could have followed no other suitable occupation. What you
+have always wanted until now, has been a set, steady, constant purpose.
+I therefore exhort you to persevere in a thorough determination to do
+whatever you have to do, as well as you can do it. I was not so old as
+you are now, when I first had to win my food, and to do it out of this
+determination; and I have never slackened in it since. Never take a mean
+advantage of any one in any transaction, and never be hard upon people
+who are in your power. Try to do to others as you would have them do to
+you, and do not be discouraged if they fail sometimes. It is much better
+for you that they should fail in obeying the greatest rule laid down by
+Our Saviour than that you should. I put a New Testament among your books
+for the very same reasons, and with the very same hopes, that made me
+write an easy account of it for you, when you were a little child.
+Because it is the best book that ever was, or will be, known in the
+world; and because it teaches you the best lessons by which any human
+creature, who tries to be truthful and faithful to duty, can possibly be
+guided. As your brothers have gone away, one by one, I have written to
+each such words as I am now writing to you, and have entreated them all
+to guide themselves by this Book, putting aside the interpretations and
+inventions of Man. You will remember that you have never at home been
+harassed about religious observances, or mere formalities. I have always
+been anxious not to weary my children with such things, before they are
+old enough to form opinions respecting them. You will therefore
+understand the better that I now most solemnly impress upon you the
+truth and beauty of the Christian Religion, as it came from Christ
+Himself, and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you humbly but
+heartily respect it. Only one thing more on this head. The more we are
+in earnest as to feeling it, the less we are disposed to hold forth
+about it. Never abandon the wholesome practice of saying your own
+private prayers, night and morning. I have never abandoned it myself,
+and I know the comfort of it. I hope you will always be able to say in
+after life, that you had a kind father. You cannot show your affection
+for him so well, or make him so happy, as by doing your duty." They who
+most intimately knew Dickens will know best that every word there is
+written from his heart, and is radiant with the truth of his nature.
+
+To the same effect, in the leading matter, he expressed himself twelve
+years before, and again the day before his death; replying in both cases
+to correspondents who had addressed him as a public writer. A clergyman,
+the Rev. R. H. Davies, had been struck by the hymn in the Christmas tale
+of the Wreck of the Golden Mary (_Household Words_, 1856). "I beg to
+thank you" Dickens answered (Christmas Eve, 1856) "for your very
+acceptable letter--not the less gratifying to me because I am myself the
+writer you refer to. . . . There cannot be many men, I believe, who have a
+more humble veneration for the New Testament, or a more profound
+conviction of its all-sufficiency, than I have. If I am ever (as you
+tell me I am) mistaken on this subject, it is because I discountenance
+all obtrusive professions of and tradings in religion, as one of the
+main causes why real Christianity has been retarded in this world; and
+because my observation of life induces me to hold in unspeakable dread
+and horror, those unseemly squabbles about the letter which drive the
+spirit out of hundreds of thousands." In precisely similar tone, to a
+reader of _Edwin Drood_ (Mr. J. M. Makeham), who had pointed out to him
+that his employment as a figure of speech of a line from Holy Writ in
+his tenth chapter might be subject to misconstruction, he wrote from
+Gadshill on Wednesday the eighth of June, 1870. "It would be quite
+inconceivable to me, but for your letter, that any reasonable reader
+could possibly attach a scriptural reference to that passage. . . . I am
+truly shocked to find that any reader can make the mistake. I have
+always striven in my writings to express veneration for the life and
+lessons of our Saviour; because I feel it; and because I re-wrote that
+history for my children--every one of whom knew it, from having it
+repeated to them, long before they could read, and almost as soon as
+they could speak. But I have never made proclamation of this from the
+house tops."[291]
+
+A dislike of all display was rooted in him; and his objection to
+posthumous honours, illustrated by the instructions in his will, was
+very strikingly expressed two years before his death, when Mr. Thomas
+Fairbairn asked his help to a proposed recognition of Rajah Brooke's
+services by a memorial in Westminster Abbey. "I am very strongly
+impelled" (24th of June 1868) "to comply with any request of yours. But
+these posthumous honours of committee, subscriptions, and Westminster
+Abbey are so profoundly unsatisfactory in my eyes that--plainly--I would
+rather have nothing to do with them in any case. My daughter and her
+aunt unite with me in kindest regards to Mrs. Fairbairn, and I hope you
+will believe in the possession of mine until I am quietly buried without
+any memorial but such as I have set up in my lifetime." Asked a year
+later (August 1869) to say something on the inauguration of Leigh Hunt's
+bust at his grave in Kensal-green, he told the committee that he had a
+very strong objection to speech-making beside graves. "I do not expect
+or wish my feelings in this wise to guide other men; still, it is so
+serious with me, and the idea of ever being the subject of such a
+ceremony myself is so repugnant to my soul, that I must decline to
+officiate."
+
+His aversion to every form of what is called patronage of
+literature[292] was part of the same feeling. A few months earlier a
+Manchester gentleman[293] wrote for his support to such a scheme. "I beg
+to be excused," was his reply, "from complying with the request you do
+me the honour to prefer, simply because I hold the opinion that there is
+a great deal too much patronage in England. The better the design, the
+less (as I think) should it seek such adventitious aid, and the more
+composedly should it rest on its own merits." This was the belief
+Southey held; it extended to the support by way of patronage given by
+such societies as the Literary Fund, which Southey also strongly
+resisted; and it survived the failure of the Guild whereby it was hoped
+to establish a system of self-help, under which men engaged in literary
+pursuits might be as proud to receive as to give. Though there was no
+project of his life into which he flung himself with greater eagerness
+than the Guild, it was not taken up by the class it was meant to
+benefit, and every renewed exertion more largely added to the failure.
+There is no room in these pages for the story, which will add its
+chapter some day to the vanity of human wishes; but a passage from a
+letter to Bulwer Lytton at its outset will be some measure of the height
+from which the writer fell, when all hope for what he had so set his
+heart upon ceased. "I do devoutly believe that this plan, carried by the
+support which I trust will be given to it, will change the status of the
+literary man in England, and make a revolution in his position which no
+government, no power on earth but his own, could ever effect. I have
+implicit confidence in the scheme--so splendidly begun--if we carry it
+out with a stedfast energy. I have a strong conviction that we hold in
+our hands the peace and honour of men of letters for centuries to come,
+and that you are destined to be their best and most enduring
+benefactor. . . . Oh what a procession of new years may walk out of all
+this for the class we belong to, after we are dust."
+
+These views about patronage did not make him more indulgent to the
+clamour with which it is so often invoked for the ridiculously small.
+"You read that life of Clare?" he wrote (15th of August 1865). "Did you
+ever see such preposterous exaggeration of small claims? And isn't it
+expressive, the perpetual prating of him in the book as _the Poet_? So
+another Incompetent used to write to the Literary Fund when I was on the
+committee: 'This leaves the Poet at his divine mission in a corner of
+the single room. The Poet's father is wiping his spectacles. The Poet's
+mother is weaving'--Yah!'" He was equally intolerant of every
+magnificent proposal that should render the literary man independent of
+the bookseller, and he sharply criticized even a compromise to replace
+the half-profits system by one of royalties on copies sold. "What does
+it come to?" he remarked of an ably-written pamphlet in which this was
+urged (10th of November 1866): "what is the worth of the remedy after
+all? You and I know very well that in nine cases out of ten the author
+is at a disadvantage with the publisher because the publisher has
+capital and the author has not. We know perfectly well that in nine
+cases out of ten money is advanced by the publisher before the book is
+producible--often, long before. No young or unsuccessful author (unless
+he were an amateur and an independent gentleman) would make a bargain
+for having that royalty, to-morrow, if he could have a certain sum of
+money, or an advance of money. The author who could command that
+bargain, could command it to-morrow, or command anything else. For the
+less fortunate or the less able, I make bold to say--with some knowledge
+of the subject, as a writer who made a publisher's fortune long before
+he began to share in the real profits of his books--that if the
+publishers met next week, and resolved henceforth to make this royalty
+bargain and no other, it would be an enormous hardship and misfortune
+because the authors could not live while they wrote. The pamphlet seems
+to me just another example of the old philosophical chess-playing, with
+human beings for pieces. 'Don't want money.' 'Be careful to be born with
+means, and have a banker's account.' 'Your publisher will settle with
+you, at such and such long periods according to the custom of his trade,
+and you will settle with your butcher and baker weekly, in the meantime,
+by drawing cheques as I do.' 'You must be sure not to want money, and
+then I have worked it out for you splendidly.'"
+
+Less has been said in this work than might perhaps have been wished, of
+the way in which his editorship of _Household Words_ and _All the Year
+Round_ was discharged. It was distinguished above all by liberality; and
+a scrupulous consideration and delicacy, evinced by him to all his
+contributors, was part of the esteem in which he held literature itself.
+It was said in a newspaper after his death, evidently by one of his
+contributors, that he always brought the best out of a man by
+encouragement and appreciation; that he liked his writers to feel
+unfettered; and that his last reply to a proposition for a series of
+articles had been: "Whatever you see your way to, I will see mine to,
+and we know and understand each other well enough to make the best of
+these conditions." Yet the strong feeling of personal responsibility was
+always present in his conduct of both journals; and varied as the
+contents of a number might be, and widely apart the writers, a certain
+individuality of his own was never absent. He took immense pains (as
+indeed was his habit about everything) with numbers in which he had
+written nothing; would often accept a paper from a young or unhandy
+contributor, because of some single notion in it which he thought it
+worth rewriting for; and in this way, or by helping generally to give
+strength and attractiveness to the work of others, he grudged no
+trouble.[294] "I have had a story" he wrote (22nd of June 1856) "to
+hack and hew into some form for _Household Words_ this morning, which
+has taken me four hours of close attention. And I am perfectly addled by
+its horrible want of continuity after all, and the dreadful spectacle I
+have made of the proofs--which look like an inky fishing-net." A few
+lines from another letter will show the difficulties in which he was
+often involved by the plan he adopted for Christmas numbers, of putting
+within a framework by himself a number of stories by separate writers to
+whom the leading notion had before been severally sent. "As yet" (25th
+of November 1859), "not a story has come to me in the least belonging to
+the idea (the simplest in the world; which I myself described in
+writing, in the most elaborate manner); and everyone of them turns, by a
+strange fatality, on a criminal trial!" It had all to be set right by
+him, and editorship on such terms was not a sinecure.
+
+It had its pleasures as well as pains, however, and the greatest was
+when he fancied he could descry unusual merit in any writer. A letter
+will give one instance for illustration of many; the lady to whom it was
+addressed, admired under her assumed name of Holme Lee, having placed it
+at my disposal. (Folkestone: 14th of August 1855.) "I read your tale
+with the strongest emotion, and with a very exalted admiration of the
+great power displayed in it. Both in severity and tenderness I thought
+it masterly. It moved me more than I can express to you. I wrote to Mr.
+Wills that it had completely unsettled me for the day, and that by
+whomsoever it was written, I felt the highest respect for the mind that
+had produced it. It so happened that I had been for some days at work
+upon a character externally like the Aunt. And it was very strange to me
+indeed to observe how the two people seemed to be near to one another at
+first, and then turned off on their own ways so wide asunder. I told Mr.
+Wills that I was not sure whether I could have prevailed upon myself to
+present to a large audience the terrible consideration of hereditary
+madness, when it was reasonably probable that there must be many--or
+some--among them whom it would awfully, because personally, address. But
+I was not obliged to ask myself the question, inasmuch as the length of
+the story rendered it unavailable for _Household Words_. I speak of its
+length in reference to that publication only; relatively to what is told
+in it, I would not spare a page of your manuscript. Experience shows me
+that a story in four portions is best suited to the peculiar
+requirements of such a journal, and I assure you it will be an uncommon
+satisfaction to me if this correspondence should lead to your enrolment
+among its contributors. But my strong and sincere conviction of the
+vigour and pathos of this beautiful tale, is quite apart from, and not
+to be influenced by, any ulterior results. You had no existence to me
+when I read it. The actions and sufferings of the characters affected me
+by their own force and truth, and left a profound impression on
+me."[295] The experience there mentioned did not prevent him from
+admitting into his later periodical, _All the Year Round_, longer serial
+stories published with the names of known writers; and to his own
+interference with these he properly placed limits. "When one of my
+literary brothers does me the honour to undertake such a task, I hold
+that he executes it on his own personal responsibility, and for the
+sustainment of his own reputation; and I do not consider myself at
+liberty to exercise that control over his text which I claim as to other
+contributions." Nor had he any greater pleasure, even in these cases,
+than to help younger novelists to popularity. "You asked me about new
+writers last night. If you will read _Kissing the Rod_, a book I have
+read to-day, you will not find it hard to take an interest in the author
+of such a book." That was Mr. Edmund Yates, in whose literary successes
+he took the greatest interest himself, and with whom he continued to the
+last an intimate personal intercourse which had dated from kindness
+shown at a very trying time. "I think" he wrote of another of his
+contributors, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, for whom he had also much personal
+liking, and of whose powers he thought highly, "you will find _Fatal
+Zero_ a very curious bit of mental development, deepening as the story
+goes on into a picture not more startling than true." My mention of
+these pleasures of editorship shall close with what I think to him was
+the greatest. He gave to the world, while yet the name of the writer was
+unknown to him, the pure and pathetic verse of Adelaide Procter. "In the
+spring of the year 1853 I observed a short poem among the proffered
+contributions, very different, as I thought, from the shoal of verses
+perpetually setting through the office of such a periodical."[296] The
+contributions had been large and frequent under an assumed name, when at
+Christmas 1854 he discovered that Miss Mary Berwick was the daughter of
+his old and dear friend Barry Cornwall.
+
+But periodical writing is not without its drawbacks, and its effect on
+Dickens, who engaged in it largely from time to time, was observable in
+the increased impatience of allusion to national institutions and
+conventional distinctions to be found in his later books. Party
+divisions he cared for less and less as life moved on; but the decisive,
+peremptory, dogmatic style, into which a habit of rapid remark on topics
+of the day will betray the most candid and considerate commentator,
+displayed its influence, perhaps not always consciously to himself, in
+the underlying tone of bitterness that runs through the books which
+followed _Copperfield_. The resentment against remediable wrongs is as
+praiseworthy in them as in the earlier tales; but the exposure of
+Chancery abuses, administrative incompetence, politico-economic
+shortcomings, and social flunkeyism, in _Bleak House_, _Little Dorrit_,
+_Hard Times_, and _Our Mutual Friend_, would not have been made less
+odious by the cheerier tone that had struck with much sharper effect at
+prison abuses, parish wrongs, Yorkshire schools, and hypocritical
+humbug, in _Pickwick_, _Oliver Twist_, _Nickleby_, and _Chuzzlewit_. It
+will be remembered of him always that he desired to set right what was
+wrong, that he held no abuse to be unimprovable, that he left none of
+the evils named exactly as he found them, and that to influences drawn
+from his writings were due not a few of the salutary changes which
+marked the age in which he lived; but anger does not improve satire, and
+it gave latterly, from the causes named, too aggressive a form to what,
+after all, was but a very wholesome hatred of the cant that everything
+English is perfect, and that to call a thing _un_English is to doom it
+to abhorred extinction.
+
+"I have got an idea for occasional papers in _Household Words_ called
+the Member for Nowhere. They will contain an account of his views,
+votes, and speeches; and I think of starting with his speeches on the
+Sunday question. He is a member of the Government of course. The moment
+they found such a member in the House, they felt that he must be dragged
+(by force, if necessary) into the Cabinet." "I give it up reluctantly,"
+he wrote afterwards, "and with it my hope to have made every man in
+England feel something of the contempt for the House of Commons that I
+have. We shall never begin to do anything until the sentiment is
+universal." That was in August 1854; and the break-down in the Crimea
+that winter much embittered his radicalism. "I am hourly strengthened in
+my old belief," he wrote (3rd of February 1855) "that our political
+aristocracy and our tuft-hunting are the death of England. In all this
+business I don't see a gleam of hope. As to the popular spirit, it has
+come to be so entirely separated from the Parliament and Government, and
+so perfectly apathetic about them both, that I seriously think it a most
+portentous sign." A couple of months later: "I have rather a bright
+idea, I think, for _Household Words_ this morning: a fine little bit of
+satire: an account of an Arabic MS. lately discovered very like the
+_Arabian Nights_--called the Thousand and One Humbugs. With new versions
+of the best known stories." This also had to be given up, and is only
+mentioned as another illustration of his political discontents and of
+their connection with his journal-work. The influences from his early
+life which unconsciously strengthened them in certain social directions
+has been hinted at, and of his absolute sincerity in the matter there
+can be no doubt. The mistakes of Dickens were never such as to cast a
+shade on his integrity. What he said with too much bitterness, in his
+heart he believed; and had, alas! too much ground for believing. "A
+country," he wrote (27th of April 1855) "which is discovered to be in
+this tremendous condition as to its war affairs; with an enormous black
+cloud of poverty in every town which is spreading and deepening every
+hour, and not one man in two thousand knowing anything about, or even
+believing in, its existence; with a non-working aristocracy, and a
+silent parliament, and everybody for himself and nobody for the rest;
+this is the prospect, and I think it a very deplorable one." Admirably
+did he say, of a notorious enquiry at that time: "O what a fine aspect
+of political economy it is, that the noble professors of the science on
+the adulteration committee should have tried to make Adulteration a
+question of Supply and Demand! We shall never get to the Millennium,
+sir, by the rounds of that ladder; and I, for one, won't hold by the
+skirts of that Great Mogul of impostors, Master M'Culloch!" Again he
+wrote (30th of September 1855): "I really am serious in thinking--and I
+have given as painful consideration to the subject as a man with
+children to live and suffer after him can honestly give to it--that
+representative government is become altogether a failure with us, that
+the English gentilities and subserviences render the people unfit for
+it, and that the whole thing has broken down since that great
+seventeenth-century time, and has no hope in it."
+
+With the good sense that still overruled all his farthest extremes of
+opinion he yet never thought of parliament for himself. He could not
+mend matters, and for him it would have been a false position. The
+people of the town of Reading and others applied to him during the first
+half of his life, and in the last half some of the Metropolitan
+constituencies. To one of the latter a reply is before me in which he
+says: "I declare that as to all matters on the face of this teeming
+earth, it appears to me that the House of Commons and Parliament
+altogether is become just the dreariest failure and nuisance that ever
+bothered this much-bothered world." To a private enquiry of apparently
+about the same date he replied: "I have thoroughly satisfied myself,
+having often had occasion to consider the question, that I can be far
+more usefully and independently employed in my chosen sphere of action
+than I could hope to be in the House of Commons; and I believe that no
+consideration would induce me to become a member of that extraordinary
+assembly." Finally, upon a reported discussion in Finsbury whether or
+not he should be invited to sit for that borough, he promptly wrote
+(November 1861): "It may save some trouble if you will kindly confirm a
+sensible gentleman who doubted at that meeting whether I was quite the
+man for Finsbury. I am not at all the sort of man; for I believe nothing
+would induce me to offer myself as a parliamentary representative of
+that place, or of any other under the sun." The only direct attempt to
+join a political agitation was his speech at Drury-lane for
+administrative reform, and he never repeated it. But every movement for
+practical social reforms, to obtain more efficient sanitary
+legislation, to get the best compulsory education practicable for the
+poor, and to better the condition of labouring people, he assisted
+earnestly to his last hour; and the readiness with which he took the
+chair at meetings having such objects in view, the help he gave to
+important societies working in beneficent ways for themselves or the
+community, and the power and attractiveness of his oratory, made him one
+of the forces of the time. His speeches derived singular charm from the
+buoyancy of his perfect self-possession, and to this he added the
+advantages of a person and manner which had become as familiar and as
+popular as his books. The most miscellaneous assemblages listened to him
+as to a personal friend.
+
+Two incidents at the close of his life will show what upon these matters
+his latest opinions were. At the great Liverpool dinner after his
+country readings in 1869, over which Lord Dufferin eloquently presided,
+he replied to a remonstrance from Lord Houghton against his objection to
+entering public life,[297] that when he took literature for his
+profession he intended it to be his sole profession; that at that time
+it did not appear to him to be so well understood in England, as in some
+other countries, that literature was a dignified profession by which any
+man might stand or fall; and he resolved that in his person at least it
+should stand "by itself, of itself, and for itself;" a bargain which "no
+consideration on earth would now induce him to break." Here however he
+probably failed to see the entire meaning of Lord Houghton's regret,
+which would seem to have been meant to say, in more polite form, that to
+have taken some part in public affairs might have shown him the
+difficulty in a free state of providing remedies very swiftly for evils
+of long growth. A half reproach from the same quarter for alleged
+unkindly sentiments to the House of Lords, he repelled with vehement
+warmth; insisting on his great regard for individual members, and
+declaring that there was no man in England he respected more in his
+public capacity, loved more in his private capacity, or from whom he had
+received more remarkable proofs of his honour and love of literature,
+than Lord Russell.[298] In Birmingham shortly after, discoursing on
+education to the members of the Midland Institute, he told them they
+should value self-improvement not because it led to fortune but because
+it was good and right in itself; counselled them in regard to it that
+Genius was not worth half so much as Attention, or the art of taking an
+immense deal of pains, which he declared to be, in every study and
+pursuit, the one sole, safe, certain, remunerative quality; and summed
+up briefly his political belief.--"My faith in the people governing is,
+on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the People governed is, on the
+whole, illimitable." This he afterwards (January 1870) explained to mean
+that he had very little confidence in the people who govern us ("with a
+small p"), and very great confidence in the People whom they govern
+("with a large P"). "My confession being shortly and elliptically
+stated, was, with no evil intention I am absolutely sure, in some
+quarters inversely explained." He added that his political opinions had
+already been not obscurely stated in an "idle book or two"; and he
+reminded his hearers that he was the inventor "of a certain fiction
+called the Circumlocution Office, said to be very extravagant, but which
+I _do_ see rather frequently quoted as if there were grains of truth at
+the bottom of it." It may nevertheless be suspected, with some
+confidence, that the construction of his real meaning was not far wrong
+which assumed it as the condition precedent to his illimitable faith,
+that the people, even with the big P, should be "governed." It was his
+constant complaint that, being much in want of government, they had only
+sham governors; and he had returned from his second American visit, as
+he came back from his first, indisposed to believe that the political
+problem had been solved in the land of the free. From the pages of his
+last book, the bitterness of allusion so frequent in the books just
+named was absent altogether; and his old unaltered wish to better what
+was bad in English institutions, carried with it no desire to replace
+them by new ones.
+
+In a memoir published shortly after his death there appeared this
+statement. "For many years past Her Majesty the Queen has taken the
+liveliest interest in Mr. Dickens's literary labours, and has frequently
+expressed a desire for an interview with him. . . . This interview took
+place on the 9th of April, when he received her commands to attend her
+at Buckingham Palace, and was introduced by his friend Mr. Arthur Helps,
+the clerk of the Privy Council. . . . Since our author's decease the
+journal with which he was formerly connected has said: 'The Queen was
+ready to confer any distinction which Mr. Dickens's known views and
+tastes would permit him to accept, and after more than one title of
+honour had been declined, Her Majesty desired that he would, at least,
+accept a place in her Privy Council.'" As nothing is too absurd[299] for
+belief, it will not be superfluous to say that Dickens knew of no such
+desire on her Majesty's part; and though all the probabilities are on
+the side of his unwillingness to accept any title or place of honour,
+certainly none was offered to him.
+
+It had been hoped to obtain her Majesty's name for the Jerrold
+performances in 1857, but, being a public effort in behalf of an
+individual, assent would have involved "either perpetual compliance or
+the giving of perpetual offence." Her Majesty however then sent, through
+Colonel Phipps, a request to Dickens that he would select a room in the
+palace, do what he would with it, and let her see the play there. "I
+said to Col. Phipps thereupon" (21st of June 1857) "that the idea was
+not quite new to me; that I did not feel easy as to the social position
+of my daughters, &c. at a Court under those circumstances; and that I
+would beg her Majesty to excuse me, if any other way of her seeing the
+play could be devised. To this Phipps said he had not thought of the
+objection, but had not the slightest doubt I was right. I then proposed
+that the Queen should come to the Gallery of Illustration a week before
+the subscription night, and should have the room entirely at her own
+disposal, and should invite her own company. This, with the good sense
+that seems to accompany her good nature on all occasions, she resolved
+within a few hours to do." The effect of the performance was a great
+gratification. "My gracious sovereign" (5th of July 1857) "was so
+pleased that she sent round begging me to go and see her and accept her
+thanks. I replied that I was in my Farce dress, and must beg to be
+excused. Whereupon she sent again, saying that the dress 'could not be
+so ridiculous as that,' and repeating the request. I sent my duty in
+reply, but again hoped her Majesty would have the kindness to excuse my
+presenting myself in a costume and appearance that were not my own. I
+was mighty glad to think, when I woke this morning, that I had carried
+the point."
+
+The opportunity of presenting himself in his own costume did not arrive
+till the year of his death, another effort meanwhile made having proved
+also unsuccessful. "I was put into a state of much perplexity on Sunday"
+(30th of March 1858). "I don't know who had spoken to my informant, but
+it seems that the Queen is bent upon hearing the _Carol_ read, and has
+expressed her desire to bring it about without offence; hesitating about
+the manner of it, in consequence of my having begged to be excused from
+going to her when she sent for me after the _Frozen Deep_. I parried the
+thing as well as I could; but being asked to be prepared with a
+considerate and obliging answer, as it was known the request would be
+preferred, I said, 'Well! I supposed Col. Phipps would speak to me about
+it, and if it were he who did so, I should assure him of my desire to
+meet any wish of her Majesty's, and should express my hope that she
+would indulge me by making one of some audience or other--for I thought
+an audience necessary to the effect.' Thus it stands: but it bothers
+me." The difficulty was not surmounted, but her Majesty's continued
+interest in the _Carol_ was shown by her purchase of a copy of it with
+Dickens's autograph at Thackeray's sale;[300] and at last there came,
+in the year of his death, the interview with the author whose popularity
+dated from her accession, whose books had entertained larger numbers of
+her subjects than those of any other contemporary writer, and whose
+genius will be counted among the glories of her reign. Accident led to
+it. Dickens had brought with him from America some large and striking
+photographs of the Battle Fields of the Civil War, which the Queen,
+having heard of them through Mr. Helps, expressed a wish to look at.
+Dickens sent them at once; and went afterwards to Buckingham Palace with
+Mr. Helps, at her Majesty's request, that she might see and thank him in
+person.
+
+It was in the middle of March, not April. "Come now sir, this is an
+interesting matter, do favour us with it," was the cry of Johnson's
+friends after his conversation with George the Third; and again and
+again the story was told to listeners ready to make marvels of its
+commonplaces. But the romance even of the eighteenth century in such a
+matter is clean gone out of the nineteenth. Suffice it that the Queen's
+kindness left a strong impression on Dickens. Upon her Majesty's regret
+not to have heard his Readings, Dickens intimated that they were become
+now a thing of the past, while he acknowledged gratefully her Majesty's
+compliment in regard to them. She spoke to him of the impression made
+upon her by his acting in the _Frozen Deep_; and on his stating, in
+reply to her enquiry, that the little play had not been very successful
+on the public stage, said this did not surprise her, since it no longer
+had the advantage of his performance in it. Then arose a mention of some
+alleged discourtesy shown to Prince Arthur in New York, and he begged
+her Majesty not to confound the true Americans of that city with the
+Fenian portion of its Irish population; on which she made the quiet
+comment that she was convinced the people about the Prince had made too
+much of the affair. He related to her the story of President Lincoln's
+dream on the night before his murder. She asked him to give her his
+writings, and could she have them that afternoon? but he begged to be
+allowed to send a bound copy. Her Majesty then took from a table her own
+book upon the Highlands, with an autograph inscription "to Charles
+Dickens"; and, saying that "the humblest" of writers would be ashamed to
+offer it to "one of the greatest" but that Mr. Helps, being asked to
+give it, had remarked that it would be valued most from herself, closed
+the interview by placing it in his hands. "Sir," said Johnson, "they may
+say what they like of the young King, but Louis the Fourteenth could not
+have shown a more refined courtliness"; and Dickens was not disposed to
+say less of the young King's granddaughter. That the grateful impression
+sufficed to carry him into new ways, I had immediate proof, coupled with
+intimation of the still surviving strength of old memories. "As my
+sovereign desires" (26th of March 1870) "that I should attend the next
+levee, don't faint with amazement if you see my name in that unwonted
+connexion. I have scrupulously kept myself free for the second of April,
+in case you should be accessible." The name appeared at the levee
+accordingly, his daughter was at the drawing-room that followed, and
+Lady Houghton writes to me "I never saw Mr. Dickens more agreeable than
+at a dinner at our house about a fortnight before his death, when he met
+the King of the Belgians and the Prince of Wales at the special desire
+of the latter." Up to nearly the hour of dinner, it was doubtful if he
+could go. He was suffering from the distress in his foot; and on arrival
+at the house, being unable to ascend the stairs, had to be assisted at
+once into the dining-room.
+
+The friend who had accompanied Dickens to Buckingham Palace, writing of
+him[301] after his death, briefly but with admirable knowledge and
+taste, said that he ardently desired, and confidently looked forward to,
+a time when there would be a more intimate union than exists at present
+between the different classes in the state, a union that should embrace
+alike the highest and the lowest. This perhaps expresses, as well as a
+few words could, what certainly was always at his heart; and he might
+have come to think it, when his life was closing, more possible of
+realisation some day than he ever thought it before. The hope of it was
+on his friend Talfourd's lips when he died, and his own most jarring
+opinions might at last have joined in the effort to bring about such
+reconcilement. More on this head it needs not to say. Whatever may be
+the objection to special views held by him, he would, wanting even the
+most objectionable, have been less himself. It was by something of the
+despot seldom separable from genius, joined to a truthfulness of nature
+belonging to the highest characters, that men themselves of a rare
+faculty were attracted to find in Dickens what Sir Arthur Helps has
+described, "a man to confide in, and look up to as a leader, in the
+midst of any great peril."
+
+Mr. Layard also held that opinion of him. He was at Gadshill during the
+Christmas before Dickens went for the last time to America, and
+witnessed one of those scenes, not infrequent there, in which the master
+of the house was pre-eminently at home. They took generally the form of
+cricket matches; but this was, to use the phrase of his friend Bobadil,
+more popular and diffused; and of course he rose with the occasion. "The
+more you want of the master, the more you'll find in him," said the
+gasman employed about his readings. "Foot-races for the villagers," he
+wrote on Christmas Day, "come off in my field to-morrow. We have been
+all hard at work all day, building a course, making countless flags, and
+I don't know what else. Layard is chief commissioner of the domestic
+police. The country police predict an immense crowd." There were between
+two and three thousand people; and somehow, by a magical kind of
+influence, said Layard, Dickens seemed to have bound every creature
+present, upon what honour the creature had, to keep order. What was the
+special means used, or the art employed, it might have been difficult to
+say; but that was the result. Writing on New Year's Day, Dickens himself
+described it to me. "We had made a very pretty course, and taken great
+pains. Encouraged by the cricket matches experience, I allowed the
+landlord of the Falstaff to have a drinking-booth on the ground. Not to
+seem to dictate or distrust, I gave all the prizes (about ten pounds in
+the aggregate) in money. The great mass of the crowd were labouring men
+of all kinds, soldiers, sailors, and navvies. They did not, between
+half-past ten, when we began, and sunset, displace a rope or a stake;
+and they left every barrier and flag as neat as they found it. There was
+not a dispute, and there was no drunkenness whatever. I made them a
+little speech from the lawn, at the end of the games, saying that please
+God we would do it again next year. They cheered most lustily and
+dispersed. The road between this and Chatham was like a Fair all day;
+and surely it is a fine thing to get such perfect behaviour out of a
+reckless seaport town. Among other oddities we had a Hurdle Race for
+Strangers. One man (he came in second) ran 120 yards and leaped over ten
+hurdles, in twenty seconds, _with a pipe in his mouth, and smoking it
+all the time_. 'If it hadn't been for your pipe,' I said to him at the
+winning-post, 'you would have been first.' 'I beg your pardon, sir,' he
+answered, 'but if it hadn't been for my pipe, I should have been
+nowhere.'" The close of the letter had this rather memorable
+announcement. "The sale of the Christmas number was, yesterday evening,
+255,380." Would it be absurd to say that there is something in such a
+vast popularity in itself electrical, and, though founded on books, felt
+where books never reach?
+
+It is also very noticeable that what would have constituted the strength
+of Dickens if he had entered public life, the attractive as well as the
+commanding side of his nature, was that which kept him most within the
+circle of home pursuits and enjoyments. This "better part" of him had
+now long survived that sorrowful period of 1857-8, when, for reasons
+which I have not thought myself free to suppress, a vaguely disturbed
+feeling for the time took possession of him, and occurrences led to his
+adoption of other pursuits than those to which till then he had given
+himself exclusively. It was a sad interval in his life; but, though
+changes incident to the new occupation then taken up remained, and with
+them many adverse influences which brought his life prematurely to a
+close, it was, with any reference to that feeling, an interval only; and
+the dominant impression of the later years, as of the earlier, takes the
+marvellously domestic home-loving shape in which also the strength of
+his genius is found. It will not do to draw round any part of such a man
+too hard a line, and the writer must not be charged with inconsistency
+who says that Dickens's childish sufferings,[302] and the sense they
+burnt into him of the misery of loneliness and a craving for joys of
+home, though they led to what was weakest in him, led also to what was
+greatest. It was his defect as well as his merit in maturer life not to
+be able to live alone. When the fancies of his novels were upon him and
+he was under their restless influence, though he often talked of
+shutting himself up in out of the way solitary places, he never went
+anywhere unaccompanied by members of his family. His habits of daily
+life he carried with him wherever he went. In Albaro and Genoa, at
+Lausanne and Geneva, in Paris and Boulogne, his ways were as entirely
+those of home as in London and Broadstairs. If it is the property of a
+domestic nature to be personally interested in every detail, the
+smallest as the greatest, of the four walls within which one lives, then
+no man had it so essentially as Dickens. No man was so inclined
+naturally to derive his happiness from home concerns. Even the kind of
+interest in a house which is commonly confined to women, he was full of.
+Not to speak of changes of importance, there was not an additional hook
+put up wherever he inhabited, without his knowledge, or otherwise than
+as part of some small ingenuity of his own. Nothing was too minute for
+his personal superintendence. Whatever might be in hand, theatricals for
+the little children, entertainments for those of larger growth, cricket
+matches, dinners, field sports, from the first new year's eve dance in
+Doughty Street to the last musical party in Hyde Park Place, he was the
+centre and soul of it. He did not care to take measure of its greater or
+less importance. It was enough that a thing was to do, to be worth his
+while to do it as if there was nothing else to be done in the world.
+The cry of Laud and Wentworth was his, alike in small and great things;
+and to no man was more applicable the German "Echt," which expresses
+reality as well as thoroughness. The usual result followed, in all his
+homes, of an absolute reliance on him for everything. Under every
+difficulty, and in every emergency, his was the encouraging influence,
+the bright and ready help. In illness, whether of the children or any of
+the servants, he was better than a doctor. He was so full of resource,
+for which every one eagerly turned to him, that his mere presence in the
+sick-room was a healing influence, as if nothing could fail if he were
+only there. So that at last, when, all through the awful night which
+preceded his departure, he lay senseless in the room where he had
+fallen, the stricken and bewildered ones who tended him found it
+impossible to believe that what they saw before them alone was left, or
+to shut out wholly the strange wild hope that he might again be suddenly
+among them _like_ himself, and revive what they could not connect, even
+then, with death's despairing helplessness.
+
+It was not a feeling confined to the relatives whom he had thus taught
+to have such exclusive dependence on him. Among the consolations
+addressed to those mourners came words from one whom in life he had most
+honoured, and who also found it difficult to connect him with death, or
+to think that he should never see that blithe face anymore. "It is
+almost thirty years," Mr. Carlyle wrote, "since my acquaintance with him
+began; and on my side, I may say, every new meeting ripened it into more
+and more clear discernment of his rare and great worth as a brother
+man: a most cordial, sincere, clear-sighted, quietly decisive, just and
+loving man: till at length he had grown to such a recognition with me as
+I have rarely had for any man of my time. This I can tell you three, for
+it is true and will be welcome to you: to others less concerned I had as
+soon _not_ speak on such a subject." "I am profoundly sorry, for _you_,"
+Mr. Carlyle at the same time wrote to me; "and indeed for myself and for
+us all. It is an event world-wide; a _unique_ of talents suddenly
+extinct; and has 'eclipsed,' we too may say, 'the harmless gaiety of
+nations.' No death since 1866 has fallen on me with such a stroke. No
+literary man's hitherto ever did. The good, the gentle, high-gifted,
+ever-friendly, noble Dickens,--every inch of him an Honest Man."
+
+Of his ordinary habits of activity I have spoken, and they were
+doubtless carried too far. In youth it was all well, but he did not make
+allowance for years. This has had abundant illustration, but will admit
+of a few words more. To all men who do much, rule and order are
+essential; method in everything was Dickens's peculiarity; and between
+breakfast and luncheon, with rare exceptions, was his time of work. But
+his daily walks were less of rule than of enjoyment and necessity. In
+the midst of his writing they were indispensable, and especially, as it
+has often been shown, at night. Mr. Sala is an authority on London
+streets, and, in the eloquent and generous tribute he was among the
+first to offer to his memory, has described himself encountering Dickens
+in the oddest places and most inclement weather, in Ratcliffe-highway,
+on Haverstock-hill, on Camberwell-green, in Gray's-inn-lane, in the
+Wandsworth-road, at Hammersmith Broadway, in Norton Folgate, and at
+Kensal New Town. "A hansom whirled you by the Bell and Horns at
+Brompton, and there he was striding, as with seven-league boots,
+seemingly in the direction of North-end, Fulham. The Metropolitan
+Railway sent you forth at Lisson-grove, and you met him plodding
+speedily towards the Yorkshire Stingo. He was to be met rapidly skirting
+the grim brick wall of the prison in Coldbath-fields, or trudging along
+the Seven Sisters-road at Holloway, or bearing, under a steady press of
+sail, underneath Highgate Archway, or pursuing the even tenor of his way
+up the Vauxhall-bridge-road." But he was equally at home in the
+intricate byways of narrow streets and in the lengthy thoroughfares.
+Wherever there was "matter to be heard and learned," in back streets
+behind Holborn, in Borough courts and passages, in city wharfs or
+alleys, about the poorer lodging-houses, in prisons, workhouses,
+ragged-schools, police-courts, rag-shops, chandlers' shops, and all
+sorts of markets for the poor, he carried his keen observation and
+untiring study. "I was among the Italian Boys from 12 to 2 this
+morning," says one of his letters. "I am going out to-night in their
+boat with the Thames Police," says another. It was the same when he was
+in Italy or Switzerland, as we have seen; and when, in later life, he
+was in French provincial places. "I walk miles away into the country,
+and you can scarcely imagine by what deserted ramparts and silent little
+cathedral closes, or how I pass over rusty drawbridges and stagnant
+ditches out of and into the decaying town." For several consecutive
+years I accompanied him every Christmas Eve to see the marketings for
+Christmas down the road from Aldgate to Bow; and he had a surprising
+fondness for wandering about in poor neighbourhoods on Christmas-day,
+past the areas of shabby genteel houses in Somers or Kentish Towns, and
+watching the dinners preparing or coming in. But the temptations of his
+country life led him on to excesses in walking. "Coming in just now," he
+wrote in his third year at Gadshill, "after twelve miles in the rain, I
+was so wet that I have had to change and get my feet into warm water
+before I could do anything." Again, two years later: "A south-easter
+blowing, enough to cut one's throat. I am keeping the house for my cold,
+as I did yesterday. But the remedy is so new to me, that I doubt if it
+does me half the good of a dozen miles in the snow. So, if this mode of
+treatment fails to-day, I shall try that to-morrow." He tried it perhaps
+too often. In the winter of 1865 he first had the attack in his left
+foot which materially disabled his walking-power for the rest of his
+life. He supposed its cause to be overwalking in the snow, and that this
+had aggravated the suffering is very likely; but, read by the light of
+what followed, it may now be presumed to have had more serious origin.
+It recurred at intervals, before America, without any such provocation;
+in America it came back, not when he had most been walking in the snow,
+but when nervous exhaustion was at its worst with him; after America, it
+became prominent on the eve of the occurrence at Preston which first
+revealed the progress that disease had been making in the vessels of the
+brain; and in the last year of his life, as will immediately be seen,
+it was a constant trouble and most intense suffering, extending then
+gravely to his left hand also, which had before been only slightly
+affected.
+
+It was from a letter of the 21st of February 1865 I first learnt that he
+was suffering tortures from a "frost-bitten" foot, and ten days later
+brought more detailed account. "I got frost-bitten by walking
+continually in the snow, and getting wet in the feet daily. My boots
+hardened and softened, hardened and softened, my left foot swelled, and
+I still forced the boot on; sat in it to write, half the day; walked in
+it through the snow, the other half; forced the boot on again next
+morning; sat and walked again; and being accustomed to all sorts of
+changes in my feet, took no heed. At length, going out as usual, I fell
+lame on the walk, and had to limp home dead lame, through the snow, for
+the last three miles--to the remarkable terror, by-the-bye, of the two
+big dogs." The dogs were Turk and Linda. Boisterous companions as they
+always were, the sudden change in him brought them to a stand-still; and
+for the rest of the journey they crept by the side of their master as
+slowly as he did, never turning from him. He was greatly moved by the
+circumstance, and often referred to it. Turk's look upward to his face
+was one of sympathy as well as fear, he said; but Linda was wholly
+struck down.
+
+The saying in his letter to his youngest son that he was to do to others
+what he would that they should do to him, without being discouraged if
+they did not do it; and his saying to the Birmingham people that they
+were to attend to self-improvement not because it led to fortune, but
+because it was right; express a principle that at all times guided
+himself. Capable of strong attachments, he was not what is called an
+effusive man; but he had no half-heartedness in any of his likings. The
+one thing entirely hateful to him, was indifference. "I give my heart to
+very few people; but I would sooner love the most implacable man in the
+world than a careless one, who, if my place were empty to-morrow, would
+rub on and never miss me." There was nothing he more repeatedly told his
+children than that they were not to let indifference in others appear to
+justify it in themselves. "All kind things," he wrote, "must be done on
+their own account, and for their own sake, and without the least
+reference to any gratitude." Again he laid it down, while he was making
+some exertion for the sake of a dead friend that did not seem likely to
+win proper appreciation from those it was to serve. "As to gratitude
+from the family--as I have often remarked to you, one does a generous
+thing because it is right and pleasant, and not for any response it is
+to awaken in others." The rule in another form frequently appears in his
+letters; and it was enforced in many ways upon all who were dear to him.
+It is worth while to add his comment on a regret of a member of his
+family at an act of self-devotion supposed to have been thrown away:
+"Nothing of what is nobly done can ever be lost." It is also to be noted
+as in the same spirit, that it was not the loud but the silent heroisms
+he most admired. Of Sir John Richardson, one of the few who have lived
+in our days entitled to the name of a hero, he wrote from Paris in 1856.
+"Lady Franklin sent me the whole of that Richardson memoir; and I think
+Richardson's manly friendship, and love of Franklin, one of the noblest
+things I ever knew in my life. It makes one's heart beat high, with a
+sort of sacred joy." (It is the feeling as strongly awakened by the
+earlier exploits of the same gallant man to be found at the end of
+Franklin's first voyage, and never to be read without the most exalted
+emotion.) It was for something higher than mere literature he valued the
+most original writer and powerful teacher of the age. "I would go at all
+times farther to see Carlyle than any man alive."
+
+Of his attractive points in society and conversation I have
+particularized little, because in truth they were himself. Such as they
+were, they were never absent from him. His acute sense of enjoyment gave
+such relish to his social qualities that probably no man, not a great
+wit or a professed talker, ever left, in leaving any social gathering, a
+blank so impossible to fill up. In quick and varied sympathy, in ready
+adaptation to every whim or humour, in help to any mirth or game, he
+stood for a dozen men. If one may say such a thing, he seemed to be
+always the more himself for being somebody else, for continually putting
+off his personality. His versatility made him unique. What he said once
+of his own love of acting, applied to him equally when at his happiest
+among friends he loved; sketching a character, telling a story, acting a
+charade, taking part in a game; turning into comedy an incident of the
+day, describing the last good or bad thing he had seen, reproducing in
+quaint, tragical, or humorous form and figure, some part of the
+passionate life with which all his being overflowed. "Assumption has
+charms for me so delightful--I hardly know for how many wild
+reasons--that I feel a loss of Oh I can't say what exquisite foolery,
+when I lose a chance of being some one not in the remotest degree like
+myself." How it was, that, from one of such boundless resource in
+contributing to the pleasure of his friends, there was yet, as I have
+said, so comparatively little to bring away, may be thus explained. But
+it has been also seen that no one at times said better things, and to
+happy examples formerly given I will add one or two of a kind he more
+rarely indulged. "He is below par on the Exchange," a friend remarked of
+a notorious puffing actor; "he doesn't stand well at Lloyds." "Yet no
+one stands so well with the under-writers," said Dickens; a pun that
+Swift would have envied. "I call him an Incubus!" said a non-literary
+friend, at a loss to express the boredom inflicted on him by a popular
+author. "Pen-and-ink-ubus, you mean," interposed Dickens. So, when
+Stanfield said of his mid-shipman son, then absent on his first cruise,
+"the boy has got his sea-legs on by this time!" "I don't know," remarked
+Dickens, "about his getting his sea-legs on; but if I may judge from his
+writing, he certainly has not got his A B C legs on."
+
+Other agreeable pleasantries might be largely cited from his letters.
+"An old priest" (he wrote from France in 1862), "the express image of
+Frederic Lemaitre got up for the part, and very cross with the
+toothache, told me in a railway carriage the other day, that we had no
+antiquities in heretical England. 'None at all?' I said. 'You have some
+ships however.' 'Yes; a few.' 'Are they strong?' 'Well,' said I, 'your
+trade is spiritual, my father: ask the ghost of Nelson.' A French
+captain who was in the carriage, was immensely delighted with this small
+joke. I met him at Calais yesterday going somewhere with a detachment;
+and he said--Pardon! But he had been so limited as to suppose an
+Englishman incapable of that bonhommie!" In humouring a joke he was
+excellent, both in letters and talk; and for this kind of enjoyment his
+least important little notes are often worth preserving. Take one small
+instance. So freely had he admired a tale told by his friend and
+solicitor Mr. Frederic Ouvry, that he had to reply to a humorous
+proposal for publication of it, in his own manner, in his own
+periodical. "Your modesty is equal to your merit. . . . I think your way of
+describing that rustic courtship in middle life, quite matchless. . . . A
+cheque for L1000 is lying with the publisher. We would willingly make it
+more, but that we find our law charges so exceedingly heavy." His
+letters have also examples now and then of what he called his
+conversational triumphs. "I have distinguished myself" (28th of April
+1861) "in two respects lately. I took a young lady, unknown, down to
+dinner, and, talking to her about the Bishop of Durham's nepotism in the
+matter of Mr. Cheese, I found she was Mrs. Cheese. And I expatiated to
+the member for Marylebone, Lord Fermoy, generally conceiving him to be
+an Irish member, on the contemptible character of the Marylebone
+constituency and Marylebone representation."
+
+Among his good things should not be omitted his telling of a ghost
+story. He had something of a hankering after them, as the readers of his
+briefer pieces will know; and such was his interest generally in things
+supernatural that, but for the strong restraining power of his common
+sense, he might have fallen into the follies of spiritualism. As it was,
+the fanciful side of his nature stopped short at such pardonable
+superstitions as those of dreams, and lucky days, or other marvels of
+natural coincidence; and no man was readier to apply sharp tests to a
+ghost story or a haunted house, though there was just so much tendency
+to believe in any such, "well-authenticated," as made perfect his manner
+of telling one. Such a story is related in the 125th number of _All the
+Year Round_, which before its publication both Mr. Layard and myself saw
+at Gadshill, and identified as one related by Lord Lytton. It was
+published in September, and in a day or two led to what Dickens will
+relate. "The artist himself who is the hero of that story" (to Lord
+Lytton, 15th of September 1861) "has sent me in black and white his own
+account of the whole experience, so very original, so very
+extraordinary, so very far beyond the version I have published, that all
+other like stories turn pale before it." The ghost thus reinforced came
+out in the number published on the 5th of October; and the reader who
+cares to turn to it, and compare what Dickens in the interval (17th of
+September) wrote to myself, will have some measure of his readiness to
+believe in such things. "Upon the publication of the ghost story, up has
+started the portrait-painter who saw the phantoms! His own written story
+is out of all distance the most extraordinary that ever was produced;
+and is as far beyond my version or Bulwer's, as Scott is beyond James.
+Everything connected with it is amazing; but conceive this--the
+portrait-painter had been engaged to write it elsewhere as a story for
+next Christmas, and not unnaturally supposed, when he saw himself
+anticipated in _All the Year Round_, that there had been treachery at
+his printer's. 'In particular,' says he, 'how else was it possible that
+the date, the 13th of September, could have been got at? For I never
+told the date, until I wrote it.' Now, _my_ story had NO DATE; but
+seeing, when I looked over the proof, the great importance of having _a_
+date, I (C. D.) wrote in, unconsciously, the exact date on the margin of
+the proof!" The reader will remember the Doncaster race story; and to
+other like illustrations of the subject already given, may be added this
+dream. "Here is a curious case at first-hand" (30th of May 1863). "On
+Thursday night in last week, being at the office here, I dreamed that I
+saw a lady in a red shawl with her back towards me (whom I supposed to
+be E.). On her turning round I found that I didn't know her, and she
+said 'I am Miss Napier.' All the time I was dressing next morning, I
+thought--What a preposterous thing to have so very distinct a dream
+about nothing! and why Miss Napier? for I never heard of any Miss
+Napier. That same Friday night, I read. After the reading, came into my
+retiring-room, Mary Boyle and her brother, and _the_ Lady in the red
+shawl whom they present as 'Miss Napier!' These are all the
+circumstances, exactly told."
+
+Another kind of dream has had previous record, with no superstition to
+build itself upon but the loving devotion to one tender memory. With
+longer or shorter intervals this was with him all his days. Never from
+his waking thoughts was the recollection altogether absent; and though
+the dream would leave him for a time, it unfailingly came back. It was
+the feeling of his life that always had a mastery over him. What he said
+on the sixth anniversary of the death of his sister-in-law, that friend
+of his youth whom he had made his ideal of all moral excellence, he
+might have said as truly after twenty-six years more. In the very year
+before he died, the influence was potently upon him. "She is so much in
+my thoughts at all times, especially when I am successful, and have
+greatly prospered in anything, that the recollection of her is an
+essential part of my being, and is as inseparable from my existence as
+the beating of my heart is." Through later troubled years, whatever was
+worthiest in him found in this an ark of safety; and it was the nobler
+part of his being which had thus become also the essential. It gave to
+success what success by itself had no power to give; and nothing could
+consist with it, for any length of time, that was not of good report and
+pure. What more could I say that was not better said from the pulpit of
+the Abbey where he rests?
+
+"He whom we mourn was the friend of mankind, a philanthropist in the
+true sense; the friend of youth, the friend of the poor, the enemy of
+every form of meanness and oppression. I am not going to attempt to draw
+a portrait of him. Men of genius are different from what we suppose them
+to be. They have greater pleasures and greater pains, greater affections
+and greater temptations, than the generality of mankind, and they can
+never be altogether understood by their fellow men. . . . But we feel that
+a light has gone out, that the world is darker to us, when they depart.
+There are so very few of them that we cannot afford to lose them one by
+one, and we look vainly round for others who may supply their places. He
+whose loss we now mourn occupied a greater space than any other writer
+in the minds of Englishmen during the last thirty-three years. We read
+him, talked about him, acted him; we laughed with him; we were roused by
+him to a consciousness of the misery of others, and to a pathetic
+interest in human life. Works of fiction, indirectly, are great
+instructors of this world; and we can hardly exaggerate the debt of
+gratitude which is due to a writer who has led us to sympathize with
+these good, true, sincere, honest English characters of ordinary life,
+and to laugh at the egotism, the hypocrisy, the false respectability of
+religious professors and others. To another great humourist who lies in
+this Church the words have been applied that his death eclipsed the
+gaiety of nations. But of him who has been recently taken I would rather
+say, in humbler language, that no one was ever so much beloved or so
+much mourned."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[289] Mr. Grant Wilson has sent me an extract from a letter by
+Fitz-Greene Halleck (author of one of the most delightful poems ever
+written about Burns) which exactly expresses Dickens as he was, not only
+in 1842, but, as far as the sense of authorship went, all his life. It
+was addressed to Mrs. Rush of Philadelphia, and is dated the 8th of
+March 1842. "You ask me about Mr. Boz. I am quite delighted with him. He
+is a thorough good fellow, with nothing of the author about him but the
+reputation, and goes through his task as Lion with exemplary grace,
+patience, and good nature. He has the brilliant face of a man of
+genius. . . . His writings you know. I wish you had listened to his
+eloquence at the dinner here. It was the only real specimen of eloquence
+I have ever witnessed. Its charm was not in its words, but in the manner
+of saying them."
+
+[290] In a volume called _Home and Abroad_, by Mr. David Macrae, is
+printed a correspondence with Dickens on matters alluded to in the text,
+held in 1861, which will be found to confirm all that is here said.
+
+[291] This letter is facsimile'd in _A Christmas Memorial of Charles
+Dickens by A. B. Hume_ (1870), containing an Ode to his Memory written
+with feeling and spirit.
+
+[292] I may quote here from a letter (Newcastle-on-Tyne, 5th Sept. 1858)
+sent me by the editor of the _Northern Express_. "The view you take of
+the literary character in the abstract, or of what it might and ought to
+be, expresses what I have striven for all through my literary
+life--never to allow it to be patronized, or tolerated, or treated like
+a good or a bad child. I am always animated by the hope of leaving it a
+little better understood by the thoughtless than I found it."--To James
+B. Manson, Esq.
+
+[293] Henry Ryder-Taylor, Esq. Ph.D. 8th Sept. 1868.
+
+[294] By way of instance I subjoin an amusing insertion made by him in
+an otherwise indifferently written paper descriptive of the typical
+Englishman on the foreign stage, which gives in more comic detail
+experiences of his own already partly submitted to the reader (ii. 127).
+"In a pretty piece at the Gymnase in Paris, where the prime minister of
+England unfortunately ruined himself by speculating in railway shares, a
+thorough-going English servant appeared under that thorough-going
+English name Tom Bob--the honest fellow having been christened Tom, and
+born the lawful son of Mr. and Mrs. Bob. In an Italian adaptation of
+DUMAS' preposterous play of KEAN, which we once saw at the great theatre
+of Genoa, the curtain rose upon that celebrated tragedian, drunk and
+fast asleep in a chair, attired in a dark blue blouse fastened round the
+waist with a broad belt and a most prodigious buckle, and wearing a dark
+red hat of the sugar-loaf shape, nearly three feet high. He bore in his
+hand a champagne-bottle, with the label RHUM, in large capital letters,
+carefully turned towards the audience; and two or three dozen of the
+same popular liquor, which we are nationally accustomed to drink neat as
+imported, by the half gallon, ornamented the floor of the apartment.
+Every frequenter of the Coal Hole tavern in the Strand, on that
+occasion, wore a sword and a beard. Every English lady, presented on the
+stage in Italy, wears a green veil; and almost every such specimen of
+our fair countrywomen carries a bright red reticule, made in the form of
+a monstrous heart. We do not remember to have ever seen an Englishman on
+the Italian stage, or in the Italian circus, without a stomach like
+Daniel Lambert, an immense shirt-frill, and a bunch of watch-seals each
+several times larger than his watch, though the watch itself was an
+impossible engine. And we have rarely beheld this mimic Englishman,
+without seeing present, then and there, a score of real Englishmen
+sufficiently characteristic and unlike the rest of the audience, to whom
+he bore no shadow of resemblance." These views as to English people and
+society, of which Count d'Orsay used always to say that an average
+Frenchman knew about as much as he knew of the inhabitants of the moon,
+may receive amusing addition from one of Dickens's letters during his
+last visit to France; which enclosed a cleverly written Paris journal
+containing essays on English manners. In one of these the writer
+remarked that he had heard of the venality of English politicians, but
+could not have supposed it to be so shameless as it is, for, when he
+went to the House of Commons, he heard them call out "Places! Places!"
+"Give us Places!" when the Minister entered.
+
+[295] The letter is addressed to Miss Harriet Parr, whose book called
+_Gilbert Massenger_ is the tale referred to.
+
+[296] See the introductory memoir from his pen now prefixed to every
+edition of the popular and delightful _Legends and Lyrics_.
+
+[297] On this remonstrance and Dickens's reply the _Times_ had a leading
+article of which the closing sentences find fitting place in his
+biography. "If there be anything in Lord Russell's theory that Life
+Peerages are wanted specially to represent those forms of national
+eminence which cannot otherwise find fitting representation, it might be
+urged, for the reasons we have before mentioned, that a Life Peerage is
+due to the most truly national representative of one important
+department of modern English literature. Something may no doubt be said
+in favour of this view, but we are inclined to doubt if Mr. Dickens
+himself would gain anything by a Life Peerage. Mr. Dickens is
+pre-eminently a writer of the people and for the people. To our
+thinking, he is far better suited for the part of the 'Great Commoner'
+of English fiction than for even a Life Peerage. To turn Charles Dickens
+into Lord Dickens would be much the same mistake in literature that it
+was in politics to turn William Pitt into Lord Chatham."
+
+[298] One of the many repetitions of the same opinion in his letters may
+be given. "Lord John's note" (September 1853) "confirms me in an old
+impression that he is worth a score of official men; and has more
+generosity in his little finger than a Government usually has in its
+whole corporation." In another of his public allusions, Dickens
+described him as a statesman of whom opponents and friends alike felt
+sure that he would rise to the level of every occasion, however exalted;
+and compared him to the seal of Solomon in the old Arabian story
+inclosing in a not very large casket the soul of a giant.
+
+[299] In a memoir by Dr. Shelton McKenzie which has had circulation in
+America, there is given the following statement, taken doubtless from
+publications at the time, of which it will be strictly accurate to say,
+that, excepting the part of its closing averment which describes Dickens
+sending a copy of his works to her Majesty by her own desire, _there is
+in it not a single word of truth_. "Early in 1870 the Queen presented a
+copy of her book upon the Highlands to Mr. Dickens, with the modest
+autographic inscription, 'from the humblest to the most distinguished
+author of England.' This was meant to be complimentary, and was accepted
+as such by Mr. Dickens, who acknowledged it in a manly, courteous
+letter. Soon after, Queen Victoria wrote to him, requesting that he
+would do her the favour of paying her a visit at Windsor. He accepted,
+and passed a day, very pleasantly, in his Sovereign's society. It is
+said that they were mutually pleased, that Mr. Dickens caught the royal
+lady's particular humour, that they chatted together in a very friendly
+manner, that the Queen was never tired of asking questions about certain
+characters in his books, that they had almost a _tete-a-tete_ luncheon,
+and that, ere he departed, the Queen pressed him to accept a baronetcy
+(a title which descends to the eldest son), and that, on his declining,
+she said, 'At least, Mr. Dickens, let me have the gratification of
+making you one of my Privy Council.' This, which gives the personal
+title of 'Right Honourable,' he also declined--nor, indeed, did Charles
+Dickens require a title to give him celebrity. The Queen and the author
+parted, well pleased with each other. The newspapers reported that a
+peerage had been offered and declined--_but even newspapers are not
+invariably correct_. Mr. Dickens presented his Royal Mistress with a
+handsome set of all his works, and, on the very morning of his death, a
+letter reached Gad's Hill, written by Mr. Arthur Helps, by her desire,
+acknowledging the present, and describing the exact position the books
+occupied at Balmoral--so placed that she could see them before her when
+occupying the usual seat in her sitting-room. When this letter arrived,
+Mr. Dickens was still alive, but wholly unconscious. What to him, at
+that time, was the courtesy of an earthly sovereign?" I repeat that the
+only morsel of truth in all this rigmarole is that the books were sent
+by Dickens, and acknowledged by Mr. Helps at the Queen's desire. The
+letter did not arrive on the day of his death, the 9th of June, but was
+dated from Balmoral on that day.
+
+[300] The book was thus entered in the catalogue. "DICKENS (C.), A
+CHRISTMAS CAROL, in prose, 1843; _Presentation Copy_, inscribed '_W. M.
+Thackeray, from Charles Dickens (whom he made very happy once a long way
+from home_).'" Some pleasant verses by his friend had affected him much
+while abroad. I quote the Life of Dickens published by Mr. Hotten. "Her
+Majesty expressed the strongest desire to possess this presentation
+copy, and sent an unlimited commission to buy it. The original published
+price of the book was 5_s._ It became Her Majesty's property for L25
+10_s._, and was at once taken to the palace."
+
+[301] "In Memoriam" by Arthur Helps, in _Macmillan's Magazine_ for July
+1870.
+
+[302] An entry, under the date of July 1833, from a printed but
+unpublished Diary by Mr. Payne Collier, appeared lately in the
+_Athenaeum_, having reference to Dickens at the time when he first
+obtained employment as a reporter, and connecting itself with what my
+opening volume had related of those childish sufferings. "Soon
+afterwards I observed a great difference in C. D.'s dress, for he had
+bought a new hat and a very handsome blue cloak, which he threw over his
+shoulder _a l' Espagnole_. . . . We walked together through Hungerford
+Market, where we followed a coal-heaver, who carried his little rosy but
+grimy child looking over his shoulder; and C. D. bought a
+halfpenny-worth of cherries, and as we went along he gave them one by
+one to the little fellow without the knowledge of the father. . . . He
+informed me as we walked through it that he knew Hungerford Market
+well. . . . He did not affect to conceal the difficulties he and his family
+had had to contend against."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+THE END.
+
+1869-1870.
+
+ Visit from Mr. and Mrs. Fields--Places shown to
+ Visitor--Last Paper in _All the Year
+ Round_--Son Henry's Scholarship--A Reading of
+ _Edwin Drood_--Medical Attendance at
+ Readings--Excitement after _Oliver Twist_
+ Scenes--Farewell Address--Results of Over
+ Excitement--Last Appearances in Public--Death
+ of Daniel Maclise--Temptations of
+ London--Another Attack in the Foot--Noteworthy
+ Incident--Tribute of Gratitude for his
+ Books--Last Letter from him--Last
+ Days--Thoughts on his Last Day of
+ Consciousness--The Close--General
+ Mourning--Wish to bury him in the Abbey--His
+ Own Wish--The Burial--Unbidden Mourners--The
+ Grave.
+
+
+THE summer and autumn of 1869 were passed quietly at Gadshill. He
+received there, in June, the American friends to whom he had been most
+indebted for unwearying domestic kindness at his most trying time in the
+States. In August, he was at the dinner of the International boat-race;
+and, in a speech that might have gone far to reconcile the victors to
+changing places with the vanquished, gave the healths of the Harvard and
+the Oxford crews. He went to Birmingham, in September, to fulfil a
+promise that he would open the session of the Institute; and there,
+after telling his audience that his invention, such as it was, never
+would have served him as it had done, but for the habit of commonplace,
+patient, drudging attention, he declared his political creed to be
+infinitesimal faith in the people governing and illimitable faith in the
+People governed. In such engagements as these, with nothing of the kind
+of strain he had most to dread, there was hardly more movement or change
+than was necessary to his enjoyment of rest.
+
+He had been able to show Mr. Fields something of the interest of London
+as well as of his Kentish home. He went over its "general post-office"
+with him, took him among its cheap theatres and poor lodging-houses, and
+piloted him by night through its most notorious thieves' quarter. Its
+localities that are pleasantest to a lover of books, such as Johnson's
+Bolt-court and Goldsmith's Temple-chambers, he explored with him; and,
+at his visitor's special request, mounted a staircase he had not
+ascended for more than thirty years, to show the chambers in Furnival's
+Inn where the first page of _Pickwick_ was written. One more book,
+unfinished, was to close what that famous book began; and the original
+of the scene of its opening chapter, the opium-eater's den, was the last
+place visited. "In a miserable court at night," says Mr. Fields, "we
+found a haggard old woman blowing at a kind of pipe made of an old
+ink-bottle; and the words which Dickens puts into the mouth of this
+wretched creature in _Edwin Drood_, we heard her croon as we leaned over
+the tattered bed in which she was lying."
+
+Before beginning his novel he had written his last paper for his weekly
+publication. It was a notice of my _Life of Landor_, and contained some
+interesting recollections of that remarkable man. His memory at this
+time dwelt much, as was only natural, with past pleasant time, as he saw
+familiar faces leaving us or likely to leave; and, on the death of one
+of the comedians associated with the old bright days of Covent Garden, I
+had intimation of a fancy that had never quitted him since the
+Cheltenham reading. "I see in the paper to-day that Meadows is dead. I
+had a talk with him at Coutts's a week or two ago, when he said he was
+seventy-five, and very weak. Except for having a tearful eye, he looked
+just the same as ever. My mind still constantly misgives me concerning
+Macready. Curiously, I don't think he has been ever, for ten minutes
+together, out of my thoughts since I talked with Meadows last. Well, the
+year that brings trouble brings comfort too: I have a great success in
+the boy-line to announce to you. Harry has won the second scholarship at
+Trinity Hall, which gives him L50 a year as long as he stays there; and
+I begin to hope that he will get a fellowship." I doubt if anything ever
+more truly pleased him than this little success of his son Henry at
+Cambridge. Henry missed the fellowship, but was twenty-ninth wrangler in
+a fair year, when the wranglers were over forty.
+
+He finished his first number of _Edwin Drood_ in the third week of
+October, and on the 26th read it at my house with great spirit. A few
+nights before we had seen together at the Olympic a little drama taken
+from his _Copperfield_, which he sat out with more than patience, even
+with something of enjoyment; and another pleasure was given him that
+night by its author, Mr. Halliday, who brought into the box another
+dramatist, Mr. Robertson, to whom Dickens, who then first saw him, said
+that to himself the charm of his little comedies was "their unassuming
+form," which had so happily shown that "real wit could afford to put off
+any airs of pretension to it." He was at Gadshill till the close of the
+year; coming up for a few special occasions, such as Procter's
+eighty-second birthday; and at my house on new-year's eve he read to us,
+again aloud, a fresh number of his book. Yet these very last days of
+December had not been without a reminder of the grave warnings of April.
+The pains in somewhat modified form had returned in both his left hand
+and his left foot a few days before we met; and they were troubling him
+still on that day. But he made so light of them himself; so little
+thought of connecting them with the uncertainties of touch and tread of
+which they were really part; and read with such an overflow of humour
+Mr. Honeythunder's boisterous philanthropy; that there was no room,
+then, for anything but enjoyment. His only allusion to an effect from
+his illness was his mention of a now invincible dislike which he had to
+railway travel. This had decided him to take a London house for the
+twelve last readings in the early months of 1870, and he had become Mr.
+Milner-Gibson's tenant at 5, Hyde Park Place.
+
+St. James's Hall was to be the scene of these Readings, and they were to
+occupy the interval from the 11th of January to the 15th of March; two
+being given in each week to the close of January, and the remaining
+eight on each of the eight Tuesdays following. Nothing was said of any
+kind of apprehension as the time approached; but, with a curious absence
+of the sense of danger, there was certainly both distrust and fear.
+Sufficient precaution was supposed to have been taken[303] by
+arrangement for the presence, at each reading, of his friend and medical
+attendant, Mr. Carr Beard; but this resolved itself, not into any
+measure of safety, the case admitting of none short of stopping the
+reading altogether, but simply into ascertainment of the exact amount of
+strain and pressure, which, with every fresh exertion, he was placing on
+those vessels of the brain where the Preston trouble too surely had
+revealed that danger lay. No supposed force in reserve, no dominant
+strength of will, can turn aside the penalties sternly exacted for
+disregard of such laws of life as were here plainly overlooked; and
+though no one may say that it was not already too late for any but the
+fatal issue, there will be no presumption in believing that life might
+yet have been for some time prolonged if these readings could have been
+stopped.
+
+"I am a little shaken," he wrote on the 9th of January, "by my journey
+to Birmingham to give away the Institution's prizes on Twelfth Night,
+but I am in good heart; and, notwithstanding Lowe's worrying scheme for
+collecting a year's taxes in a lump, which they tell me is damaging
+books, pictures, music, and theatres beyond precedent, our 'let' at St.
+James's Hall is enormous." He opened with _Copperfield_ and the
+_Pickwick Trial_; and I may briefly mention, from the notes taken by Mr.
+Beard and placed at my disposal, at what cost of exertion to himself he
+gratified the crowded audiences that then and to the close made these
+evenings memorable. His ordinary pulse on the first night was at 72; but
+never on any subsequent night was lower than 82, and had risen on the
+later nights to more than 100. After _Copperfield_ on the first night it
+went up to 96, and after _Marigold_ on the second to 99; but on the
+first night of the _Sikes and Nancy_ scenes (Friday the 21st of January)
+it went from 80 to 112, and on the second night (the 1st of February) to
+118. From this, through the six remaining nights, it never was lower
+than 110 after the first piece read; and after the third and fourth
+readings of the _Oliver Twist_ scenes it rose, from 90 to 124 on the
+15th of February, and from 94 to 120 on the 8th of March; on the former
+occasion, after twenty minutes' rest, falling to 98, and on the latter,
+after fifteen minutes' rest, falling to 82. His ordinary pulse on
+entering the room, during these last six nights, was more than once
+over 100, and never lower than 84; from which it rose, after _Nickleby_
+on the 22nd of February, to 112. On the 8th of February, when he read
+_Dombey_, it had risen from 91 to 114; on the 1st of March, after
+_Copperfield_, it rose from 100 to 124; and when he entered the room on
+the last night it was at 108, having risen only two beats more when the
+reading was done. The pieces on this occasion were the _Christmas
+Carol_, followed by the _Pickwick Trial_; and probably in all his life
+he never read so well. On his return from the States, where he had to
+address his effects to audiences composed of immense numbers of people,
+a certain loss of refinement had been observable; but the old delicacy
+was now again delightfully manifest, and a subdued tone, as well in the
+humorous as the serious portions, gave something to all the reading as
+of a quiet sadness of farewell. The charm of this was at its height when
+he shut the volume of _Pickwick_ and spoke in his own person. He said
+that for fifteen years he had been reading his own books to audiences
+whose sensitive and kindly recognition of them had given him instruction
+and enjoyment in his art such as few men could have had; but that he
+nevertheless thought it well now to retire upon older associations, and
+in future to devote himself exclusively to the calling which had first
+made him known. "In but two short weeks from this time I hope that you
+may enter, in your own homes, on a new series of readings at which my
+assistance will be indispensable; but from these garish lights I vanish
+now for evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, affectionate
+farewell." The brief hush of silence as he moved from the platform; and
+the prolonged tumult of sound that followed suddenly, stayed him, and
+again for another moment brought him back; will not be forgotten by any
+present.
+
+Little remains to be told that has not in it almost unmixed pain and
+sorrow. Hardly a day passed, while the readings went on or after they
+closed, unvisited by some effect or other of the disastrous excitement
+shown by the notes of Mr. Beard. On the 23rd of January, when for the
+last time he met Carlyle, he came to us with his left hand in a sling;
+on the 7th of February, when he passed with us his last birthday, and on
+the 25th, when he read the third number of his novel, the hand was still
+swollen and painful; and on the 21st of March, when he read admirably
+his fourth number, he told us that as he came along, walking up the
+length of Oxford-street, the same incident had recurred as on the day of
+a former dinner with us, and he had not been able to read, all the way,
+more than the right-hand half of the names over the shops. Yet he had
+the old fixed persuasion that this was rather the effect of a medicine
+he had been taking than of any grave cause, and he still strongly
+believed his other troubles to be exclusively local. Eight days later he
+wrote: "My uneasiness and hemorrhage, after having quite left me, as I
+supposed, has come back with an aggravated irritability that it has not
+yet displayed. You have no idea what a state I am in to-day from a
+sudden violent rush of it; and yet it has not the slightest effect on my
+general health that I know of." This was a disorder which troubled him
+in his earlier life; and during the last five years, in his intervals of
+suffering from other causes, it had from time to time taken aggravated
+form.
+
+His last public appearances were in April. On the 5th he took the chair
+for the Newsvendors, whom he helped with a genial address in which even
+his apology for little speaking overflowed with irrepressible humour. He
+would try, he said, like Falstaff, "but with a modification almost as
+large as himself," less to speak himself than to be the cause of
+speaking in others. "Much in this manner they exhibit at the door of a
+snuff-shop the effigy of a Highlander with an empty mull in his hand,
+who, apparently having taken all the snuff he can carry, and discharged
+all the sneezes of which he is capable, politely invites his friends and
+patrons to step in and try what they can do in the same line." On the
+30th of the same month he returned thanks for "Literature" at the Royal
+Academy dinner, and I may preface my allusion to what he then said with
+what he had written to me the day before. Three days earlier Daniel
+Maclise had passed away. "Like you at Ely, so I at Higham, had the shock
+of first reading at a railway station of the death of our old dear
+friend and companion. What the shock would be, you know too well. It has
+been only after great difficulty, and after hardening and steeling
+myself to the subject by at once thinking of it and avoiding it in a
+strange way, that I have been able to get any command over it or over
+myself. If I feel at the time that I can be sure of the necessary
+composure, I shall make a little reference to it at the Academy
+to-morrow. I suppose you won't be there."[304] The reference made was
+most touching and manly. He told those who listened that since he first
+entered the public lists, a very young man indeed, it had been his
+constant fortune to number among his nearest and dearest friends members
+of that Academy who had been its pride; and who had now, one by one, so
+dropped from his side that he was grown to believe, with the Spanish
+monk of whom Wilkie spoke, that the only realities around him were the
+pictures which he loved, and all the moving life but a shadow and a
+dream. "For many years I was one of the two most intimate friends and
+most constant companions of Mr. Maclise, to whose death the Prince of
+Wales has made allusion, and the President has referred with the
+eloquence of genuine feeling. Of his genius in his chosen art, I will
+venture to say nothing here; but of his fertility of mind and wealth of
+intellect I may confidently assert that they would have made him, if he
+had been so minded, at least as great a writer as he was a painter. The
+gentlest and most modest of men, the freshest as to his generous
+appreciation of young aspirants and the frankest and largest hearted as
+to his peers, incapable of a sordid or ignoble thought, gallantly
+sustaining the true dignity of his vocation, without one grain of
+self-ambition, wholesomely natural at the last as at the first, 'in wit
+a man, simplicity a child,'--no artist of whatsoever denomination, I
+make bold to say, ever went to his rest leaving a golden memory more
+pure from dross, or having devoted himself with a truer chivalry to the
+art-goddess whom he worshipped." These were the last public words of
+Dickens, and he could not have spoken any worthier.
+
+Upon his appearance at the dinner of the Academy had followed some
+invitations he was led to accept; greatly to his own regret, he told me
+on the night (7th of May) when he read to us the fifth number of _Edwin
+Drood_; for he was now very eager to get back to the quiet of Gadshill.
+He dined with Mr. Motley, then American minister; had met Mr. Disraeli
+at a dinner at Lord Stanhope's; had breakfasted with Mr. Gladstone; and
+on the 17th was to attend the Queen's ball with his daughter. But she
+had to go there without him; for on the 16th I had intimation of a
+sudden disablement. "I am sorry to report, that, in the old preposterous
+endeavour to dine at preposterous hours and preposterous places, I have
+been pulled up by a sharp attack in my foot. And serve me right. I hope
+to get the better of it soon, but I fear I must not think of dining with
+you on Friday. I have cancelled everything in the dining way for this
+week, and that is a very small precaution after the horrible pain I have
+had and the remedies I have taken." He had to excuse himself also from
+the General Theatrical Fund dinner, where the Prince of Wales was to
+preside; but at another dinner a week later, where the King of the
+Belgians and the Prince were to be present, so much pressure was put
+upon him that he went, still suffering as he was, to dine with Lord
+Houghton.
+
+We met for the last time on Sunday the 22nd of May, when I dined with
+him in Hyde Park Place. The death of Mr. Lemon, of which he heard that
+day, had led his thoughts to the crowd of friendly companions in letters
+and art who had so fallen from the ranks since we played Ben Jonson
+together that we were left almost alone. "And none beyond his sixtieth
+year," he said, "very few even fifty." It is no good to talk of it, I
+suggested. "We shall not think of it the less" was his reply; and an
+illustration much to the point was before us, afforded by an incident
+deserving remembrance in his story. Not many weeks before, a
+correspondent had written to him from Liverpool describing himself as a
+self-raised man, attributing his prosperous career to what Dickens's
+writings had taught him at its outset of the wisdom of kindness, and
+sympathy for others; and asking pardon for the liberty he took in hoping
+that he might be permitted to offer some acknowledgment of what not only
+had cheered and stimulated him through all his life, but had contributed
+so much to the success of it. The letter enclosed L500. Dickens was
+greatly touched by this; and told the writer, in sending back his
+cheque, that he would certainly have taken it if he had not been, though
+not a man of fortune, a prosperous man himself; but that the letter, and
+the spirit of its offer, had so gratified him, that if the writer
+pleased to send him any small memorial of it in another form he would
+gladly receive it. The memorial soon came. A richly worked basket of
+silver, inscribed "from one who has been cheered and stimulated by Mr.
+Dickens's writings, and held the author among his first remembrances
+when he became prosperous," was accompanied by an extremely handsome
+silver centrepiece for the table, of which the design was four figures
+representing the Seasons. But the kindly donor shrank from sending
+Winter to one whom he would fain connect with none but the brighter and
+milder days, and he had struck the fourth figure from the design. "I
+never look at it," said Dickens, "that I don't think most of the
+Winter."
+
+A matter discussed that day with Mr. Ouvry was briefly resumed in a note
+of the 29th of May, the last I ever received from him; which followed me
+to Exeter, and closed thus. "You and I can speak of it at Gads by and
+by. Foot no worse. But no better." The old trouble was upon him when we
+parted, and this must have been nearly the last note written before he
+quitted London. He was at Gadshill on the 30th of May; and I heard no
+more until the telegram reached me at Launceston on the night of the 9th
+of June, which told me that the "by and by" was not to come in this
+world.
+
+The few days at Gadshill had been given wholly to work on his novel. He
+had been easier in his foot and hand; and, though he was suffering
+severely from the local hemorrhage before named, he made no complaint of
+illness. But there was observed in him a very unusual appearance of
+fatigue. "He seemed very weary." He was out with his dogs for the last
+time on Monday the 6th of June, when he walked with his letters into
+Rochester. On Tuesday the 7th, after his daughter Mary had left on a
+visit to her sister Kate, not finding himself equal to much fatigue, he
+drove to Cobhamwood with his sister-in-law, there dismissed the
+carriage, and walked round the park and back. He returned in time to put
+up in his new conservatory some Chinese lanterns sent from London that
+afternoon; and, the whole of the evening, he sat with Miss Hogarth in
+the dining-room that he might see their effect when lighted. More than
+once he then expressed his satisfaction at having finally abandoned all
+intention of exchanging Gadshill for London; and this he had done more
+impressively some days before. While he lived, he said, he should like
+his name to be more and more associated with the place; and he had a
+notion that when he died he should like to lie in the little graveyard
+belonging to the Cathedral at the foot of the Castle wall.
+
+On the 8th of June he passed all the day writing in the Chalet. He came
+over for luncheon; and, much against his usual custom, returned to his
+desk. Of the sentences he was then writing, the last of his long life of
+literature, a portion has been given in facsimile on a previous page;
+and the reader will observe with a painful interest, not alone its
+evidence of minute labour at this fast-closing hour of time with him,
+but the direction his thoughts had taken. He imagines such a brilliant
+morning as had risen with that eighth of June shining on the old city of
+Rochester. He sees in surpassing beauty, with the lusty ivy gleaming in
+the sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy air, its antiquities and
+its ruins; its Cathedral and Castle. But his fancy, then, is not with
+the stern dead forms of either; but with that which makes warm the cold
+stone tombs of centuries, and lights them up with flecks of brightness,
+"fluttering there like wings." To him, on that sunny summer morning, the
+changes of glorious light from moving boughs, the songs of birds, the
+scents from garden, woods, and fields, have penetrated into the
+Cathedral, have subdued its earthy odour, and are preaching the
+Resurrection and the Life.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+He was late in leaving the Chalet; but before dinner, which was ordered
+at six o'clock with the intention of walking afterwards in the lanes, he
+wrote some letters, among them one to his friend Mr. Charles Kent
+appointing to see him in London next day; and dinner was begun before
+Miss Hogarth saw, with alarm, a singular expression of trouble and pain
+in his face. "For an hour," he then told her, "he had been very ill;"
+but he wished dinner to go on. These were the only really coherent words
+uttered by him. They were followed by some, that fell from him
+disconnectedly, of quite other matters; of an approaching sale at a
+neighbour's house, of whether Macready's son was with his father at
+Cheltenham, and of his own intention to go immediately to London; but at
+these latter he had risen, and his sister-in-law's help alone prevented
+him from falling where he stood. Her effort then was to get him on the
+sofa, but after a slight struggle he sank heavily on his left side. "On
+the ground" were the last words he spoke. It was now a little over ten
+minutes past six o'clock. His two daughters came that night with Mr.
+Beard, who had also been telegraphed for, and whom they met at the
+station. His eldest son arrived early next morning, and was joined in
+the evening (too late) by his younger son from Cambridge. All possible
+medical aid had been summoned. The surgeon of the neighbourhood was
+there from the first, and a physician from London was in attendance as
+well as Mr. Beard. But all human help was unavailing. There was effusion
+on the brain; and though stertorous breathing continued all night, and
+until ten minutes past six o'clock on the evening of Thursday the 9th of
+June, there had never been a gleam of hope during the twenty-four hours.
+He had lived four months beyond his 58th year.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The excitement and sorrow at his death are within the memory of all.
+Before the news of it even reached the remoter parts of England, it had
+been flashed across Europe; was known in the distant continents of
+India, Australia, and America; and not in English-speaking communities
+only, but in every country of the civilised earth, had awakened grief
+and sympathy. In his own land it was as if a personal bereavement had
+befallen every one. Her Majesty the Queen telegraphed from Balmoral "her
+deepest regret at the sad news of Charles Dickens's death;" and this was
+the sentiment alike of all classes of her people. There was not an
+English journal that did not give it touching and noble utterance; and
+the _Times_ took the lead in suggesting[305] that the only fit
+resting-place for the remains of a man so dear to England was the Abbey
+in which the most illustrious Englishmen are laid.
+
+With the expression thus given to a general wish, the Dean of
+Westminster lost no time in showing ready compliance; and on the morning
+of the day when it appeared was in communication with the family and
+representatives. The public homage of a burial in the Abbey had to be
+reconciled with his own instructions to be privately buried without
+previous announcement of time or place, and without monument or
+memorial. He would himself have preferred to lie in the small graveyard
+under Rochester Castle wall, or in the little churches of Cobham or
+Shorne; but all these were found to be closed; and the desire of the
+Dean and Chapter of Rochester to lay him in their Cathedral had been
+entertained, when the Dean of Westminster's request, and the considerate
+kindness of his generous assurance that there should be only such
+ceremonial as would strictly obey all injunctions of privacy, made it a
+grateful duty to accept that offer. The spot already had been chosen by
+the Dean; and before mid-day on the following morning, Tuesday the 14th
+of June, with knowledge of those only who took part in the burial, all
+was done. The solemnity had not lost by the simplicity. Nothing so grand
+or so touching could have accompanied it, as the stillness and the
+silence of the vast Cathedral. Then, later in the day and all the
+following day, came unbidden mourners in such crowds, that the Dean had
+to request permission to keep open the grave until Thursday; but after
+it was closed they did not cease to come, and "all day long," Doctor
+Stanley wrote on the 17th, "there was a constant pressure to the spot,
+and many flowers were strewn upon it by unknown hands, many tears shed
+from unknown eyes." He alluded to this in the impressive funeral
+discourse delivered by him in the Abbey on the morning of Sunday the
+19th, pointing to the fresh flowers that then had been newly thrown (as
+they still are thrown, in this fourth year after the death), and saying
+that "the spot would thenceforward be a sacred one with both the New
+World and the Old, as that of the representative of the literature, not
+of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue." The stone
+placed upon it is inscribed
+
+ CHARLES DICKENS.
+ BORN FEBRUARY THE SEVENTH 1812. DIED JUNE THE
+ NINTH 1870.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The highest associations of both the arts he loved surround him where
+he lies. Next to him is RICHARD CUMBERLAND. Mrs. PRITCHARD'S monument
+looks down upon him, and immediately behind is DAVID GARRICK'S. Nor is
+the actor's delightful art more worthily represented than the nobler
+genius of the author. Facing the grave, and on its left and right, are
+the monuments of CHAUCER, SHAKESPEARE, and DRYDEN, the three immortals
+who did most to create and settle the language to which CHARLES DICKENS
+has given another undying name.
+
+
+FINIS.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[303] I desire to guard myself against any possible supposition that I
+think these Readings might have been stopped by the exercise of medical
+authority. I am convinced of the contrary. Dickens had pledged himself
+to them; and the fact that others' interests were engaged rather than
+his own supplied him with an overpowering motive for being determinedly
+set on going through with them. At the sorrowful time in the preceding
+year, when, yielding to the stern sentence passed by Sir Thomas Watson,
+he had dismissed finally the staff employed on his country readings, he
+had thus written to me. "I do believe" (3rd of May 1869) "that such
+people as the Chappells are very rarely to be found in human affairs. To
+say nothing of their noble and munificent manner of sweeping away into
+space all the charges incurred uselessly, and all the immense
+inconvenience and profitless work thrown upon their establishment, comes
+a note this morning from the senior partner, to the effect that they
+feel that my overwork has been 'indirectly caused by them, and by my
+great and kind exertions to make their venture successful to the
+extreme.' There is something so delicate and fine in this, that I feel
+it deeply." That feeling led to his resolve to make the additional
+exertion of these twelve last readings, and nothing would have turned
+him from it as long as he could stand at the desk.
+
+[304] I preserve also the closing words of the letter. "It is very
+strange--you remember I suppose?--that the last time we spoke of him
+together, you said that we should one day hear that the wayward life
+into which he had fallen was over, and there an end of our knowledge of
+it." The waywardness, which was merely the having latterly withdrawn
+himself too much from old friendly intercourse, had its real origin in
+disappointments connected with the public work on which he was engaged
+in those later years, and to which he sacrificed every private interest
+of his own. His was only the common fate of Englishmen, so engaged, who
+do this; and when the real story of the "Fresco-painting for the Houses
+of Parliament" comes to be written, it will be another chapter added to
+our national misadventures and reproaches in everything connected with
+Art and its hapless cultivators.
+
+[305] It is a duty to quote these eloquent words. "Statesmen, men of
+science, philanthropists, the acknowledged benefactors of their race,
+might pass away, and yet not leave the void which will be caused by the
+death of Dickens. They may have earned the esteem of mankind; their days
+may have been passed in power, honour, and prosperity; they may have
+been surrounded by troops of friends; but, however pre-eminent in
+station, ability, or public services, they will not have been, like our
+great and genial novelist, the intimate of every household. Indeed, such
+a position is attained not even by one man in an age. It needs an
+extraordinary combination of intellectual and moral qualities . . . before
+the world will thus consent to enthrone a man as their unassailable and
+enduring favourite. This is the position which Mr. Dickens has occupied
+with the English and also with the American public for the third of a
+century. . . . Westminster Abbey is the peculiar resting-place of English
+literary genius; and among those whose sacred dust lies there, or whose
+names are recorded on the walls, very few are more worthy than Charles
+Dickens of such a home. Fewer still, we believe, will be regarded with
+more honour as time passes and his greatness grows upon us."
+
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+THE WRITINGS OF CHARLES DICKENS.
+
+
+1835.
+
+SKETCHES BY BOZ. Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People.
+(The detached papers collected under this title were in course of
+publication during this year, in the pages of the _Monthly Magazine_ and
+the columns of the _Morning_ and the _Evening Chronicle_.) i. 97; 104,
+105; 107; 113, 114.
+
+
+1836.
+
+SKETCHES BY BOZ. Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People.
+Two volumes: Illustrations by George Cruikshank. (Preface dated from
+Furnival's Inn, February 1836.) John Macrone.
+
+THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF THE PICKWICK CLUB. Edited by Boz. With
+Illustrations by R. Seymour and Phiz (Hablot Browne). (Nine numbers
+published monthly from April to December.) Chapman and Hall.
+
+SUNDAY UNDER THREE HEADS. As it is; as Sabbath Bills would make it; as
+it might be made. By Timothy Sparks. Illustrated by H. K. B. (Hablot
+Browne). Dedicated (June 1836) to the Bishop of London. Chapman & Hall.
+i. 149.
+
+THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN. A Comic Burletta, in two acts. By "Boz."
+(Performed at the St. James's Theatre, 29th of September 1836, and
+published with the imprint of 1837.) Chapman & Hall. i. 116.
+
+THE VILLAGE COQUETTES. A Comic Opera, in two acts. By Charles Dickens.
+The Music by John Hullah. (Dedication to Mr. Braham is dated from
+Furnival's Inn, 15th of December 1836.) Richard Bentley. i. 116.
+
+SKETCHES BY BOZ. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. Second Series. One
+volume. (Preface dated from Furnival's Inn, 17th of December 1836.) John
+Macrone.
+
+
+1837.
+
+THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF THE PICKWICK CLUB. Edited by Boz. (Eleven
+numbers, the last being a double number, published monthly from January
+to November. Issued complete in the latter month, with Dedication to Mr.
+Serjeant Talfourd dated from Doughty-street, 27th of September, as _The
+Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. By Charles Dickens._) Chapman &
+Hall. i. 108-113; 125-132. iii. 343.
+
+OLIVER TWIST; OR THE PARISH BOY'S PROGRESS. By Boz. Begun in _Bentley's
+Miscellany_ for January, and continued throughout the year. Richard
+Bentley.
+
+
+1838.
+
+OLIVER TWIST. By Charles Dickens, Author of the Pickwick Papers. With
+Illustrations by George Cruikshank. Three volumes. (Had appeared in
+monthly portions, in the numbers of _Bentley's Miscellany_ for 1837 and
+1838, with the title of _Oliver Twist; or the Parish Boy's Progress_. By
+Boz. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. The Third Edition, with Preface
+dated Devonshire-terrace, March 1841, published by Messrs. Chapman &
+Hall.) Richard Bentley. i. 121; 124-126; 152-164. iii. 24, 25; 343.
+
+MEMOIRS OF JOSEPH GRIMALDI. Edited by "Boz." Illustrated by George
+Cruikshank. Two volumes. (For Dickens's small share in the composition
+of this work, his preface to which is dated from Doughty-street,
+February 1838, see i. 141-143.) Richard Bentley.
+
+SKETCHES OF YOUNG GENTLEMEN. Illustrated by Phiz. Chapman & Hall. i.
+149.
+
+LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. By Charles Dickens. With
+Illustrations by Phiz (Hablot Browne). (Nine numbers published monthly
+from April to December.) Chapman & Hall.
+
+
+1839.
+
+LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. (Eleven numbers, the last
+being a double number, published monthly from January to October. Issued
+complete in the latter month, with dedication to William Charles
+Macready.) Chapman & Hall. i. 145; 165-179. ii. 99, 100; 102. iii. 344.
+
+SKETCHES BY BOZ. Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People.
+With forty Illustrations by George Cruikshank. (The first complete
+edition, issued in monthly parts uniform with _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_,
+from November 1837 to June 1839, with preface dated 15th of May 1839.)
+Chapman & Hall. i. 121-124.
+
+
+1840.
+
+SKETCHES OF YOUNG COUPLES; with an urgent Remonstrance to the Gentlemen
+of England, being Bachelors or Widowers, at the present alarming crisis.
+By the Author of Sketches of Young Gentlemen. Illustrated by Phiz.
+Chapman & Hall, i. 149.
+
+
+1840-1841.
+
+MASTER HUMPHREY'S CLOCK. By Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by
+George Cattermole and Hablot Browne. Three volumes. (First and second
+volume, each 306 pp.; third, 426 pp.) For the account of this work,
+published in 88 weekly numbers, extending over the greater part of these
+two years, see i. 191-203; 240; 281, 282. In addition to occasional
+detached papers and a series of sketches entitled MR. WELLER'S WATCH,
+occupying altogether about 90 pages of the first volume, 4 pages of the
+second, and 5 pages of the third, which have not yet appeared in any
+other collected form, this serial comprised the stories of The Old
+Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge; each ultimately sold separately in a
+single volume, from which the pages of the _Clock_ were detached.
+Chapman and Hall.
+
+I. OLD CURIOSITY SHOP (1840).
+
+Began at p. 37 of vol. i.; resumed at intervals up to the appearance of
+the ninth chapter; from the ninth chapter at p. 133, continued without
+interruption to the close of the volume (then issued with dedication to
+Samuel Rogers and preface from Devonshire-terrace, dated September
+1840); resumed in the second volume, and carried on to the close of the
+tale at p. 223. i. 200-216, iii. 344, 345.
+
+II. BARNABY RUDGE (1841).
+
+Introduced by brief paper from Master Humphrey (pp. 224-8), and carried
+to end of Chapter XII. in the closing 78 pages of volume ii., which was
+issued with a preface dated in March 1841. Chapter XIII. began the third
+volume, and the story closed with its 82nd chapter at p. 420; a closing
+paper from Master Humphrey (pp. 421--426) then winding up the Clock, of
+which the concluding volume was published with a preface dated November
+1841. i. 134, 135; 147-149; 161-163; 223-225; 232-248.
+
+
+1841.
+
+THE PIC-NIC PAPERS by Various Hands. Edited by Charles Dickens. With
+Illustrations by George Cruikshank, Phiz, &c. Three volumes. (To this
+Book, edited for the benefit of Mrs. Macrone, widow of his old
+publisher, Dickens contributed a preface and the opening story, the
+_Lamplighter_.) Henry Colburn. i. 124; 183; 240, 241.
+
+
+1842.
+
+AMERICAN NOTES FOR GENERAL CIRCULATION. By Charles Dickens. Two volumes.
+Chapman and Hall. ii. 21-39; 50.
+
+
+1843.
+
+THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. With Illustrations by
+Hablot Browne. (Begun in January, and, up to the close of the year,
+twelve monthly numbers published). Chapman & Hall.
+
+A CHRISTMAS CAROL IN PROSE. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. By Charles
+Dickens. With Illustrations by John Leech. (Preface dated December
+1843.) Chapman & Hall. ii. 60, 61; 71, 72; 84-92.
+
+
+1844.
+
+THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. With Illustrations by
+Hablot Browne. (Eight monthly numbers issued; the last being a double
+number, between January and July; in which latter month the completed
+work was published, with dedication to Miss Burdett Coutts, and Preface
+dated 25th of June.) Chapman & Hall. ii. 44-46; 50, 51; 63-65; 74-84;
+99-103. iii. 345.
+
+EVENINGS OF A WORKING MAN. By John Overs. With a Preface relative to the
+Author, by Charles Dickens. (Dedication to Doctor Elliotson, and Preface
+dated in June.) T. C. Newby. ii. 109, 110.
+
+THE CHIMES: a Goblin Story of some Bells that Rang an Old Year out and a
+New Year in. By Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by Maclise R.A.,
+Stanfield R.A., Richard Doyle, and John Leech. Chapman & Hall. ii.
+143-147; 151-157; 160-162; 174, 175; 179.
+
+
+1845.
+
+THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH. A Fairy Tale of Home. By Charles Dickens.
+With Illustrations by Maclise R.A., Stanfield R.A., Edwin Landseer R.A.,
+Richard Doyle, and John Leech. (Dedication to Lord Jeffrey dated in
+December 1845.) Bradbury & Evans (for the Author). ii. 202-204; 215;
+445.
+
+
+1846.
+
+PICTURES FROM ITALY. By Charles Dickens. (Published originally in the
+_Daily News_ from January to March 1846, with the title of "Travelling
+Letters written on the Road.") Bradbury & Evans (for the Author). ii.
+88; 105; 163-167; 191; 219, 220.
+
+DEALINGS WITH THE FIRM OF DOMBEY AND SON, WHOLESALE, RETAIL, AND FOR
+EXPORTATION. By Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by Hablot Browne.
+(Three monthly numbers published, from October to the close of the
+year.) Bradbury & Evans. (During this year Messrs. Bradbury & Evans
+published "for the Author," in numbers uniform with the other serials,
+and afterwards in a single volume, _The Adventures of Oliver Twist, or
+the Parish Boy's Progress_. By Charles Dickens. With 24 Illustrations by
+George Cruikshank. A new Edition, revised and corrected.).
+
+THE BATTLE OF LIFE. A Love Story. By Charles Dickens. Illustrated by
+Maclise R.A., Stanfield R.A., Richard Doyle, and John Leech. (Dedicated
+to his "English Friends in Switzerland.") Bradbury & Evans (for the
+Author). ii. 230; 241, 242; 279, 280; 284, 285; 286-289; 293-297;
+303-311.
+
+
+1847.
+
+DEALINGS WITH THE FIRM OF DOMBEY AND SON. (Twelve numbers published
+monthly during the year.) Bradbury & Evans.
+
+FIRST CHEAP ISSUE OF THE WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENS. An Edition, printed
+in double columns, and issued in weekly three-halfpenny numbers. The
+first number, being the first of _Pickwick_, was issued in April 1847;
+and the volume containing that book, with preface dated September 1847,
+was published in October. New prefaces were for the most part prefixed
+to each story, and each volume had a frontispiece. The first series
+(issued by Messrs. Chapman and Hall, and closing in September 1852)
+comprised Pickwick, Nickleby, Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Chuzzlewit,
+Oliver Twist, American Notes, Sketches by Boz, and Christmas Books. The
+second (issued by Messrs. Bradbury & Evans, and closing in 1861)
+contained Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Little
+Dorrit. The third, issued by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, has since included
+Great Expectations (1863), Tale of Two Cities (1864), Hard Times and
+Pictures from Italy (1865), Uncommercial Traveller (1865), and Our
+Mutual Friend (1867). Among the Illustrators employed for the
+Frontispieces were Leslie R.A., Webster R.A., Stanfield R.A., George
+Cattermole, George Cruikshank, Frank Stone A.R.A., John Leech, Marcus
+Stone, and Hablot Browne. See ii. 326 and 388.
+
+
+1848.
+
+DEALINGS WITH THE FIRM OF DOMBEY & SON: WHOLESALE, RETAIL, AND FOR
+EXPORTATION. (Five numbers issued monthly, the last being a double
+number, from January to April; in which latter month the complete work
+was published with dedication to Lady Normanby and preface dated
+Devonshire-terrace, 24th of March.) Bradbury & Evans, ii. 102; 107; 219;
+220; 230; 241; 265; 278; 280-282; 334-336; 337-367. iii. 345.
+
+THE HAUNTED MAN AND THE GHOST'S BARGAIN. A Fancy for Christmas Time. By
+Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Stanfield R.A., John Tenniel, Frank
+Stone A.R.A., and John Leech. Bradbury & Evans, ii. 280; 388-390; 419;
+442-447; 468.
+
+
+1849.
+
+THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD. By Charles Dickens. With
+Illustrations by Hablot Browne. (Eight parts issued monthly from May to
+December.) Bradbury & Evans.
+
+
+1850.
+
+THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD. By Charles Dickens.
+Illustrated by Hablot Browne. (Twelve numbers issued monthly, the last
+being a double number, from January to November; in which latter month
+the completed work was published, with inscription to Mr. and Mrs.
+Watson of Rockingham, and preface dated October.) Bradbury & Evans. ii.
+102; 422, 423; 434, 435; 438; 447; 462-466; 484-487; 494. iii. 21-40;
+348, 349.
+
+HOUSEHOLD WORDS. On Saturday the 30th of March in this year the weekly
+serial of HOUSEHOLD WORDS was begun, and was carried on uninterruptedly
+to the 28th of May 1859, when, its place having been meanwhile taken by
+the serial in the same form still existing, HOUSEHOLD WORDS was
+discontinued. ii. 201-203; 449-456. iii. 239; 490-498.
+
+CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _Household Words_. CHRISTMAS. To this Dickens
+contributed A CHRISTMAS TREE.
+
+
+1851.
+
+CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _Household Words_. WHAT CHRISTMAS IS. To this
+Dickens contributed WHAT CHRISTMAS IS AS WE GROW OLDER.
+
+
+1852.
+
+BLEAK HOUSE. By Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by Hablot Browne.
+(Ten numbers, issued monthly, from March to December.) Bradbury & Evans.
+
+CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _Household Words_. STORIES FOR CHRISTMAS. To this
+Dickens contributed THE POOR RELATION'S STORY, and THE CHILD'S STORY.
+
+
+1853.
+
+BLEAK HOUSE. By Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Hablot Browne. (Ten
+numbers issued monthly, the last being a double number, from January to
+September, in which latter month, with dedication to his "Companions in
+the Guild of Literature and Art," and preface dated in August, the
+completed book was published.) Bradbury & Evans, ii. 342; 441. iii.
+25-29; 40-54; 57-59; 345.
+
+A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. By Charles Dickens. Three vols. With
+frontispieces from designs by F. W. Topham. Reprinted from _Household
+Words_, where it appeared between the dates of the 25th of January 1851
+and the 10th of December 1853. (It was published first in a complete
+form with dedication to his own children in 1854.) Bradbury & Evans,
+iii. 58.
+
+CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _Household Words_. CHRISTMAS STORIES. To this
+Dickens contributed THE SCHOOL BOY'S STORY, and NOBODY'S STORY.
+
+
+1854.
+
+HARD TIMES. FOR THESE TIMES. By Charles Dickens. (This tale appeared in
+weekly portions in _Household Words_, between the dates of the 1st of
+April and the 12th of August 1854; in which latter month it was
+published complete, with inscription to Thomas Carlyle.) Bradbury &
+Evans, iii. 65-70.
+
+CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _Household Words_: THE SEVEN POOR TRAVELLERS. To
+this Dickens contributed three chapters. I. IN THE OLD CITY OF
+ROCHESTER; II. THE STORY OF RICHARD DOUBLEDICK; III. THE ROAD. iii. 154.
+
+
+1855.
+
+LITTLE DORRIT. By Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Hablot Browne. The
+first number published in December. Bradbury & Evans.
+
+CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _Household Words_. THE HOLLY-TREE. To this Dickens
+contributed three branches. I. MYSELF; II. THE BOOTS; III. THE BILL.
+iii. 154; 415.
+
+
+1856.
+
+LITTLE DORRIT. By Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Hablot Browne. (Twelve
+numbers issued monthly, between January and December.) Bradbury & Evans.
+
+CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _Household Words_. THE WRECK OF THE GOLDEN MARY. To
+this Dickens contributed the leading chapter: THE WRECK. iii. 485.
+
+
+1857.
+
+LITTLE DORRIT. By Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Hablot Browne. (Seven
+numbers issued monthly, the last being a double number, from January to
+June, in which latter month the tale was published complete, with
+preface, and dedication to Clarkson Stanfield.) Bradbury & Evans, iii.
+72; 75; 96; 115; 154-164; 276-278.
+
+THE LAZY TOUR OF TWO IDLE APPRENTICES, in _Household Words_ for
+October. To the first part of these papers Dickens contributed all up to
+the top of the second column of page 316; to the second part, all up to
+the white line in the second column of page 340; to the third part, all
+except the reflections of Mr. Idle (363-5); and the whole of the fourth
+part. All the rest was by Mr. Wilkie Collins, iii. 170-176; 351.
+
+CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _Household Words_. THE PERILS OF CERTAIN ENGLISH
+PRISONERS. To this Dickens contributed the chapters entitled THE ISLAND
+OF SILVER-STORE, and THE RAFTS ON THE RIVER.
+
+THE FIRST LIBRARY EDITION OF THE WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENS. The first
+volume, with dedication to John Forster, was issued in December 1857,
+and the volumes appeared monthly up to the 24th, issued in November
+1859. The later books and writings have been added in subsequent
+volumes, and an addition has also been issued with the illustrations. To
+the second volume of the Old Curiosity Shop, as issued in this edition,
+were added 31 "REPRINTED PIECES" taken from Dickens's papers in
+_Household Words_; which have since appeared also in other collected
+editions. Chapman & Hall. iii. 236.
+
+AUTHORIZED FRENCH TRANSLATION OF THE WORKS OF DICKENS. Translations of
+Dickens exist in every European language; but the only version of his
+writings in a foreign tongue authorized by him, or for which he received
+anything, was undertaken in Paris. Nickleby was the first story
+published, and to it was prefixed an address from Dickens to the French
+public dated from Tavistock-house the 17th January 1857. Hachette. iii.
+121; 125.
+
+
+1858.
+
+CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _Household Words_. A HOUSE TO LET. To this Dickens
+contributed the chapter entitled "GOING INTO SOCIETY." iii. 250; 260.
+
+
+1859.
+
+ALL THE YEAR ROUND, the weekly serial which took the place of HOUSEHOLD
+WORDS. Began on the 30th of April in this year, went on uninterruptedly
+until Dickens's death, and is continued under the management of his son.
+iii. 239-254; 462; 490-499.
+
+A TALE OF TWO CITIES. By Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Hablot Browne.
+This tale was printed in weekly portions in _All the Year Round_,
+between the dates of the 30th of April and the 26th of November 1859;
+appearing also concurrently in monthly numbers with illustrations, from
+June to December; when it was published complete with dedication to Lord
+John Russell, iii. 243; 279; 353-360.
+
+CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _All the Year Round_. THE HAUNTED HOUSE. To which
+Dickens contributed two chapters. I. THE MORTALS IN THE HOUSE. II. THE
+GHOST IN MASTER B'S ROOM. iii. 246.
+
+
+1860.
+
+HUNTED DOWN. A Story in two Portions. (Written for an American
+newspaper, and reprinted in the numbers of _All the Year Round_ for the
+4th and the 11th of August. iii. 253; 279.)
+
+THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELER. By Charles Dickens. (Seventeen papers, which
+had appeared under this title between the dates of 28th of January and
+13th of October 1860 in _All the Year Round_, were published at the
+close of the year, in a volume, with preface dated December. A later
+impression was issued in 1868, as a volume of what was called the
+Charles Dickens Edition; when eleven fresh papers, written in the
+interval, were added; and promise was given, in a preface dated December
+1868, of the Uncommercial Traveller's intention "to take to the road
+again before another winter sets in." Between that date and the autumn
+of 1869, when the last of his detached papers were written, _All the
+Year Round_ published seven "New Uncommercial Samples" which have not
+yet been collected. Their title's were, i. Aboard ship (which opened, on
+the 5th of December 1868, the New Series of _All the Year Round_); ii. A
+Small Star in the East; iii. A Little Dinner in an Hour; iv. Mr.
+Barlow; v. On an Amateur Beat; vi. A Fly-Leaf in a Life; vii. A Plea for
+Total Abstinence. The date of the last was the 5th of June 1869; and on
+the 24th of July appeared his last piece of writing for the serial he
+had so long conducted, a paper entitled _Landor's Life_.) iii. 247-252;
+528.
+
+CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _All the Year Round_. A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA. To
+which Dickens contributed nearly all the first, and the whole of the
+second and the last chapter: THE VILLAGE, THE MONEY, and THE
+RESTITUTION; the two intervening chapters, though also with insertions
+from his hand, not being his.
+
+GREAT EXPECTATIONS. By Charles Dickens. Begun in _All the Year Round_ on
+the 1st of December, and continued weekly to the close of that year.
+
+
+1861.
+
+GREAT EXPECTATIONS. By Charles Dickens. Resumed on the 5th of January
+and issued in weekly portions, closing on the 3rd of August, when the
+complete story was published in three volumes and inscribed to Chauncy
+Hare Townshend. In the following year it was published in a single
+volume, illustrated by Mr. Marcus Stone. Chapman & Hall. iii. 245; 259;
+260 (the words there used "on Great Expectations closing in June 1861"
+refer to the time when the Writing of it was closed: it did not close in
+the Publication until August, as above stated); 360-369.
+
+CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _All the Year Round_, TOM TIDDLER'S GROUND. To which
+Dickens contributed three of the seven chapters. I. PICKING UP SOOT AND
+CINDERS; II. PICKING UP MISS KIMMEENS; III. PICKING UP THE TINKER. iii.
+245.
+
+
+1862.
+
+CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _All the Year Round_. SOMEBODY'S LUGGAGE. To which
+Dickens contributed four chapters. I. HIS LEAVING IT TILL CALLED FOR;
+II. HIS BOOTS; III. HIS BROWN-PAPER PARCEL; IV. HIS WONDERFUL END. To
+the chapter of His Umbrella he also contributed a portion. iii. 351;
+370.
+
+
+1863.
+
+CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _All the Year Round_. MRS. LIRRIPER'S LODGINGS. To
+which Dickens contributed the first and the last chapter. I. HOW MRS.
+LIRRIPER CARRIED ON THE BUSINESS; II. HOW THE PARLOURS ADDED A FEW
+WORDS. iii. 370, 371.
+
+
+1864.
+
+OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. By Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by Marcus
+Stone. Eight numbers issued monthly between May and December. Chapman &
+Hall.
+
+CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _All the Year Round_: MRS. LIRRIPER'S LEGACY: to
+which Dickens contributed the first and the last chapter. I. MRS.
+LIRRIPER RELATES HOW SHE WENT ON, AND WENT OVER; II. MRS. LIRRIPER
+RELATES HOW JEMMY TOPPED UP. iii. 371.
+
+
+1865.
+
+OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. By Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by Marcus
+Stone. In Two Volumes. (Two more numbers issued in January and February,
+when the first volume was published, with dedication to Sir James
+Emerson Tennent. The remaining ten numbers, the last being a double
+number, were issued between March and November, when the complete work
+was published in two volumes.) Chapman & Hall. iii. 271; 280, 281; 301.
+
+CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _All the Year Round_. DOCTOR MARIGOLD'S
+PRESCRIPTIONS. To this Dickens contributed three portions. I. TO BE
+TAKEN IMMEDIATELY. II. TO BE TAKEN FOR LIFE; III. The portion with the
+title of TO BE TAKEN WITH A GRAIN OF SALT, describing a Trial for
+Murder, was also his. iii. 379.
+
+
+1866.
+
+CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _All the Year Round_. MUGBY JUNCTION. To this
+Dickens contributed four papers. I. BARBOX BROTHERS; II. BARBOX
+BROTHERS AND CO.; III. MAIN LINE--THE BOY AT MUGBY. IV. NO. I BRANCH
+LINE--THE SIGNAL-MAN. iii. 379 (where a slight error is made in not
+treating _Barbox_ and the _Mugby Boy_ as parts of one Christmas piece).
+
+
+1867.
+
+THE CHARLES DICKENS EDITION. This collected edition, which had
+originated with the American publishing firm of Ticknor and Fields, was
+issued here between the dates of 1868 and 1870, with dedication to John
+Forster, beginning with Pickwick in May 1868, and closing with the
+Child's History in July 1870. The REPRINTED PIECES were with the volume
+of AMERICAN NOTES, and the PICTURES FROM ITALY closed the volume
+containing HARD TIMES. Chapman & Hall.
+
+CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _All the Year Round_. NO THOROUGHFARE. To this
+Dickens contributed, with Mr. Wilkie Collins, in nearly equal portions.
+With the new series of _All the Year Round_, which began on the 5th of
+December 1868, Dickens discontinued the issue of Christmas Numbers. iii.
+462 note.
+
+
+1868.
+
+A HOLIDAY ROMANCE. GEORGE SILVERMAN'S EXPLANATION. Written respectively
+for a Child's Magazine, and for the Atlantic Monthly, published in
+America by Messrs. Ticknor and Fields. Republished in _All the Year
+Round_ on the 25th of January and the 1st and 8th of February 1868. iii.
+321, 380.
+
+
+1870.
+
+THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. By Charles Dickens, with twelve
+illustrations by S. L. Fildes. (Meant to have comprised twelve monthly
+numbers, but prematurely closed by the writer's death in June.) Issued
+in six monthly numbers, between April and September. Chapman & Hall.
+iii. 461-477.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+THE WILL OF CHARLES DICKENS.
+
+
+"I, Charles Dickens, of Gadshill Place, Higham in the county of Kent,
+hereby revoke all my former Wills and Codicils and declare this to be my
+last Will and Testament. I give the sum of L1000 free of legacy duty to
+Miss Ellen Lawless Ternan, late of Houghton Place, Ampthill Square, in
+the county of Middlesex. I GIVE the sum of L19 19 0 to my faithful
+servant Mrs. Anne Cornelius. I GIVE the sum of L19 19 0 to the daughter
+and only child of the said Mrs. Anne Cornelius. I GIVE the sum of L19 19
+0 to each and every domestic servant, male and female, who shall be in
+my employment at the time of my decease, and shall have been in my
+employment for a not less period of time than one year. I GIVE the sum
+of L1000 free of legacy duty to my daughter Mary Dickens. I also give to
+my said daughter an annuity of L300 a year, during her life, if she
+shall so long continue unmarried; such annuity to be considered as
+accruing from day to day, but to be payable half yearly, the first of
+such half-yearly payments to be made at the expiration of six months
+next after my decease. If my said daughter Mary shall marry, such
+annuity shall cease; and in that case, but in that case only, my said
+daughter shall share with my other children in the provision hereinafter
+made for them. I GIVE to my dear sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth the sum
+of L8000 free of legacy duty. I also give to the said Georgina Hogarth
+all my personal jewellery not hereinafter mentioned, and all the little
+familiar objects from my writing-table and my room, and she will know
+what to do with those things. I ALSO GIVE to the said Georgina Hogarth
+all my private papers whatsoever and wheresoever, and I leave her my
+grateful blessing as the best and truest friend man ever had. I GIVE to
+my eldest son Charles my library of printed books, and my engravings and
+prints; and I also give to my son Charles the silver salver presented
+to me at Birmingham, and the silver cup presented to me at Edinburgh,
+and my shirt studs, shirt pins, and sleeve buttons. AND I BEQUEATH unto
+my said son Charles and my son Henry Fielding Dickens, the sum of L8000
+upon trust to invest the same, and from time to time to vary the
+investments thereof, and to pay the annual income thereof to my wife
+during her life, and after her decease the said sum of L8000 and the
+investments thereof shall be in trust for my children (but subject as to
+my daughter Mary to the proviso hereinbefore contained) who being a son
+or sons shall have attained or shall attain the age of twenty-one years
+or being a daughter or daughters shall have attained or shall attain
+that age or be previously married, in equal shares if more than one. I
+GIVE my watch (the gold repeater presented to me at Coventry), and I
+give the chains and seals and all appendages I have worn with it, to my
+dear and trusty friend John Forster, of Palace Gate House, Kensington,
+in the county of Middlesex aforesaid; and I also give to the said John
+Forster such manuscripts of my published works as may be in my
+possession at the time of my decease. AND I DEVISE AND BEQUEATH all my
+real and personal estate (except such as is vested in me as a trustee or
+mortgagee) unto the said Georgina Hogarth and the said John Forster,
+their heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns respectively, upon
+trust that they the said Georgina Hogarth and John Forster, or the
+survivor of them or the executors or administrators of such survivor, do
+and shall, at their, his, or her uncontrolled and irresponsible
+direction, either proceed to an immediate sale or conversion into money
+of the said real and personal estate (including my copyrights), or defer
+and postpone any sale or conversion into money, till such time or times
+as they, he, or she shall think fit, and in the meantime may manage and
+let the said real and personal estate (including my copyrights), in such
+manner in all respects as I myself could do, if I were living and acting
+therein; it being my intention that the trustees or trustee for the time
+being of this my Will shall have the fullest power over the said real
+and personal estate which I can give to them, him, or her. AND I DECLARE
+that, until the said real and personal estate shall be sold and
+converted into money, the rents and annual income thereof respectively
+shall be paid and applied to the person or persons in the manner and for
+the purposes to whom and for which the annual income of the monies to
+arise from the sale or conversion thereof into money would be payable or
+applicable under this my Will in case the same were sold or converted
+into money. AND I DECLARE that my real estate shall for the purposes of
+this my Will be considered as converted into personalty upon my decease.
+AND I DECLARE that the said trustees or trustee for the time being, do
+and shall, with and out of the monies which shall come to their, his, or
+her hands, under or by virtue of this my Will and the trusts thereof,
+pay my just debts, funeral and testamentary expenses, and legacies. AND
+I DECLARE that the said trust funds or so much thereof as shall remain
+after answering the purposes aforesaid, and the annual income thereof,
+shall be in trust for all my children (but subject as to my daughter
+Mary to the proviso hereinbefore contained), who being a son or sons
+shall have attained or shall attain the age of twenty-one years, and
+being a daughter or daughters shall have attained or shall attain that
+age or be previously married, in equal shares if more than one. PROVIDED
+ALWAYS, that, as regards my copyrights and the produce and profits
+thereof, my said daughter Mary, notwithstanding the proviso hereinbefore
+contained with reference to her, shall share with my other children
+therein whether she be married or not. AND I DEVISE the estates vested
+in me at my decease as a trustee or mortgagee unto the use of the said
+Georgina Hogarth and John Forster, their heirs and assigns, upon the
+trusts and subject to the equities affecting the same respectively. AND
+I APPOINT the said GEORGINA HOGARTH and JOHN FORSTER executrix and
+executor of this my Will, and GUARDIANS of the persons of my children
+during their respective minorities. AND LASTLY, as I have now set down
+the form of words which my legal advisers assure me are necessary to the
+plain objects of this my Will, I solemnly enjoin my dear children always
+to remember how much they owe to the said Georgina Hogarth, and never to
+be wanting in a grateful and affectionate attachment to her, for they
+know well that she has been, through all the stages of their growth and
+progress, their ever useful self-denying and devoted friend. AND I
+DESIRE here simply to record the fact that my wife, since our separation
+by consent, has been in the receipt from me of an annual income of L600,
+while all the great charges of a numerous and expensive family have
+devolved wholly upon myself. I emphatically direct that I be buried in
+an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner; that no
+public announcement be made of the time or place of my burial; that at
+the utmost not more than three plain mourning coaches be employed; and
+that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long
+hat-band, or other such revolting absurdity. I DIRECT that my name be
+inscribed in plain English letters on my tomb, without the addition of
+'Mr.' or 'Esquire.' I conjure my friends on no account to make me the
+subject of any monument, memorial, or testimonial whatever. I rest my
+claims to the remembrance of my country upon my published works, and to
+the remembrance of my friends upon their experience of me in addition
+thereto. I commit my soul to the mercy of God through our Lord and
+Saviour Jesus Christ, and I exhort my dear children humbly to try to
+guide themselves by the teaching of the New Testament in its broad
+spirit, and to put no faith in any man's narrow construction of its
+letter here or there. IN WITNESS whereof I the said Charles Dickens, the
+testator, have to this my last Will and Testament set my hand this 12th
+day of May in the year of our Lord 1869.
+
+ "Signed published and declared by }
+ the above-named Charles Dickens the }
+ testator as and for his last Will and Testament }
+ in the presence of us (present together } CHARLES DICKENS.
+ at the same time) who in his presence }
+ at his request and in the presence of }
+ each other have hereunto subscribed our }
+ names as witnesses. }
+
+ "G. HOLSWORTH,
+ "26 Wellington Street, Strand.
+
+ "HENRY WALKER,
+ "26 Wellington Street, Strand.
+
+
+"I, Charles Dickens of Gadshill Place near Rochester in the county of
+Kent Esquire declare this to be a Codicil to my last Will and Testament
+which Will bears date the 12th day of May 1869. I GIVE to my son Charles
+Dickens the younger all my share and interest in the weekly journal
+called 'All the Year Round,' which is now conducted under Articles of
+Partnership made between me and William Henry Wills and the said Charles
+Dickens the younger, and all my share and interest in the stereotypes
+stock and other effects belonging to the said partnership, he defraying
+my share of all debts and liabilities of the said partnership which may
+be outstanding at the time of my decease, and in all other respects I
+confirm my said Will. IN WITNESS whereof I have hereunto set my hand the
+2nd day of June in the year of our Lord 1870.
+
+ "Signed and declared by the said }
+ CHARLES DICKENS, the testator as and }
+ for a Codicil to his Will in the presence }
+ of us present at the same time who at } CHARLES DICKENS.
+ his request in his presence and in the }
+ presence of each other hereunto subscribe }
+ our names as witnesses. }
+
+ "G. HOLSWORTH,
+ "26 Wellington Street, Strand.
+
+ "HENRY WALKER,
+ "26 Wellington Street, Strand.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The real and personal estate,--taking the property bequeathed by the
+last codicil at a valuation of something less than two years' purchase;
+and of course before payment of the legacies, the (inconsiderable)
+debts, and the testamentary and other expenses,--amounted, as nearly as
+may be calculated, to, L93,000.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+CORRECTIONS MADE IN THE LATER EDITIONS OF THE SECOND VOLUME.
+
+
+I regret to have had no opportunity until now (May, 1873) of making the
+corrections which appear in this impression of my second volume. All the
+early reprints having been called for before the close of 1872, the only
+change I at that time found possible was amendment of an error at p.
+397, as to the date of the first performance at Devonshire House, and of
+a few others of small importance at pp. 262, 291, 320, 360, 444, and
+446.
+
+Premising that additional corrections, also unimportant, are now made at
+pp. 57, 135, 136, 142, 301, 329, 405, and 483, I proceed to indicate
+what may seem to require more detailed mention.
+
+ P. 50. "Covent-garden" is substituted for
+ "Drury-lane." The _Chronicle_ atoned for its
+ present silence by a severe notice of the man's
+ subsequent appearance at the Haymarket; and of
+ this I am glad to be reminded by Mr. Gruneisen,
+ who wrote the criticism.
+
+ 50. The son of the publican referred to (Mr.
+ Whelpdale of Streatham), pointing out my error
+ in not having made the Duke of Brunswick the
+ defendant, says he was himself a witness in the
+ case, and has had pride in repeating to his own
+ children what the Chief Justice said of his
+ father.
+
+ 117. The "limpet on the rock" and the "green
+ boots" refer to a wonderful piece by Turner in
+ the previous year's Academy, exhibiting a rock
+ overhanging a magnificent sea, a booted figure
+ appearing on the rock, and at its feet a blotch
+ to represent a limpet: the subject being
+ Napoleon at St. Helena.
+
+ 168. "Assumption" is substituted for "Transfiguration."
+
+ 182. Six words are added to the first note.
+
+ 193, 194. An error in my former statement of
+ the circumstances of Mr. Fletcher's death,
+ which I much regret to have made, is now
+ corrected.
+
+ 195. The proper names of the ship and her
+ captain are here given, as the Fantome,
+ commanded by Sir Frederick (now Vice-Admiral)
+ Nicolson.
+
+ 229. A correspondent familiar with Lausanne
+ informs me that the Castle of Chillon is not
+ visible from Rosemont, and that Dickens in
+ these first days must have mistaken some other
+ object for it. "A long mass of mountain hides
+ Chillon from view, and it only becomes visible
+ when you get about six miles from Lausanne on
+ the Vevay road, when a curve in the road or
+ lake shows it visible behind the bank of
+ mountains." The error at p. 257, now corrected,
+ was mine.
+
+ 247. "Clinking," the right word, replaces
+ "drinking."
+
+ 263. A passage which stood in the early
+ editions is removed, the portrait which it
+ referred to having been not that of the lady
+ mentioned, but of a relative bearing the same
+ name.
+
+ 267, 268. I quote a letter to myself from one
+ of the baronet's family present at the outbreak
+ goodnaturedly exaggerated in Mr. Cerjat's
+ account to Dickens. "I well remember the dinner
+ at Mr. Cerjat's alluded to in one of the
+ letters from Lausanne in your Life of Dickens.
+ It was not however our first acquaintance with
+ the 'distinguished writer,' as he came with his
+ family to stay at a Pension on the border of
+ the Lake of Geneva where my father and his
+ family were then living, and notwithstanding
+ the gallant captain's 'habit' the families
+ subsequently became very intimate."
+
+ 270. Lord Vernon is more correctly described as
+ the fifth Baron, who succeeded to the title in
+ 1835 and died in 1866 in his 64th year.
+
+ 283. The distance of Mont Blanc from the
+ Neuchatel road is now properly given as sixty
+ not six miles.
+
+ 341, second line from bottom. Not
+ "subsequent" but "modified" is the proper word.
+
+ 398. In mentioning the painters who took an
+ interest in the Guild scheme I omitted the
+ distinguished name of Mr. E. M. Ward, R.A., by
+ whom an admirable design, taken from Defoe's
+ life, was drawn for the card of membership.
+
+ 455, 456. In supposing that the Child's Dream
+ of a Star was not among Dickens's Reprinted
+ Pieces, I fell into an error, which is here
+ corrected.
+
+ 468. I did not mean to imply that Lady Graham
+ was herself a Sheridan. She was only connected
+ with the family she so well "represented" by
+ being the sister of the lady whom Tom Sheridan
+ married.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The incident at Mr. Hone's funeral quoted at pp. 31-33 from a letter to
+Mr. Felton written by Dickens shortly after the occurrence (2nd of
+March, 1843), and published, a year before my volume, in Mr. Field's
+_Yesterdays with Authors_ (pp. 146-8), has elicited from the
+"Independent clergyman" referred to a counter statement of the alleged
+facts, of which I here present an abridgement, omitting nothing that is
+in any way material. "Though it is thirty years since . . . several who
+were present survive to this day, and have a distinct recollection of
+all that occurred. One of these is the writer of this article--another,
+the Rev. Joshua Harrison. . . . The Independent clergyman never wore bands,
+and had no Bible under his arm. . . . An account of Mr. Hone had appeared
+in some of the newspapers, containing an offensive paragraph to the
+effect that one 'speculation' having failed, Mr. Hone was disposed, and
+persuaded by the Independent clergyman, to try another, that other being
+'to try his powers in the pulpit.' This was felt by the family to be an
+insult alike to the living and the dead. . . . Mr. Harrison's account is,
+that the Independent clergyman was observed speaking to Miss Hone about
+something apparently annoying to both, and that, turning to Mr.
+Cruikshank, he said 'Have you seen the sketch of Mr. Hone's life in the
+_Herald_?' Mr. C. replied 'Yes.' 'Don't you think it very
+discreditable? It is a gross reflection on our poor friend, as if he
+would use the most sacred things merely for a piece of bread; and it is
+a libel on me and the denomination I belong to, as if we could be
+parties to such a proceeding.' Mr. C. said in reply, 'I know something
+of the article, but what you complain of was not in it originally--it
+was an addition by another hand.' Mr. C. afterwards stated that he wrote
+the article, 'but _not_ the offensive paragraph.' The vulgar nonsense
+put into the mouth of the clergyman by Mr. Dickens was wound up, it is
+said, by 'Let us pray' . . . but this _cannot_ be true; and for this
+reason, the conversation with Mr. Cruikshank took place before the
+domestic service, and that service, according to Nonconformist custom,
+is always begun by reading an appropriate passage of Scripture. . . . Mr.
+Dickens says that while they were kneeling at prayer Mr. Cruikshank
+whispered to him what he relates. Mr. C. denies it; and I believe
+him. . . . In addition to the improbability, one of the company remembers
+that Mr. Dickens and Mr. Cruikshank did not sit together, and could not
+have knelt side by side." The reader must be left to judge between what
+is said of the incident in the text and these recollections of it after
+thirty years.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+At the close of the corrections to the first volume, prefixed to the
+second, the intention was expressed to advert at the end of the work to
+information, not in correction but in illustration of my text, forwarded
+by obliging correspondents who had been scholars at the Wellington House
+Academy (i. 74). But inexorable limits of space prevent, for the
+present, a fulfilment of this intention.
+
+ J. F.
+
+ PALACE GATE HOUSE, KENSINGTON,
+ _22nd of January 1874_.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+ A'BECKETT (GILBERT), at Miss Kelly's theatre, ii. 210;
+ death of, iii. 119.
+
+ Aberdeen, reading at, iii. 234.
+
+ Actors and acting, i. 174, 175, 260, ii. 96, 103, 126-128, 176,
+ 399, 401;
+ at Miss Kelly's theatre, ii. 210;
+ French, iii. 127-134.
+
+ Adams (John Quincey), i. 214, 349.
+
+ Adelphi theatre, _Carol_ dramatized at the, ii. 96.
+
+ Africa, memorials of dead children in, iii. 293.
+
+ Agassiz (M.), iii. 389 note.
+
+ Agreements, literary, ii. 87, 88, iii. 240.
+
+ Ainsworth (Harrison), i. 118, 163, 181.
+
+ Alamode beef-house (Johnson's), i. 54.
+
+ Albany (U. S.), reading at, iii. 436 (and see 441).
+
+ Albaro, Villa Bagnerello at, ii. 113, 120;
+ the sirocco at, ii. 114;
+ Angus Fletcher's sketch of the villa, ii. 121;
+ English servants at, ii. 123;
+ tradespeople at, ii. 124, 125;
+ dinner at French consul's, ii. 130-132;
+ reception at the Marquis di Negri's, ii. 132.
+
+ Albert (Prince), i. 322 note;
+ at Boulogne, iii. 108.
+
+ Alison (Dr.), i. 258, 260.
+
+ Alison (Sheriff), ii. 391.
+
+ _All the Year Round_, titles suggested for, iii. 241-243;
+ first number of, iii. 244;
+ success of, iii. 244;
+ difference between _Household Words_ and, iii. 245;
+ tales in, by eminent writers, iii. 245;
+ sale of Christmas numbers of, iii. 246;
+ Dickens's detached papers in, iii. 247-249, 528;
+ Charles Collins's papers in, iii. 257;
+ projected story for, iii. 310, 462;
+ new series of, iii. 462 note;
+ change of plan in, iii. 462 note;
+ Dickens's last paper in, iii. 528.
+
+ Allan (Sir William), i. 258, 260; ii. 475.
+
+ Allonby (Cumberland), iii. 173;
+ landlady of inn at, iii. 173.
+
+ Allston (Washington), i. 331.
+
+ Amateur theatricals, i. 413-417; ii. 481; iii. 62-64.
+
+ Ambigu (Paris), _Paradise Lost_ at the, iii. 130, 131.
+
+ America, visit to, contemplated by Dickens, i. 195;
+ wide-spread knowledge of Dickens's writings in, i. 215, 216,
+ iii. 384-386;
+ eve of visit to, i. 284-291;
+ visit to, decided, i. 285;
+ proposed book about, i. 286;
+ arrangements for journey, 286;
+ rough passage to, i. 292-298;
+ first impressions of, i. 299-309;
+ hotels in, i. 304, iii. 390, 396, 412, 435;
+ inns in, i. 344, 366 note, 393, 395, 400, 401, iii. 432;
+ Dickens's popularity in, i. 307, iii. 388;
+ second impressions of, i. 310-334;
+ levees in, i. 312, 347, 365, 373, 386, 397;
+ outcry against Dickens in, i. 319;
+ slavery in, i. 327, 352-354, 395, ii. 103;
+ international copyright agitation in, i. 329, 351, 408, 409;
+ railway travelling in, i. 336, 368, iii. 398, 405, 435, 436;
+ trying climate of, i. 347;
+ "located" Englishmen in, i. 350;
+ Dickens's dislike of, i. 351;
+ canal-boat journeys in, i. 358-380;
+ Dickens's real compliment to, i. 361;
+ deference paid to ladies in, i. 374;
+ duelling in, i. 396;
+ Dickens's opinion of country and people of,
+ in 1842, i. 350, 351 (and see 401, 402);
+ in 1868, ii. 38, iii. 413-416;
+ effect of _Martin Chuzzlewit_ in, ii. 76, 77;
+ desire in, to hear Dickens read, iii. 319;
+ Mr. Dolby sent to, iii, 320;
+ result of Dolby's visit, iii. 322, 323 note;
+ revisited by Dickens, iii. 387-443;
+ old and new friends in, iii. 389;
+ profits of readings in, iii. 392;
+ Fenianism in, iii. 397;
+ newspapers in, iii. 400;
+ planning the readings in, iii. 401;
+ nothing lasts long in, iii. 401, 429;
+ work of Dickens's staff in, iii. 410;
+ the result of 34 readings in, iii. 415;
+ Dickens's way of life in, iii. 416, 434, 437 note;
+ value of a vote in, iii. 420;
+ objection to coloured people in, iii. 420;
+ female beauty in, iii. 432;
+ total expenses of reading tour, and profits from readings, iii. 446
+ (and see 441, 442);
+ Dickens's departure from, iii. 443;
+ effect of Dickens's death in, iii. 384.
+
+ Americanisms, i. 303, 327, 370, 387, 410, 414, 415.
+
+ _American Notes_, choicest passages of, i. 362, 363;
+ less satisfactory than Dickens's letters, i. 358, 359;
+ in preparation, ii. 23, 24;
+ proposed dedication of, ii. 27;
+ rejected motto for, ii. 30;
+ suppressed introductory chapter to, ii. 34-37;
+ Jeffrey's opinion of, ii. 38;
+ large sale of, 37, 38.
+
+ Americans, friendly, ii. 177;
+ deaths of famous, since 1842, iii. 389 note;
+ homage to Dickens by, iii. 465 note;
+ French contrasted with, ii. 322.
+
+ Andersen (Hans), iii. 167.
+
+ Anniversary, a birthday, i. 113, 150, iii. 308, 508;
+ a fatal, iii. 304, 376, 384.
+
+ Arnold (Dr.), Dickens's reverence for, ii. 150.
+
+ Arras (France), a religious Richardson's show at, iii. 273.
+
+ Art, conventionalities of, ii. 169;
+ limitations of, in England, iii. 331;
+ inferiority of English to French, iii. 146, 147.
+
+ Artists' Benevolent Fund dinner, iii. 236.
+
+ Ashburton (Lord), i. 329, 387.
+
+ Ashley (Lord) and ragged schools, i. 283;
+ ii. 58, 493, 494.
+
+ Astley's, a visit from, iii. 164, 165;
+ _Mazeppa_ at, iii. 302 note.
+
+ _As You Like It_, French version of, iii. 132.
+ Atlantic, card-playing on the, i. 295, 296.
+
+ Auber and Queen Victoria, iii. 135.
+
+ Austin (Henry), i. 182;
+ iii. 244;
+ secretary to the Sanitary Commission, ii. 385;
+ death of, iii. 261, 262.
+
+ Australia, idea of settling in, entertained by Dickens, iii. 185;
+ scheme for readings in, iii. 270 note (idea abandoned, iii. 272).
+
+ Austrian police, the, iii. 94, 95.
+
+ Authors, American, i. 319.
+
+ Authorship, disquietudes of, ii. 288, 289.
+
+
+ BABBAGE (CHARLES) ii. 108.
+
+ Bagot (Sir Charles), i. 412.
+
+ Balloon Club at Twickenham, i. 182 note.
+
+ Baltimore (U. S.), women of, iii. 418;
+ readings at, iii. 418, 419, 427 (and see 441);
+ white and coloured prisoners in Penitentiary at, iii. 419.
+
+ Bancroft (George), i. 305, ii. 467.
+
+ Banquets, Emile de Girardin's superb, iii. 139-141.
+
+ Bantams, reduced, iii. 251.
+
+ Barham (Rev. Mr.), ii. 175, 476.
+
+ _Barnaby Rudge_, agreement to write, i. 135 (and see 147, 148,
+ 161-163, 177, 225);
+ Dickens at work on, i. 186, 232-234, 239-244;
+ agreement for, transferred to Chapman and Hall, i. 223-226;
+ the raven in, i. 233-240;
+ constraints of weekly publication, i. 243;
+ close of, i. 244;
+ the story characterised, i. 244-248.
+
+ Bartlett (Dr.) on slavery in America, i. 389.
+
+ Bath, a fancy about, iii. 451, 452.
+
+ Bathing, sea, Dickens's love of, ii. 28, 56, 138.
+
+ _Battle of Life_ title suggested for the, ii. 251 (and see 295);
+ contemplated abandonment of, ii. 289;
+ writing of, resumed, ii. 293;
+ finished, ii. 295;
+ points in the story, 296;
+ Jeffrey's opinion of the, ii. 303, 304;
+ sketch of the story, ii. 304, 305;
+ Dickens's own comments on, ii. 306;
+ date of the story, 306;
+ reply to criticism on, ii. 308;
+ doubts as to third part of, ii. 309;
+ dedication of, ii. 309;
+ illustrated by Stanfield and Leech, 310;
+ grave mistake made by Leech, ii. 311;
+ dramatized, ii. 323.
+
+ Bayham-street, Camden town, Dickens's early life in, i. 30-42.
+
+ Beale (Mr.), a proposal from, iii. 196.
+
+ Beard (Mr. Carr), ii. 476;
+ on Dickens's lameness, iii. 455;
+ readings stopped by, iii. 456;
+ in constant attendance on Dickens at his last readings, iii. 531
+ (and see 541).
+
+ Beard (Thos.), i. 92. 101, 102, iii. 256.
+
+ Beaucourt (M.), described by Dickens, iii. 99-102;
+ his "Property," iii. 100;
+ among the Putney market-gardeners, iii. 102;
+ goodness of, iii. 120 note.
+
+ Bedrooms, American, i. 304, 313.
+
+ Beecher (Ward), iii. 410;
+ readings in his church at Brooklyn, iii. 417.
+
+ Beer, a dog's fancy for, iii. 217 note.
+
+ Beggars, Italian, ii. 183, 184.
+
+ Begging-letter writers, i. 228, ii. 106, 107;
+ in Paris, ii. 327.
+
+ Belfast, reading at, iii. 229.
+
+ Benedict (Jules), illness of, ii. 466.
+
+ Bentley (Mr.), Dickens's early relations with, i. 134, 135, 141,
+ 147, 148, 161, 163, 224, iii. 240;
+ friendly feeling of Dickens to, in after life, ii 481, iii. 241.
+
+ _Bentley's Miscellany_, Dickens editor of, i. 121;
+ proposal to write _Barnaby Rudge_ in, i. 148;
+ editorship of, transferred to Mr. Ainsworth, i. 163, 164.
+
+ Berwick, Mary (Adelaide Procter), iii. 495
+
+ Berwick-on-Tweed, reading at, iii. 266.
+
+ Betting-men at Doncaster, iii. 174-176.
+
+ Beverley (William), at Wellington-house academy, i. 84.
+
+ Birds and low company, iii. 251, 252.
+
+ Birmingham, Dickens's promise to read at, iii. 56;
+ promise fulfilled (first public readings), iii. 59;
+ another reading at, iii. 311;
+ Dickens's speeches at Institute at, ii. 94, 95, iii. 527.
+
+ Birthday associations, i. 113, 150, iii. 308, 508.
+
+ Black (Adam), i. 259.
+
+ Black (Charles), ii. 476.
+
+ Black (John), i. 100, ii. 104;
+ early appreciation by, of Dickens, i. 106;
+ dinner to, ii. 53.
+
+ Blacking-warehouse (at Hungerford Stairs), Dickens employed at, i. 50;
+ described, i. 51 (and see iii. 512 note);
+ associates of Dickens at, i. 52;
+ removed to Chandos-street, Covent-garden, i. 67;
+ Dickens leaves, i. 68;
+ what became of the business, i. 70.
+
+ Blackmore (Edward), Dickens employed as clerk by, i. 87;
+ his recollections of Dickens, i. 87.
+
+ Blackpool, Dickens at, iii. 455.
+
+ _Blackwood's Magazine and Little Dorrit_, iii. 163.
+
+ Blair (General), iii. 424.
+
+ Blanchard (Laman). ii. 162, 175 (and see 187);
+ a Literary Fund dinner described by, i. 322 note.
+
+ _Bleak House_ begun, ii. 441;
+ originals of Boythorn and Skimpole in, iii. 25-28;
+ inferior to _Copperfield_, iii. 32;
+ handling of character in, iii. 40-50;
+ defects of, iii. 44;
+ Dean Ramsay on, iii. 47;
+ originals of Chancery abuses in, iii. 50;
+ proposed titles for, iii. 52 note;
+ completion of, iii. 51;
+ sale of, iii. 53.
+
+ Blessington (Lady), lines written for, ii. 52 note (and see 93).
+
+ Blind Institution at Lausanne, inmates of, ii. 235, 240, iii. 78.
+
+ Bonchurch, Dickens at, ii. 425-436;
+ effect of climate of, ii. 431-433;
+ entertainment at, iii. 111, 112 note.
+
+ Books, written and unwritten, hints for, iii. 275-297;
+ suggested titles in Memoranda for new, iii. 293, 294;
+ a complete list of Dickens's, iii. 547-560.
+
+ Booksellers, invitation to, ii. 100 note.
+
+ Boots, absurdity of, i. 314.
+
+ Boots, a gentlemanly, at Calais, i. 136;
+ a patriotic Irish, iii. 227.
+
+ _Boots at the Holly-tree Inn_, iii. 154;
+ reading of, at Boston (U. S.), iii. 410.
+
+ Bores, American, i. 375, 376, 383, 384, 385.
+
+ Boston (U. S.), first visit to, i. 300-309;
+ enthusiastic reception at, i. 301;
+ dinner at, i. 312;
+ changes in, since 1842, iii. 390;
+ first reading in, iii. 391;
+ a remembrance of Christmas at, iii. 399;
+ walking-match at, iii. 427;
+ audiences at, iii. 429;
+ last readings at, iii. 440.
+
+ _Bottle_ (Cruikshank's), Dickens's opinion of, ii. 384, 411.
+
+ Boulogne, an imaginary dialogue at, ii. 328, 329;
+ Dickens at, iii. 55, 56, 59, 96-120;
+ the Pier at, iii. 115;
+ Dickens's liking for, iii. 56;
+ M. Beaucourt's "Property" at, iii. 97-106, 115-120;
+ sketch of M. Beaucourt, iii. 99-103;
+ prices of provisions at, iii. 102 note;
+ Shakespearian performance at, iii. 103;
+ pig-market at, iii. 104;
+ Thackeray at, iii. 105 note;
+ camp at, iii. 106, 107, 116;
+ Prince Albert at, iii. 107, 108;
+ illuminations at, iii. 109;
+ epidemic at, iii. 119.
+
+ _Boulogne Jest Book_, iii. 65 note.
+
+ Bouquets, serviceable, iii. 137.
+
+ Bourse, victims of the, iii. 142.
+
+ Boxall (William), ii. 475, iii. 126.
+
+ Boxing-match, a, ii. 224.
+
+ Boyle (Mary), ii. 481, iii. 524.
+
+ Boys, a list of Christian names of, iii. 294, 295.
+
+ Boz, origin of the word, i. 104;
+ facsimile of autograph signature, i. 276.
+
+ Bradbury & Evans (Messrs.), ii. 66, 67, 68, 105, 250;
+ a suggestion by, ii. 71;
+ Dickens's agreements with, ii. 88 (and see 289), iii. 56.
+
+ Bradford, Dickens asked to read at, iii. 61 note.
+
+ Brighton, Dickens's first visit to, i. 138;
+ other visits, ii. 421, 422, 455;
+ theatre at, i. 138;
+ reading at, iii. 263.
+
+ _Bride of Lammermoor_ (Scott's), composition of the, iii. 339, 340.
+
+ British Museum reading-room, frequented by Dickens, i. 90.
+
+ Broadstairs, Dickens at, i. 136, 137, 176, 204, 277-283,
+ ii. 55, 214 note, 387-389, 405-421, 422-424, 436-441;
+ _Nickleby_ completed at, i. 176;
+ Dickens's house at, i. 205;
+ writing _American Notes_ at, ii. 23;
+ pony-chaise accident, ii. 418, 419;
+ smuggling at, ii. 439.
+
+ Brobity's (Mr.) snuff-box, iii. 297.
+
+ Brooklyn (New York), scene at, iii. 411;
+ readings in Mr. Ward Beecher's chapel, iii. 417.
+
+ Brougham (Lord), in Paris, ii. 316, 317;
+ the "_Punch_ people" and, ii. 469.
+
+ Browne (H. K.) chosen to illustrate _Pickwick_, i. 115;
+ accompanies Dickens and his wife to Flanders, i. 135;
+ failure of, in a _Dombey_ illustration, ii. 354, 355
+ (but see 348, 349);
+ sketch by, for Micawber, ii. 435;
+ his sketch of Skimpole, iii. 53.
+
+ Browning's (R. B.) _Blot on the 'Scutcheon_, Dickens's opinion of,
+ ii. 46.
+
+ Bruce (Knight), ii. 97.
+
+ Brunel (Isambard), ii. 469.
+
+ Buckingham Palace, Dickens at, iii. 508.
+
+ Buffalo (U. S.), reading at, iii. 432.
+
+ Buller (Charles), ii. 53.
+
+ Burdett (Sir Francis), advocacy of the poor, i. 250.
+
+ Burns festival, Prof. Wilson's speech at the, ii. 136.
+
+ Buss (Mr.), _Pickwick_ illustrations by, i. 115.
+
+ Byron's (Lord) Ada, ii. 469.
+
+
+ CA IRA, the revolutionary tune of, iii. 129.
+
+ Cambridge, reading at, iii. 317.
+
+ Cambridge (U. S.) and Boston contrasted, iii. 390;
+ the Webster murder at, iii. 402, 403.
+
+ Camden-town, Dickens with Mrs. Roylance at, i. 55.
+
+ Campbell (Lord), i. 322 note;
+ on the writings of Dickens, iii. 72 and note;
+ death of, iii. 247 note.
+
+ Canada, emigrants in, ii. 28, 29.
+
+ Canal-boat journeys in America, i. 358-380;
+ a day's routine on, i. 366, 367;
+ disagreeables of, i. 367;
+ a pretty scene on board, i. 390-392.
+
+ Cannibalism, an approach to, ii. 326.
+
+ Cannon-row, Westminster, incident at public-house in, i. 63.
+
+ Canterbury, reading at, iii. 264.
+
+ Car-driver, an Irish, iii. 225, 226 note.
+
+ Carlyle (Lord), ii. 469.
+
+ Carlisle (Bishop of) and Colenso, iii. 248 note.
+
+ Carlyle (Thomas), ii. 110, 135, 160, 162, 174;
+ a strange profane story, i. 130;
+ on international copyright, i. 332-334;
+ Dickens's admiration of, i. 334 (and see ii. 470);
+ a correction for, ii. 440;
+ on Dickens's acting, iii. 72;
+ grand teaching of, iii. 204;
+ inaugural address of, at Edinburgh University, iii. 308;
+ hint by, to common men, iii. 326;
+ on humour, iii. 342;
+ a hero to Dickens, iii. 520;
+ on Dickens's death, iii. 514, 515 (and see ii. 110).
+
+ Carlyle (Mrs.), on the expression in Dickens's face, i. 119;
+ death of, iii. 308;
+ Dickens's last meeting, iii. 309.
+
+ Carriage, an unaccommodating, ii. 232;
+ a wonderful, ii. 270.
+
+ Carrick Fell (Cumberland), ascent of, iii. 170, 171;
+ accident on, iii. 171.
+
+ _Castle Spectre_, a judicious "tag" to the, ii. 471.
+
+ Catholicism, Roman, the true objection to, ii. 299.
+
+ Cattermole (George), i. 181, 197, ii. 113 note;
+ imitation of a cabstand waterman by, ii. 423 note.
+
+ _Caudle Lectures_, a suggestion for the, ii. 136 note.
+
+ Cerjat (Mr.), ii. 232 (and see iii. 567), 252.
+
+ Chalk (Kent), Dickens's honeymoon spent at, i. 108;
+ revisited, i. 119.
+
+ Chambers, contemplated chapters on, i. 194.
+
+ Chamounix, Dickens's trip to, ii. 253-256;
+ revisited, iii. 76, 77;
+ narrow escape of Egg at, iii. 77.
+
+ Chancery, Dickens's experience of a suit in, ii. 97-99;
+ originals of the abuses exposed in _Bleak House_, iii. 49, 50.
+
+ Channing (Dr.) on Dickens, i. 302, 308, 309.
+
+ Chapman and Hall, overtures to Dickens by, i. 109;
+ advise purchase of the _Sketches_ copyright from Mr. Macrone,
+ i. 124;
+ early relations of Dickens with, i. 144, 145;
+ share of copyright in _Pickwick_ conceded by, i. 145;
+ payments by, for _Pickwick_ and _Nicholas Nickleby_, i. 145;
+ outline of _Master Humphrey's Clock_ submitted to, i. 192-197;
+ purchase of _Barnaby Rudge_ by, i. 225;
+ Dickens's earliest and latest publishers, iii. 240.
+
+ Chapman (Mr. Thomas), not the original of Mr. Dombey, ii. 107
+ (and see 108).
+
+ Chappell (Messrs.), agreements with, iii. 306, 309, 310;
+ arrangement with, for course of final readings, iii. 437 note
+ (and see 445);
+ amount received from, on account of readings, iii. 446;
+ Dickens's tribute to, iii. 531 note (and see 315).
+
+ _Charles Dickens as a Reader_ (Charles Kent's), iii. 236 note.
+
+ Chatham, Dickens's early impressions of, i. 23, 34;
+ day-school in Rome-lane, i. 27 note;
+ Mr. Giles's school at, i. 32, 33.
+
+ Cheeryble (Brothers) in _Nickleby_, originals of, i. 181.
+
+ Chester, readings at, iii. 268, 313.
+
+ Chesterton (Mr.), i. 280, ii. 23.
+
+ Chicago (U. S.), monomania respecting, iii. 418.
+
+ Chigwell, inn at, i. 239.
+
+ Children, powers of observation in, i. 23, 27;
+ mortality of young, in London, iii. 192 note, 293;
+ old, iii. 292.
+
+ Children-farming, Dickens on, iii. 287, 288 note.
+
+ _Child's History_, the, finished, iii. 59.
+
+ Child's night-lights, wonders of, iii. 172.
+
+ Chillon, Castle of, ii. 229, 257, 258.
+
+ _Chimes_, a title found for the, ii. 143;
+ design for, ii. 144;
+ Dickens hard at work on, ii. 150;
+ first outline of the, ii. 152-155;
+ effect of, on Dickens's health, ii. 156, 157;
+ objections to, ii. 160;
+ finished, ii. 161;
+ private readings of, at Lincoln's-inn fields, ii. 162, 174, 175;
+ Jeffrey's opinion of the, ii. 179.
+
+ Chimneys, the smoky, i. 221.
+
+ Chinese Junk, ii. 405-408.
+
+ Chorley (Henry), iii. 256.
+
+ Christmas, Dickens's identity with, ii. 90.
+
+ Christmas-eve and day, Dickens's accustomed walk on, iii. 517.
+
+ _Christmas Carol_, origin of, ii. 60;
+ preparation of, ii. 71, 72;
+ sale and accounts of, ii. 85-87;
+ Jeffrey and Thackeray on, ii. 89;
+ message of the, ii. 89;
+ the story characterized, ii. 91;
+ dramatized at the Adelphi, ii. 96;
+ reading of, for the Hospital for Sick Children, iii. 200;
+ reading of, in Boston (U. S.), iii. 429, 430;
+ Thackeray's copy of, purchased by her Majesty, iii. 506 note.
+
+ _Christmas Sketches_, Dickens's, iii. 370, 371.
+
+ Christmas sports, ii. 47 note.
+
+ Cicala, the, ii. 118.
+
+ Cincinnati (U. S.), i. 378;
+ described, i. 379, 380;
+ temperance festival at, i. 383;
+ bores at, i. 385.
+
+ Circumlocution Office, the, iii. 159.
+
+ Clay (Henry), i. 348, 349;
+ on international copyright, i. 323.
+
+ Clennam (Mrs.), in _Little Dorrit_, original of, iii. 277.
+
+ Cleveland (U. S.), rude reception of mayor of, i. 403.
+
+ Coachman, a Paris, ii. 332 note.
+
+ Cobham-park, i. 224, 288;
+ Dickens's last walk in, iii. 540.
+
+ Cockburn (Sir Alexander), iii. 126.
+
+ Coffee-shops frequented by Dickens, i. 56.
+
+ Cogswell (Mr.), ii. 476, 477.
+
+ Coincidence, marvels of, iii. 174, 175, 524.
+
+ Col de Balme Pass, ii. 253.
+
+ Colden (David), i. 315, 316, ii. 192 note, 476.
+
+ Colenso (Bishop) and the Bishop of Carlisle, iii. 248 note.
+
+ Coleridge (Sara) on Little Nell, iii. 345 note;
+ on _Chuzzlewit_, iii. 345 note.
+
+ Collier (Payne) and Dickens in Hungerford Market, iii. 512 note.
+
+ Collins (Charles Alston), marriage of, to Kate Dickens, iii. 255;
+ books by, iii. 257;
+ on Dickens's accompaniments of work, iii. 211 note;
+ cover designed by, for _Edwin Drood_, iii. 466;
+ death of, iii. 258.
+
+ Collins (Wilkie), Dickens's regard for, ii. 402;
+ holiday trip of, with Dickens and Egg, iii. 76-95;
+ at Boulogne, iii. 106;
+ in Paris, iii. 126;
+ in Cumberland, iii. 170-173;
+ accident to, on Carrick Fell, iii. 171;
+ tales by, in _All the Year Round_, iii. 245;
+ at his brother's wedding, iii. 256.
+
+ Colquhoun (Mr.), i. 258.
+
+ Columbus (U. S.), levee at, i. 398.
+
+ Commercial Travellers' schools, admired by Dickens, iii. 247.
+
+ Commons, House of, Dickens's opinion of, i. 103, iii. 499.
+
+ Conjuror, a French, iii. 110-115.
+
+ Consumption, hops a supposed cure for, iii. 208.
+
+ Conversion, a wonderful, ii. 180 note.
+
+ Cooke, Mr. (of Astley's), iii. 164, 165.
+
+ Cooling Castle, ruins of, iii. 206, 220.
+
+ Cooling churchyard, Dickens's partiality for, iii. 221.
+
+ Copyright, international, Dickens's views on, i. 311, 318, 322,
+ 332, 349, 360, ii. 50;
+ Henry Clay on, i. 323;
+ petition to American Congress on, i. 328, 351;
+ Carlyle on, i. 332-334;
+ two obstacles to, i. 408, 409 (and see ii. 26);
+ result of agitation, i. 322.
+
+ Corduroy-road, a, i. 398, 399.
+
+ Cornwall (Barry), ii. 187, iii. 27 (and see 495, 530).
+
+ Cornwall, Dickens's trip to, ii. 40-43.
+
+ Costello (Dudley), fancy sketch of, ii. 383.
+
+ Coutts, Miss (Baroness Burdett-Coutts), great regard for, ii. 58;
+ true friendship of, ii. 323;
+ generosity of, ii. 109 note, 488, iii. 300 (and see ii. 179).
+
+ Covent-garden theatre, Macready at, i. 140, 185;
+ farce written by Dickens for, i. 183;
+ dinner at the close of Mr. Macready's management, i. 185;
+ the editor of the _Satirist_ hissed from stage of, ii. 50;
+ Dickens applies for an engagement at, ii. 206.
+
+ Coventry, gold repeater presented to Dickens by watchmakers of,
+ iii. 237 (and see 562).
+
+ Crawford (Sir George), ii. 172.
+
+ _Cricket on the Hearth_, origin of the, ii. 201-204;
+ Dickens busy on, ii. 215;
+ reading of, in Ary Scheffer's studio, iii. 148.
+
+ Crimean war, unpopular in France, iii. 110, 127, 143.
+
+ Cruikshank (George), illustrations by, to _Sketches_, i. 113;
+ claim by, to the origination of _Oliver Twist_, i. 154-156,
+ ii. 347, 348, 350, 351 note (and see autograph letter of
+ Dickens, ii. 349, 350, and p. vii. of vol. ii.);
+ fancy sketch of, ii. 379, 381;
+ Dickens's opinion of his _Bottle_ and _Drunkard's Children_,
+ ii. 384, 410, 411.
+
+ _Cruize on Wheels_ (Charles Collins's), iii, 257.
+
+ Cumberland, Dickens's trip in, iii. 170-173.
+
+ Cunningham, Peter, character and life, iii. 73, 74.
+
+ Curry (Mr.), ii. 125, 158, 172.
+
+ Custom-house-officers (continental), ii. 172, 173, 315.
+
+
+ _Daily News_ projected, ii. 203;
+ misgiving as to, ii. 215-217;
+ first number of, ii. 218;
+ Dickens's short editorship, ii. 215-219;
+ succeeded by author of this book, ii. 220, 302, 303.
+
+ Dana (R. H.), i. 304.
+
+ Danson (Dr. Henry), recollections by, of Dickens at school,
+ i. 81-85;
+ letter from Dickens to, i. 85 note.
+
+ Dansons (the), at work, iii. 166.
+
+ _David Copperfield_, identity of Dickens with hero of, i. 50-69;
+ iii. 33-36;
+ characters and incidents in, iii. 21-40;
+ original of Dora in, i. 93;
+ name found for, ii. 422;
+ dinners in celebration of, ii. 438, 439, 470;
+ sale of, ii. 447;
+ titles proposed for, ii. 463-465;
+ progress of, ii. 483-487;
+ Lord Lytton on, iii. 21;
+ popularity of, iii. 22;
+ original of Miss Moucher in, iii. 23;
+ original of Mr. Micawber in, iii. 30-32;
+ _Bleak House_ inferior to, iii. 32;
+ a proposed opening of, iii. 155;
+ fac-simile of plan prepared for first number of, iii. 157.
+
+ De Foe (Daniel), Dickens's opinion of, iii. 135 note;
+ his _History of the Devil_, i. 139.
+
+ Delane (John), ii. 469.
+
+ Denman (Lord), ii. 108.
+
+ Devonshire (Duke of) and the Guild of Literature and Art, ii. 397.
+
+ Devonshire-terrace, Dickens removes from Doughty-street into,
+ i. 186;
+ Maclise's sketch of Dickens's house in, iii. 41.
+
+ Dick, a favourite canary, iii. 117.
+
+ Dickens (John), family of, i. 22;
+ small but good library of, i. 29;
+ money embarrassments of, i. 36, 42;
+ character of, described by his son, i. 37;
+ arrested for debt, i. 43;
+ legacy to, i. 64;
+ leaves the Marshalsea, i. 66;
+ on the education of his son, i. 89;
+ becomes a reporter, i. 90;
+ Devonshire home of, described, i. 186-189;
+ death of, ii. 489;
+ his grave at Highgate, ii. 490;
+ sayings of, iii. 31, 32;
+ respect entertained by his son for, iii. 31.
+
+ Dickens (Fanny), ii. 206, 456, 459;
+ elected a pupil to the Royal Academy of Music, i. 39;
+ obtains a prize thereat, i. 66;
+ illness of, ii. 319, 320;
+ death of, ii. 460;
+ her funeral, i. 67.
+
+ Dickens (Alfred), i. 223, 288; death of, iii. 258.
+
+ Dickens, Augustus, (died in America), ii. 385.
+
+ Dickens (Frederick), i. 182, 261, 288 (and see ii. 476);
+ narrow escape from drowning in the bay at Genoa, ii. 137;
+ death of, iii. 450.
+
+ DICKENS, CHARLES, birth of, at Portsea, i. 21.
+ reminiscences of childhood at Chatham, i. 23-36.
+ relation of David Copperfield to, i. 28, 48, 92; iii. 33-35.
+ his wish that his biography should be written by the author of
+ this book, i. 40 note.
+ first efforts at description, i. 42.
+ account by himself of his boyhood, i. 50-69
+ (and see ii. 205-207; iii. 247).
+ illnesses of, i. 60, 130, 244, 288; ii. 216, 297, 312 note;
+ iii. 304, 305, 306, 311, 312, 313, 315, 321, 355, 375, 404,
+ 410, 412, 416, 426, 427, 437, 441, 450.
+ clerk in an attorney's office, i. 87.
+ hopeless love of, i. 92, 93.
+ employed as a parliamentary reporter, i. 96
+ (and see iii. 512 note).
+ his first attempts in literature, i. 97.
+ his marriage, i. 108.
+ writes for the stage, i. 116 (and see 140, 183).
+ predominant impression of his life, i. 120, 405; ii. 147-150;
+ iii. 524, 525.
+ personal habits of, i. 132, 133, 224, 368, 376, 377, 400;
+ ii. 216, 225, 324; iii. 215-218, 513.
+ relations of, with his illustrators, i. 154-156; ii. 347, 348.
+ portraits of, i. 178 note; iii. 148-150, 238.
+ curious epithets given by, to his children, i. 182 note;
+ ii. 248 note, 266 note, 314, 315, 324 note;
+ iii. 100 (and see i. 261, 306, 331, 356, 418).
+ his ravens, i. 233-239; ii. 215.
+ adventures in the Highlands, i. 263-276.
+ first visit to the United States, i. 284.
+ domestic griefs of, i. 289.
+ an old malady of, i. 288; iii. 314, 534.
+ an admirable stage manager, i. 414-417; ii. 210, 212-214,
+ 370, 371, 393 note, 400, 401.
+ his dogs, ii. 24, 25, 134 note; iii. 144 note, 217-220, 222.
+ his Will, ii. 59, 60 (and see iii. 561).
+ his accompaniments of work, ii. 48, 121, 240; iii. 211, 212 note.
+ religious views of, ii. 59, 60, 147-150; iii. 484-486.
+ turning-point of his career, ii. 72.
+ writing in the _Chronicle_, ii. 105.
+ fancy sketch of his biographer, ii. 383.
+ sea-side holidays of, ii. 403-441; iii. 96-120.
+ Italian travels, ii. 111-200; iii. 78-95.
+ craving for crowded streets, ii. 144, 151, 277, 281, 313.
+ political opinions of, ii. 146; iii. 498-503 (and see 528).
+ wish to become an actor, ii. 205.
+ his long walks, ii. 158, 230 note, 312 note; iii. 249, 515-517.
+ first desire to become a public reader, ii. 174, 284; iii. 60, 61.
+ edits the _Daily News_, ii. 218.
+ his home in Switzerland, ii. 225, 226.
+ residence in Paris, ii. 316-336, iii. 121-153.
+ underwriting numbers, ii. 335 note, 362; iii. 377, 466.
+ overwriting numbers, ii. 342, 343, 356.
+ first public readings, iii. 60.
+ revisits Switzerland and Italy, iii. 76-95.
+ his birds, iii. 117, 118.
+ home disappointments, iii. 177-201 (and see 512).
+ separation from his wife, iii. 200.
+ purchases Gadshill-place, iii. 205.
+ first paid Readings, iii. 223-238.
+ second series of Readings, iii. 255-274.
+ third series of Readings, iii. 298-324.
+ revisits America, iii. 387-443.
+ memoranda for stories first jotted down by, iii. 180
+ (and see 275-297).
+ his "violated letter," iii. 201, 231.
+ favourite walks of, iii. 209, 220-222.
+ his mother's death, iii. 300.
+ his first attack of lameness, iii. 304 (and see 312, 321, 376,
+ 437, 442 note, 453, 455, 456, 509, 514, 530, 537).
+ general review of his literary labours, iii. 325-386, 380-386.
+ effect of his death in America, iii. 384.
+ last readings of, iii. 444-460.
+ noticeable changes in, iii. 447, 455, 534.
+ comparison of his early and his late MSS., iii. 466, 468, 469.
+ personal characteristics of, iii. 478-526.
+ his interview with the Queen, iii. 507, 508.
+ strain and excitement at the final readings at St. James's Hall,
+ iii. 532.
+ last days at Gadshill, iii. 539, 543.
+ a tribute of gratitude to, for his books, iii. 538, 539.
+ general mourning for, iii. 542.
+ burial in Westminster Abbey, iii. 544.
+ unbidden mourners at grave, iii. 544.
+
+ Dickens (Mrs.), i. 108, 135, 252, 264, 273, 287, 290, 294, 299, 304,
+ 313, 318, 336, 344, 348, 349, 373, 375, 387, 397, 403, 404, 411,
+ 413-415, ii. 140, 149, 163, 165, iii. 113;
+ reluctance to leave England, i. 287;
+ an admirable traveller, i. 397;
+ Maclise's portrait of, ii. 44;
+ the separation, iii. 200 (and see 562, 564.)
+
+ Dickens (Charles, jun.), i. 257, 331, ii. 179;
+ birth of, i. 119;
+ illness of, ii. 335;
+ education of, ii. 323, iii. 57 note;
+ marriage of, iii. 262.
+
+ Dickens (Mary), birth of, i. 149 (and see ii. 471, iii. 561).
+
+ Dickens (Kate), birth of, i. 186 (and see ii. 470);
+ illness of, ii. 122;
+ marriage of, iii. 255.
+
+ Dickens (Walter Landor), death of, i. 250 (and see iii. 300, 301).
+
+ Dickens (Francis Jeffrey), birth of, ii. 61.
+
+ Dickens (Alfred Tennyson), ii. 215.
+
+ Dickens (Lieut. Sydney), death of, at sea, ii. 369 note.
+
+ Dickens (Henry Fielding), birth of, ii. 462;
+ acting of, iii. 63;
+ scholarship at Cambridge won by, iii. 529 (and see iii. 562).
+
+ Dickens (Edward Bulwer Lytton), birth of, iii. 54.
+
+ Dickens (Dora Annie), birth of, ii. 487;
+ death of, ii. 492;
+ her grave at Highgate, ii. 493, iii. 52.
+
+ _Dickens in Camp_ (Bret Harte's), i. 215, 216.
+
+ Dilke (Charles Wentworth), i. 47, 48;
+ death of, iii. 303 note.
+
+ Dilke (Sir Charles), ii. 437.
+
+ Disraeli (Mr.), iii. 537.
+
+ Doctors, Dickens's distrust of, ii. 433.
+
+ Doctors' Commons, Dickens reporting in, i. 92
+ (and see ii. 219, iii. 39).
+
+ _Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions_, large sale of, ii. 87 note;
+ Dickens's faith in, iii. 307;
+ how written, iii. 379;
+ success of the reading of, at New York, iii. 409, 410.
+
+ Dogs, Dickens's, ii. 24, 25, 134 note, iii. 144 note, 217-220, 222;
+ effect of his sudden lameness upon, iii. 518.
+
+ Dolby (Miss), ii. 475.
+
+ Dolby, Mr. (Dickens's manager) sent to America, iii. 320;
+ troubles of, iii. 394, 400, 408, 411, 412;
+ the most unpopular man in America, iii. 394;
+ care and kindness of, iii. 441;
+ commission received by, iii. 446.
+
+ _Dombey and Son_, original of Mrs. Pipchin in, i. 55, ii. 355;
+ begun at Rosemont, ii. 241;
+ Dickens at work on, ii. 249, 250, 266, 297, 314;
+ general idea for, ii. 250;
+ hints to artist, ii. 250;
+ a reading of first number of, ii. 283;
+ large sale of, ii. 296, 353 (and see 447);
+ a number under written, ii. 335 note;
+ charwoman's opinion of, ii. 335, 336;
+ plan of, ii. 337-341;
+ progress of, ii. 341-367;
+ artist-fancies for Mr. Dombey, ii. 345, 346;
+ passage of original MS. omitted, ii. 343, 344 note;
+ a reading of second number of, ii. 353 (and see 257, 281);
+ Jeffrey on, ii. 358, 359 and note, 358;
+ characters in, and supposed originals of, ii. 362-367
+ (and see 107);
+ profits of, ii. 384;
+ translated into Russian, ii. 448.
+
+ Doncaster, the race-week at, iii. 174-176;
+ a "groaning phantom" at, iii. 174.
+
+ Dora, a real, i. 92, 93;
+ changed to Flora in _Little Dorrit_, i. 94.
+
+ D'Orsay (Count) and Roche the courier, ii. 204 note;
+ death of, iii. 55.
+
+ Doughty-street, Dickens removes to, i. 119;
+ incident of, iii. 252.
+
+ Dover, Dickens at, iii. 54, 55;
+ reading at, iii. 264;
+ storm at, iii. 264.
+
+ Dowling (Vincent), i. 101.
+
+ Dramatic College, Royal, Dickens's interest in the, iii. 236.
+
+ Dream, a vision in a, ii. 148-150 (and see iii. 522-524);
+ President Lincoln's, iii. 423.
+
+ _Drunkard's Children_ (Cruikshank's), Dickens's opinion of,
+ ii. 410, 411.
+
+ Drury-lane theatre, opening of, ii. 30.
+
+ Dublin, Dickens's first impressions of, iii. 225;
+ humorous colloquies at Morrison's hotel in, iii. 227, 228;
+ reading in, iii. 317 (and see 226 note, 228).
+
+ Duelling in America, i. 396.
+
+ Dumas (Alexandre), tragedy of _Kean_ by, ii. 127
+ (and see iii. 491 note);
+ his _Christine_, ii. 176;
+ a supper with, ii. 331.
+
+ Dundee, reading at, iii. 233.
+
+ Du Plessis (Marie), death of, ii. 333.
+
+ Dyce (Alexander), ii. 473.
+
+
+ EDEN in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, original of, i. 363, 369;
+ a worse swamp than, ii. 77.
+
+ Edinburgh, public dinner in, to Dickens, i. 249-262;
+ presentation of freedom of, i. 257 (and see iii. 197);
+ wassail-bowl presented after _Carol_ reading, iii. 197;
+ readings at, iii. 233, 267, 451, and 450 note;
+ Scott monument at, ii. 392.
+
+ Editorial troubles and pleasures, iii. 493.
+
+ Editors, American, incursion of, i. 300.
+
+ Education, two kinds of, i. 89;
+ Dickens's speeches on, ii. 95.
+
+ _Edwin Drood_, clause inserted in agreement for, iii. 461 note;
+ sale of, iii. 461 note;
+ amount paid for, iii. 461 note;
+ first fancy for, iii. 462;
+ the story as planned in Dickens's mind, iii. 463, 464;
+ Longfellow on, iii. 464;
+ merits of, iii. 464, 465;
+ facsimile of portion of final page of, iii. 466 (and see 468);
+ an unpublished scene for, iii. 467-476;
+ original of the opium-eater in, iii. 528;
+ a reading of a number of, iii. 530.
+
+ Egg (Augustus), fancy sketch of, ii. 383;
+ holiday trip of, with Dickens and Wilkie Collins, iii. 76-95;
+ narrow escape at Chamounix, iii. 77.
+
+ Electric message, uses for an, iii. 282.
+
+ Eliot (George), Dickens's opinion of her first book, ii. 47.
+
+ Elliotson (Dr.), i. 270, ii. 109, 313.
+
+ Elton (Mr.), Dickens's exertions for family of, ii. 55.
+
+ Elwin (Rev. Whitwell), allusion to, ii. 462.
+
+ Emerson (Ralph Waldo), ii. 476.
+
+ Emigrants in Canada, ii. 28, 29.
+
+ Emigration schemes, Dickens's belief in, ii. 262.
+
+ Emmanuel (Victor), visit of, to Paris, iii. 127.
+
+ Englishmen abroad, ii. 223, 252, 266-271.
+
+ Engravings, Dickens on, ii. 167, 168 note.
+
+ _Evening Chronicle_, sketches contributed by Dickens to, i. 105.
+
+ _Evenings of a Working-man_ (John Overs'), ii. 109.
+
+ _Every Man in his Humour_, private performances of, at Miss Kelly's
+ theatre, ii. 209, 211 (and see iii. 537).
+
+ _Examiner_, articles by Dickens in the, i. 185.
+
+ Executions, public, letter against, ii. 479.
+
+ Exeter, reading at, iii. 224.
+
+ Eye-openers, iii. 409.
+
+
+ FACSIMILES:
+ of letter written in boyhood by Dickens, i. 79;
+ of the autograph signature "Boz," i. 276;
+ of New York invitations to Dickens, i. 308-309;
+ of letter to George Cruikshank, ii. 349, 350;
+ of plan prepared for first numbers of _Copperfield_ and _Little
+ Dorrit_, iii. 157, 158;
+ of portion of last page of _Edwin Drood_, iii. 468 (and see 488);
+ of _Oliver Twist_, iii. 469.
+
+ Fairbairn (Thomas), letter of Dickens to, on posthumous honours,
+ iii. 487.
+
+ _Fatal Zero_ (Percy Fitzgerald's), iii. 495.
+
+ Faucit (Helen), ii. 475.
+
+ Fechter (Mr.), chalet presented by, to Dickens, iii. 211, 212;
+ Dickens's friendly relations with, iii. 302.
+
+ Feline foes, iii. 117, 118.
+
+ Felton (Cornelius C.), i. 304, 315, 320, ii. 192 note;
+ death of, iii. 269 note.
+
+ Fenianism in Ireland, iii. 316, 317 note;
+ in America, iii. 397 (and see 508).
+
+ Fermoy (Lord), iii. 522.
+
+ Fetes at Lausanne, ii. 246, 258.
+
+ Fiction, realities of, iii. 346-363.
+
+ Field (Kate), _Pen Photographs_ by, iii. 236 note.
+
+ Fielding (Henry), real people in novels of, iii. 22;
+ episodes introduced by, in his novels, iii. 161;
+ Dr. Johnson's opinion of, iii. 346;
+ M. Taine's opinion of, iii. 348.
+
+ Fields (James T.), _Yesterdays with Authors_ by, ii. 42 note;
+ on Dickens's health in America, iii. 404, 405;
+ at Gadshill, iii. 527, 528.
+
+ Fiesole, Landor's villa at, ii. 189 note.
+
+ Fildes (S. L.), chosen to illustrate _Edwin Drood_, iii. 467.
+
+ Finality, a type of, ii. 408.
+
+ Finchley, cottage at, rented by Dickens, ii. 51.
+
+ _Fine Old English Gentleman_, political squib by Dickens, i. 278,
+ 279.
+
+ Fireflies in Italy, ii. 196, and note.
+
+ Fires in America, frequency of, iii. 399, 400.
+
+ Fitzgerald (Percy), iii. 218;
+ a contributor in _All the Year Round_, iii. 245;
+ personal liking of Dickens for, iii. 495.
+
+ "Fix," a useful word in America, i. 370.
+
+ Flanders, Dickens's trip to, i. 135.
+
+ Fletcher, (Angus), i. 254, 263, 274;
+ stay of, with Dickens at Broadstairs, i. 228;
+ anecdotes of, i. 262, 263, 264 note, 269 (and see ii. 113, 120,
+ 144, 182, 193, 194 note);
+ pencil sketch by, of the Villa Bagnerello at Albaro, ii. 121;
+ death of, ii. 194 note.
+
+ Flies, plague of, at Lausanne, ii. 244, 245 note.
+
+ Fonblanque (Albany), i. 113, ii. 53, 162;
+ wit of, ii. 175, 467, iii. 349.
+
+ Footman, a meek, ii. 194.
+
+ Fortescue (Miss), ii. 96.
+
+ _Fortnightly Review_, Mr. Lewes's critical essay on Dickens in,
+ iii. 332-338.
+
+ Fowls, eccentric, iii. 251, 252.
+
+ Fox (William Johnson), ii. 53.
+
+ Fox-under-the-hill (Strand), reminiscence of, i. 62.
+
+ Franklin (Lady), iii. 519.
+
+ Fraser (Peter), ii. 475.
+
+ Freemasons' Hall, banquet to Dickens at, iii. 324.
+
+ Freemasons' secret, a, ii. 440.
+
+ Free-trade, Lord "Gobden" and, ii. 312.
+
+ French and Americans contrasted, ii. 322.
+
+ Frescoes, perishing, ii. 119;
+ at the Palazzo Peschiere, ii. 140 note, 141;
+ Maclise's, for the Houses of Parliament, iii. 536 note.
+
+ Friday, important incidents of Dickens's life connected with,
+ ii. 441, iii. 205, 419, &c.
+
+ Frith (W. P.), portrait of Dickens by, iii. 238.
+
+ Funeral, scene at a, ii. 31-33;
+ an English, in Italy, ii. 193.
+
+ Furnival's inn, room in, where the first page of _Pickwick_ was
+ written, iii, 528.
+
+
+ GADSHILL PLACE, a vision of boyhood at, i. 24 (and see iii. 204);
+ Dick's tomb at, iii. 117 note;
+ first description of, iii. 202;
+ sketch of porch at, iii. 204;
+ purchase of, iii. 205;
+ antecedents of, iii. 207;
+ improvements and additions at, iii. 208-215;
+ sketch of Chalet at, iii. 212;
+ nightingales at, iii. 212;
+ Dickens's daily life at, iii. 215-222;
+ sketch of house and conservatory, iii. 216;
+ Study at, iii. 222;
+ games at, for the villagers, iii. 510, 511;
+ Dickens's last days at, iii. 539-542.
+
+ _Gambler's Life_, Lemaitre's acting in the, iii. 122-124.
+
+ Gamp (Mrs.), original of, ii. 51;
+ a masterpiece of English humour, ii. 83, 84;
+ with the Strollers, ii. 376-384.
+
+ Gaskell (Mrs.), ii. 454, 470, iii. 54.
+
+ Gasman's compliment to Dickens, iii. 265 (and see 441).
+
+ Gautier (Theophile), ii. 331.
+
+ Geneva, Dickens at, ii. 288;
+ revolution at, ii. 298-301;
+ aristocracy of, ii. 299.
+
+ Genoa described, ii. 125-128;
+ theatres at, ii. 127, 128 (and see iii. 491 note);
+ religious houses at, ii. 128;
+ rooms in the Palazzo Peschiere hired by Dickens, ii. 129;
+ view over, ii. 141;
+ Governor's levee at, ii. 144;
+ an English funeral at, ii. 193;
+ nautical incident at, ii. 195;
+ revisited by Dickens, iii. 78-80.
+
+ _George Silverman's Explanation_, iii. 380 (and see 253 note).
+
+ Gibson (Milner), ii. 468.
+
+ _Gilbert Massenger_ (Holme Lee's) remarks of Dickens on,
+ iii. 493, 494.
+
+ Giles (William), i. 23;
+ Dickens at the school kept by, i. 32, 33;
+ snuff box presented to "Boz" by, i. 33.
+
+ Gipsy tracks, iii. 250.
+
+ Girardin (Emile de), iii. 142;
+ banquets given by, in honour of Dickens, iii. 139-141.
+
+ Girls, American, i. 384, 385 note;
+ Irish, iii. 226 note;
+ list of Christian names of, iii. 294, 295.
+
+ Gladstone (Mr.), and Dickens, i. 103, iii. 537.
+
+ Glasgow, proposed dinner to Dickens at, i. 276;
+ reading at, iii. 234;
+ Dickens at meeting of Athenaeum, ii. 390.
+
+ Glencoe, Pass of, i. 268, 271;
+ effect of, on Dickens, i. 270.
+
+ Goldfinch, the, and his friend, iii. 252.
+
+ Gondoliers at Venice, habits of, iii. 90.
+
+ Gordon (Lord George), character of, i. 241.
+
+ Gordon (Sheriff), ii. 475.
+
+ Gore-house, a party at, ii. 334 note.
+
+ Gower-street-north, school in, opened by Dickens's mother, i. 43;
+ a dreary home, i. 45, iii. 218;
+ home broken up, i. 54.
+
+ Graham (Sir James), ii. 109.
+
+ Graham (Lady), ii. 468.
+
+ Grant (James), recollections of Dickens by, i. 101 (and see 108).
+
+ Graves, town, iii. 49, 52 note;
+ Dickens's dislike to speech-making at, iii. 488.
+
+ _Great Expectations_, original of Satis-house in, iii. 220;
+ germ of, iii. 361;
+ the story characterized, iii. 362-369;
+ close of, changed at Bulwer Lytton's suggestion, iii. 369,
+ and note.
+
+ Great Malvern, cold-waterers at, ii. 487.
+
+ Greek war-ship, a, iii. 82.
+
+ Greeley (Horace), iii. 400, 442;
+ on the effect in America of Dickens's death, iii. 384;
+ on Dickens's fame as a novelist, iii. 388;
+ a suggestion from, iii. 417.
+
+ Grey (Lord), recollection of, ii. 264, 265.
+
+ _Grimaldi, Life of_, edited by Dickens, i. 142;
+ the editor's modest estimate of it, i. 142;
+ criticisms on, i. 142, 143.
+
+ Grip, Dickens's raven, i. 220;
+ death of, i. 234, 235;
+ apotheosis, by Maclise, i. 237;
+ a second Grip, i. 239.
+
+ Grisi (Madame), ii. 176.
+
+ Guild of Literature and Art, origin of, ii. 395;
+ princely help of the Duke of Devonshire to, ii. 397
+ (and see iii. 488, 489).
+
+
+ HACHETTE (MM.), agreement with, for French translation of Dickens's
+ works, iii. 125 note.
+
+ Haghe (Louis), iii. 85.
+
+ Haldimand (Mr.), seat of, at Lausanne, ii, 232.
+
+ Halevy (M.), dinner to, ii. 469.
+
+ Halifax, the "Britannia" aground off, i. 297;
+ the house of assembly at, i. 299.
+
+ Hall (Mr. and Mrs. S. C.), ii. 475.
+
+ Hall (William), funeral of, ii. 369.
+
+ Hallam (Henry), loquacity of, ii. 251.
+
+ Halleck (Fitz-Greene) on Dickens, iii. 482 note.
+
+ Halliday (Andrew), iii. 529.
+
+ _Hamlet_, an emendation for, ii. 389;
+ performance of, at Preston, iii. 70.
+
+ Hampstead Heath, Dickens's partiality for, i. 133, ii. 101.
+
+ Hampstead-road, Mr. Jones's school in the, i. 74.
+
+ Hansard (Mr.), letter from, concerning Mr. Macrone, ii. 442,
+ 443 note.
+
+ Hardwick (John), ii. 468.
+
+ _Hard Times_, proposed names for, iii. 65, and note;
+ title chosen, iii. 65;
+ written for _Household Words_, iii. 66;
+ Ruskin's opinion of, iii. 66, 67.
+
+ Harley (Mr.), ii. 475.
+
+ Harness (Rev. Wm.), ii. 162, 175, 473.
+
+ Harrogate, reading at, iii. 230.
+
+ Harte (Bret), Dickens on, i. 214;
+ tribute by, to Dickens, i. 215, 216.
+
+ Hartford (U. S.) levee at, i. 313.
+
+ Harvard and Oxford crews, the, iii. 527.
+
+ Hastings, reading at, iii. 264.
+
+ Hatton-garden, Dickens at, iii. 25.
+
+ _Haunted Man_, first idea of, ii. 280;
+ large sale of, ii. 443;
+ dramatized, ii. 443;
+ teachings and moral of the story, ii. 443-446;
+ the christening dinner, ii. 468.
+
+ Hawthorne (N.), Dickens on, ii. 440.
+
+ Hayes (Catherine), ii. 468.
+
+ Heaven, ambition to see into, ii. 477.
+
+ Helps (Arthur), iii. 245;
+ _In Memoriam_ by, iii. 509.
+
+ Hereditary transmission, iii. 179 note (and see 493).
+
+ Highgate, Dora's grave at, ii. 493, iii. 52.
+
+ Highlands, Dickens's adventures in the, i. 263-276.
+
+ Hogarth, Dickens on, ii. 413, 414.
+
+ Hogarth (George), i. 105;
+ Dickens marries eldest daughter of, i. 108.
+
+ Hogarth (Georgina), ii. 120, iii. 540, 541, 561, 563;
+ sketch taken from, ii. 48, iii. 287;
+ Maclise's portrait of, ii. 48, 49.
+
+ Hogarth (Mary), death of, i. 120;
+ epitaph on tomb of, i. 120 note (and see ii. 458);
+ Dickens's loving memory of, i. 120, 144, 289, 405, ii. 147-150,
+ 458, iii. 525.
+
+ _Holiday Romance and George Silverman's Explanation_, high price
+ paid for, iii. 380 (and see 253 note, and 321).
+
+ Holland (Lady), a remembrance of, ii. 194.
+
+ Holland (Lord), ii. 190.
+
+ Holland (Captain), the _Monthly Magazine_ conducted by, i. 104.
+
+ Holyhead, a Fenian at, iii. 316 note.
+
+ Hone of the _Every Day Book_, scene at funeral of, ii. 31-33
+ (but see iii. 568, 569).
+
+ Honesty under a cloud, ii. 112.
+
+ Hood (Thomas), ii. 190; his _Tylney Hall_, ii. 264.
+
+ Hop-pickers, iii. 208.
+
+ Horne (R. H.), ii. 475.
+
+ Hospital for Sick Children, Dickens's exertions on behalf of,
+ iii. 192-200;
+ a small patient at, iii. 194;
+ _Carol_ reading for, iii. 200.
+
+ Hotels American, i. 304, iii. 390, 395, 412, 435;
+ extortion at, i. 331, 344.
+
+ Houghton (Lord), ii. 472, iii. 509, 538.
+
+ _Household Words_ in contemplation, ii. 449-453;
+ title selected for, ii. 454;
+ names proposed for, ii. 453;
+ first number of, ii. 454;
+ early contributors to, ii. 454;
+ Mrs. Gaskell's story in, iii. 54;
+ unwise printed statement in, iii. 200;
+ discontinued, iii. 239 (and see 37).
+
+ Hudson (George), glimpse of, in exile, iii. 274.
+
+ Hugo (Victor), an evening with, ii. 331, 332.
+
+ Hulkes (Mr.), iii. 206 note, 256.
+
+ Hull, reading at, iii. 232.
+
+ Humour, Americans destitute of i. 401;
+ a favourite bit of, ii. 102;
+ the leading quality of Dickens, iii. 341, 342;
+ Lord Lytton on the employment of, by novelists, iii. 350 note;
+ Dickens's enjoyment of his own, iii. 350-352;
+ the true province of, iii. 382.
+
+ Hungerford-market, i. 50 (and see iii. 512 note).
+
+ Hunt (Holman), iii. 257.
+
+ Hunt (Leigh), saying of, i. 119;
+ on _Nicholas Nickleby_, i. 169;
+ Civil-list pension given to, ii. 369;
+ theatrical benefit for, ii. 369-373;
+ result of performances, ii. 373;
+ last glimpse of, iii. 26 note;
+ letter of Dickens to, in self-defence, iii. 28;
+ the original of Harold Skimpole in _Bleak House_, iii. 26-29;
+ inauguration of bust of, at Kensal-green, iii. 487.
+
+ _Hunted Down_, high price paid for, iii. 253;
+ original of, iii. 279.
+
+
+ IMAGINATIVE life, tenure of, iii. 187.
+
+ Improprieties of speech, ii. 269.
+
+ Incurable Hospital, patients in the, iii. 287.
+
+ Inimitable, as applied to Dickens, origin of the term, i. 33.
+
+ Inn, a log-house, i. 400.
+
+ Innkeeper, a model, i. 365.
+
+ Inns, American, Miss Martineau on, i. 344 (and see 366 note, 393,
+ 395, 400, iii. 432);
+ Highland, i. 265, 267, 275;
+ Italian, ii. 158, 170, 171, 181.
+
+ International boat-race dinner, Dickens at, iii. 527.
+
+ Ireland, a timely word on, ii. 260.
+
+ Irving (Washington), i. 287, 315, 330, 351, 352, 357 note;
+ letter from Dickens to, i. 284;
+ a bad public speaker, i. 320-322;
+ at Literary Fund dinner in London, i. 321;
+ at Richmond (U. S.), i. 351.
+
+ Italians hard at work, ii. 197.
+
+ Italy, art and pictures in, ii. 167-169, iii. 91, 92;
+ private galleries in, ii. 168 note;
+ cruelty to brutes in, ii. 187 note;
+ wayside memorials in, ii. 188, 189 note;
+ best season in, ii. 191;
+ fire-flies in, ii. 195;
+ Dickens's trip to, iii. 76-95;
+ the noblest men of, in exile, iii. 93.
+
+
+ JACK STRAW'S-CASTLE (Hampstead-heath), i. 133, 299, 346,
+ ii. 101, 117.
+
+ Jackson (Sir Richard), i. 413.
+
+ Jeffrey (Lord), i. 260;
+ praise of Little Nell by, i. 251;
+ presides at Edinburgh dinner to Dickens, i. 252;
+ on the _American Notes_, ii. 38;
+ praise by, of the _Carol_, ii. 88;
+ on the _Chimes_, ii. 179;
+ his opinion of the _Battle of Life_, ii. 303, 304;
+ forecaste of _Dombey_ by, ii. 358 note;
+ on Paul's death, ii. 361 note;
+ on the character of Edith in Dombey, ii. 362-364;
+ James Sheridan Knowles and, ii. 392;
+ touching letter from, ii. 428;
+ death of, ii. 483.
+
+ Jerrold (Douglas), ii. 136, 162, 175, 200;
+ at Miss Kelly's theatre, ii. 209, 210;
+ fancy sketch of, ii. 282, iii. 63 note;
+ last meeting with Dickens, iii. 167;
+ death of, iii. 168;
+ proposed memorial tribute to, and result, iii. 168.
+
+ Jesuits at Geneva, rising against the, ii. 297-301
+ (and see 179-180).
+
+ Johnson (President), interview of Dickens with, iii. 423;
+ impeachment of, iii. 429.
+
+ Johnson (Reverdy), at Glasgow art-dinner, iii. 453 note.
+
+ Jonson (Ben), an experience of, ii. 352.
+
+ Jowett (Dr.), on Dickens, iii. 525, 526.
+
+
+ KARR (ALPHONSE), ii. 331.
+
+ Keeley (Mrs.), ii. 475;
+ in _Nicholas Nickleby_, i. 175, ii. 96.
+
+ Kelly (Fanny), theatre of, in Dean-street, Soho, ii. 208-214;
+ whims and fancies of, ii. 209.
+
+ Kemble (Charles) and his daughters, ii. 473.
+
+ Kemble (John), ii. 473.
+
+ Kensal-green, Mary Hogarth's tomb at, i. 120 note, ii. 458 note.
+
+ Kent (Charles), _Charles Dickens as a Reader_ by, iii. 235 note;
+ letter to, iii. 541.
+
+ _Kissing the Rod_ (Edmund Yates'), iii. 495.
+
+ Knebworth, private performances at, ii. 396, 397;
+ Dickens at, iii. 245, 246.
+
+ Knight (Charles), ii. 475.
+
+ Knowles (James Sheridan), bankruptcy of, ii. 392;
+ civil-list pension granted to, ii. 393;
+ performances in aid of, ii. 394, 395.
+
+
+ LADIES, American, i. 327;
+ eccentric, ii. 291-293.
+
+ Laing (Mr.), of Hatton Garden, iii. 25.
+
+ Lamartine (A., de), ii. 331, iii. 135.
+
+ Lameness, strange remedy for, i. 22.
+
+ Lamert (James), private theatricals got up by, i. 31;
+ takes young Dickens to the theatre, i. 32;
+ employs Dickens at the blacking-warehouse, i. 51;
+ quarrel of John Dickens with, i. 68 (and see 228).
+
+ _Lamplighter_, Dickens's farce of the, i. 183, ii. 207;
+ turned into a tale for the benefit of Mrs. Macrone, i. 241.
+
+ Landor (Walter Savage), Dickens's visit to, at Bath, i. 200;
+ mystification of, i. 218;
+ villa at Fiesole, ii. 189, 190 (and see 486 note);
+ the original of Boythorn in _Bleak House_, iii. 26;
+ a fancy respecting, iii. 451;
+ Forster's _Life_ of, ii. 189 note, iii. 528.
+
+ Landport (Portsea), birth of Dickens at, i. 21.
+
+ Landseer (Charles), ii. 475.
+
+ Landseer (Edwin), i. 181, ii. 162, 470, 475, iii. 63 note, 126;
+ and Napoleon III., iii. 147 note (and see iii. 238).
+
+ Land's-end, a sunset at, ii. 40.
+
+ Lankester (Dr.), ii. 430.
+
+ Lant-street, Borough, Dickens's lodgings in, i. 59;
+ the landlord's family reproduced in the Garlands in _Old
+ Curiosity Shop_, i. 60.
+
+ Lausanne, Dickens's home at, ii. 225, 226;
+ booksellers' shops at, ii. 227;
+ the town described, ii. 227;
+ view of Rosemont, ii. 229;
+ girl drowned in lake at, ii. 232, 233;
+ theatre at, ii. 233, 234 note;
+ fetes at, ii. 246, 247, 258, 259;
+ marriage at, ii. 248;
+ revolution at, ii. 259;
+ prison at, ii. 234, 235;
+ Blind Institution at, ii. 236-240, iii. 78;
+ English colony at, ii. 242 note;
+ plague of flies at, ii. 244, 245 note;
+ earthquake at, ii. 283 note;
+ feminine smoking party, ii. 292;
+ the town revisited, iii. 77, 78.
+
+ Lawes (Rev. T. B.), club established by, at Rothamsted, iii. 244.
+
+ Layard (A. H.), iii. 83;
+ at Gadshill, iii. 510, 523.
+
+ Lazy Tour projected, iii. 170 (and see 351).
+
+ Lazzaroni, what they really are, ii. 187.
+
+ Leech (John) at Miss Kelly's theatre, ii. 210;
+ grave mistake by, in _Battle of Life_ illustration, ii. 310, 311;
+ fancy sketch of, ii. 381;
+ Dickens's opinion of his _Rising Generation_, ii. 414-418;
+ what he will be remembered for, ii. 417;
+ accident to, at Bonchurch, ii. 435;
+ at Boulogne, iii. 105;
+ death of, iii. 303 (and see 375).
+
+ Leeds, reading at, iii. 232.
+
+ Leeds Mechanics' Society, Dickens at meeting of the, ii. 390, 391.
+
+ _Legends and Lyrics_ (Adelaide Procter's), iii. 495 note.
+
+ Legerdemain in perfection, iii. 112-114 (and see 111, 112 note).
+
+ Leghorn, Dickens at, iii. 80, 81.
+
+ Legislatures, local, i. 365.
+
+ Lehmann (Frederic), iii. 218, 256.
+
+ Leigh (Percival), ii. 210.
+
+ Lemaitre (Frederic), acting of, iii. 122-124 (and see 521).
+
+ Lemon (Mark), ii. 210, 211, 263;
+ fancy sketch of, ii. 382;
+ acting with children, iii. 62;
+ death of, iii. 538.
+
+ Lemon (Mrs.), ii. 263.
+
+ Leslie (Charles Robert), iii. 126.
+
+ Letter-opening at the General Post-Office, ii. 108, 109.
+
+ Levees in the United States, i. 313, 347, 365, 373, 386, 398;
+ queer customers at, i. 373;
+ what they are like, i. 398.
+
+ Lever (Charles), tale by, in _All the Year Round_, iii. 245.
+
+ Lewes (George Henry), Dickens's regard for, ii. 475;
+ critical essay on Dickens, in the _Fortnightly Review_, noticed,
+ iii. 333-339.
+
+ Library, a gigantic, ii. 272, 273.
+
+ _Life of Christ_, written by Dickens for his children, ii. 241 note.
+
+ Life-preservers, i. 376.
+
+ _Lighthouse_, Carlyle on Dickens's acting in the, iii. 72.
+
+ Lincoln (President), curious story respecting, iii. 422, 423
+ (and see 508).
+
+ Lincoln's-inn-fields, a reading of the _Chimes_ in, ii. 162, 174,
+ 175.
+
+ Linda, Dickens's dog, iii. 218, 219;
+ burial-place of, iii. 222.
+
+ Liston (Robert), ii. 475.
+
+ Literary Fund dinner, i. 321 (and see iii. 488).
+
+ Literature, too much "patronage" of, in England, iii. 488.
+
+ Litterateur, a fellow, ii. 325.
+
+ _Little Dorrit_, fac-simile of plan prepared for first number of,
+ iii. 158;
+ sale of, iii. 159;
+ general design of, iii. 159;
+ weak points in, iii. 160, 161;
+ Von Moltke and, iii. 164;
+ original of Mrs. Clennam in, iii. 277;
+ notions for, iii. 278.
+
+ Little Nell, Florence Dombey and, ii. 362;
+ Sara Coleridge on, iii. 345 note.
+
+ Liverpool, readings at, iii. 225, 268, 311, 313;
+ Dickens's speech at Mechanics' Institution at, ii. 94, 95;
+ Leigh Hunt's benefit at, ii. 372, 373;
+ public dinner to Dickens, iii. 454, 500, 501.
+
+ Loch-earn-head, postal service at, i. 269.
+
+ Locock (Dr.), ii. 468.
+
+ Lodi, Dickens at, ii. 166-173.
+
+ Logan Stone, Stanfield's sketch of, ii. 42.
+
+ London, pictures of, in Dickens's books, i. 171;
+ readings in, iii. 223, 235, 258, 269.
+
+ Longfellow (Henry Wadsworth), i. 304, 331, iii. 447;
+ among London thieves and tramps, ii. 22 (and see 57);
+ at Gadshill, iii. 216;
+ on Dickens's death, iii. 384.
+
+ Longman (Thomas), ii. 469.
+
+ Louis Philippe, a glimpse of, ii. 320;
+ dethronement of, ii. 403.
+
+ Lovelace (Lord), ii. 468.
+
+ Lowther, Mr. (charge d'affaires at Naples), difficulty in finding
+ house of, iii. 83-85.
+
+ Lytton (Lord), ii. 188 (and see iii. 246);
+ prologue written by, for Ben Jonson's play, ii. 372, 373 note;
+ Dickens's admiration for, ii. 472, 488;
+ his opinion of _Copperfield_, iii. 21, 22;
+ _Strange Story_ contributed to _All the Year Round_, iii. 245;
+ Dickens's reply to remonstrance from, iii. 341, 342;
+ defence by, of humourists, iii. 350 note;
+ suggestion as to close of _Great Expectations_, iii. 369;
+ letter of Dickens to, from Cambridge (U. S.), iii. 402, 403.
+
+ Lytton (Robert), iii. 127.
+
+
+ MACKENZIE (Dr. SHELTON) and Cruikshank's illustrations to
+ _Oliver Twist_, i. 155 note;
+ rigmarole by, concerning Dickens and Her Majesty, iii. 503,
+ 504 note.
+
+ Maclise (Daniel), i. 261, ii. 160, 175, 200;
+ portrait of Dickens by, i. 178 note;
+ social charm of, i. 180, 181;
+ his apotheosis of Grip, i. 237;
+ his play-scene in _Hamlet_, i. 355;
+ among London tramps, ii. 23;
+ sketches in Cornwall by, ii. 42, 43;
+ letter from, on the Cornwall trip, 42, 43;
+ his "Girl at the Waterfall," ii, 43;
+ paints Mrs. Dickens's portrait, ii. 44;
+ pencil drawing of Charles Dickens, his wife, and her sister,
+ ii. 49;
+ Dickens's address to, ii. 116-119;
+ sketch of the private reading in Lincoln's-inn-fields, ii. 174;
+ house in Devonshire-terrace sketched by, iii. 41;
+ death of, iii. 535;
+ tribute of Dickens to, iii. 536.
+
+ _Macmillan's Magazine_, paper in, on Dickens's amateur theatricals,
+ iii. 63 note.
+
+ Macrae (David), _Home and Abroad_ by, iii. 483 note.
+
+ Macready (William Charles), i. 261, 287, 288, ii. 160, 177;
+ at Covent-garden, i. 140;
+ dinner to, on his retirement from management, i. 185;
+ dinner to, prior to American visit, ii. 53, 54;
+ an apprehended disservice to, ii. 54;
+ in New Orleans, ii. 103;
+ in Paris, ii. 176, 177, iii. 126;
+ strange news for, ii. 207;
+ anecdote of, ii. 372, 373 note;
+ Dickens's affection for, ii. 467;
+ farewell dinner to, ii. 488;
+ at Sherborne, iii. 185;
+ his opinion of the _Sikes and Nancy_ scenes, iii. 451;
+ misgiving of Dickens respecting, iii. 481, 529.
+
+ Macready (Mrs.), death of, iii. 55.
+
+ Macrone (Mr.), copyright of _Sketches by Boz_ sold to, i. 107;
+ scheme to reissue _Sketches_, i. 122;
+ exorbitant demand by, i. 124, ii. 442, 443 note;
+ close of dealings with, i. 125;
+ a friendly plea for, ii. 443 note.
+
+ Magnetic experiments, i. 375, 376.
+
+ Malleson (Mr.), iii. 256.
+
+ Malthus philosophy, ii. 262.
+
+ Managerial troubles, ii. 210, 370, 400-402.
+
+ Manby (Charles), pleasing trait of, iii. 273.
+
+ Manchester, Dickens's speech at opening of Athenaeum, ii. 56
+ (and see iii. 237);
+ Leigh Hunt's benefit at, ii. 372;
+ Guild dinner at, ii. 401;
+ readings at, iii. 231, 268, 307, 311, 314.
+
+ Manchester (Bishop of) on Dickens's writings, iii. 383, 384 note.
+
+ Manin (Daniel), iii. 126.
+
+ Mannings, execution of the, ii. 479.
+
+ _Manon Lescaut_, Auber's opera of, iii. 136.
+
+ Mansion-house dinner to "literature and art," ii. 477;
+ doubtful compliment at, ii. 478;
+ suppressed letter of Dickens respecting, ii. 478.
+
+ Marcet (Mrs.), ii. 231, 252.
+
+ Margate theatre, burlesque of classic tragedy at, ii. 26
+ (and see ii. 387).
+
+ Mario (Signor), ii. 176.
+
+ Marryat (Captain) on the effect in America of the _Nickleby_
+ dedication, ii. 54;
+ fondness of, for children, ii. 472 (and see ii. 268, iii. 567).
+
+ Marshalsea prison, Dickens's first and last visits to the,
+ i. 44, 45, iii. 162;
+ an incident in, described by Dickens, i. 64-66 (and see iii. 163).
+
+ Marston's (Mr. Westland) _Patrician's Daughter_, prologue to, ii. 45.
+
+ Martineau (Harriet) on American inns, i. 344, 366 note.
+
+ _Martin Chuzzlewit_, agreement for, i. 282 (and see ii. 24, 65);
+ original of Eden in, i. 362, 370;
+ fancy for opening of, ii. 24 (and see i. 282, 283);
+ first year of, ii. 40-62;
+ names first given to, ii. 44;
+ Sydney Smith's opinion of first number of, ii. 45;
+ origin of, ii. 45;
+ original of Mrs. Gamp in, ii. 51;
+ sale of, less than former books, ii. 63, 64 (and see 447);
+ unlucky clause in agreement for, ii. 65;
+ Dickens's own opinion of, ii. 69, 70;
+ the story characterized, ii. 74-84;
+ Thackeray's favourite scene in, ii. 79;
+ intended motto for, ii. 81;
+ M. Taine on, ii. 78;
+ christening dinner, ii. 109;
+ Sara Coleridge on, iii. 345 note.
+
+ _Master Humphrey's Clock_, projected, i. 193-199;
+ first sale of, i. 202;
+ first number published, i. 222;
+ original plan abandoned, i. 223;
+ dinner in celebration of, i. 240;
+ _Clock_ discontents, i. 281.
+
+ Mazzini (Joseph), Dickens's interest in his school, ii. 474.
+
+ Mediterranean, sunset on the, ii. 117.
+
+ _Memoires du Diable_, a pretty tag to, iii. 133, 134.
+
+ Memoranda, extracts from Dickens's book of, iii. 275-297;
+ available names in, iii. 293-296.
+
+ Mendicity Society, the, ii. 106.
+
+ Mesmerism, Dickens's interest in, i. 279, 280, 375, ii. 436.
+
+ Micawber (Mr.), in _David Copperfield_, original of, iii. 30-32;
+ comparison between Harold Skimpole and, iii. 32;
+ Mr. G. H. Lewes on, iii. 338, 348;
+ on corn, iii. 349.
+
+ Middle Temple, Dickens entered at, i. 183, 186.
+
+ _Midsummer Night's Dream_ at the Opera Comique, Boulogne,
+ iii. 103.
+
+ Milnes (Monckton), ii. 472.
+
+ _Mirror of Parliament_, Dickens reporting for, i. 97.
+
+ Mississippi, the, i. 386.
+
+ Mitton (Thomas), i. 182, ii. 476.
+
+ Moltke (Von) and _Little Dorrit_, iii. 164.
+
+ _Money_ (Lord Lytton's), a performance of, at Doncaster,
+ iii. 175 note.
+
+ Mont Blanc, effect of, on Dickens, ii. 254.
+
+ Montreal, private theatricals in, i. 414, 417;
+ facsimile of play-bill at, i. 415.
+
+ Moore (George), business qualities and benevolence, iii. 248.
+
+ Moore (Thomas), i. 251, 321.
+
+ Morgue at Paris, ii. 321;
+ a tenant of the, ii. 327.
+
+ _Morning Chronicle_, Dickens a reporter for the, i. 97;
+ liberality of proprietors, i. 98;
+ change of editorship of, ii. 53, 104;
+ articles by Dickens in the, ii. 104, 105.
+
+ Morris (Mowbray), ii. 468.
+
+ Moulineaux, Villa des, iii. 97-105, 115-119.
+
+ Mountain travelling, ii. 253.
+
+ _Mr. Nightingale's Diary_, the Guild farce of, ii. 397, iii. 72.
+
+ _Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings_, iii. 370.
+
+ _Mugby Junction_, germ of, in Memoranda, iii. 290.
+
+ Mule-travelling in Switzerland, ii. 253.
+
+ Mulgrave (Lord), i. 297, 300, 305, 413, ii. 469.
+
+ Mumbo Jumbo, ii. 440.
+
+ Murray (Lord), i. 260, ii. 475.
+
+ Music, effect of, on a deaf, dumb, and blind girl, ii. 239;
+ vagrant, ii. 387, 438.
+
+
+ NAMES, available, iii. 295, 296.
+
+ Naples, burial place at, ii. 186 note;
+ filth of, ii. 186 (and see iii. 95);
+ Dickens at, iii. 83-85.
+
+ Napoleon III. at Gore-house, ii. 334 note;
+ at Boulogne, iii. 108;
+ at Paris, iii. 108 note;
+ Edwin Landseer and, iii. 147 note.
+
+ Nautical incident at Genoa, ii. 195.
+
+ Neaves (Mr.), i. 258.
+
+ Negri (Marquis di), ii. 130-132.
+
+ New Bedford (U.S.), reading at, iii. 437.
+
+ Newcastle, readings at, iii. 264, 315;
+ alarming scene at, iii. 265.
+
+ Newhaven (U. S.), levee at, i. 313.
+
+ _New Sentimental Journey_ (Collins's), iii. 257.
+
+ Newspaper express, a, i. 101.
+
+ Newspapers, American, iii. 400.
+
+ Newsvendors' dinner, Dickens at, iii. 535.
+
+ New-year's day in Paris, iii. 145.
+
+ New York, fac-similes of invitations to Dickens, i. 308, 309;
+ the Carlton hotel in, i. 315 (and see iii. 361);
+ ball at, i. 316-318;
+ life in, i. 324;
+ hotel bills in, i. 331 (and see 345);
+ public institutions ill-managed at, i. 339;
+ prisons in, i. 339-344;
+ capital punishment in, i. 342;
+ sale of tickets for the readings, iii. 391, 392-394;
+ first reading in, iii. 393;
+ fire at the Westminster-hotel, iii. 395, 399;
+ prodigious increase since Dickens's former visit, iii. 395;
+ Niblo's theatre at, iii. 396;
+ sleigh-driving at, iii. 397;
+ police of, iii. 398 (and see i. 339);
+ the Irish element in, iii. 413;
+ farewell readings in, iii. 441;
+ public dinner to Dickens at, iii. 442.
+
+ _New York Herald_, i. 320, iii. 400.
+
+ _New York Ledger_, high price paid for tale by Dickens in, iii. 253.
+
+ _New York Tribune_, Dickens's "violated letter" in the,
+ iii. 201, 231.
+
+ Niagara Falls, effect of, on Dickens, i. 404, 405
+ (and see iii. 433).
+
+ _Nicholas Nickleby_, agreement for, i. 145;
+ first number of, i. 150, 165;
+ sale of, i. 150;
+ the _Saturday Review_ on, i. 166;
+ characters in, i. 167-171;
+ opinions of Sydney Smith and Leigh Hunt on, i. 168, 169;
+ Dickens at work on, i. 172-176;
+ dinner-celebration of, i. 177, 178;
+ originals of the Brothers Cheeryble in, i. 181;
+ proclamation on the eve of publication, ii. 99, 100 note;
+ effect of, in establishing Dickens, iii. 344 (and see 386).
+
+ Nicolson (Sir Frederick), ii. 194.
+
+ Nightingales at Gadshill, iii. 212.
+
+ _Nobody's Fault_, the title first chosen for _Little Dorrit_,
+ iii. 155.
+
+ No-Popery riots, description of the, i. 246.
+
+ Normanby (Lord), ii. 108, 109, 320.
+
+ Norton (Charles Eliot), iii. 215, 447.
+
+ Norwich, reading at, iii. 262.
+
+ _No Thoroughfare_, i. 140.
+
+ Novels, real people in, iii. 22-33;
+ episodes in, iii. 161.
+
+ Novelists, old, design for cheap edition of, ii. 385.
+
+ Nugent (Lord), ii. 473.
+
+
+ "OCEAN SPECTRE," the, ii. 369 note.
+
+ O'Connell (Daniel), ii. 135.
+
+ Odeon (Paris), Dickens at the, iii. 128, 129.
+
+ Ohio, on the, i. 377.
+
+ _Old Curiosity Shop_, original of the Marchioness in, i. 59;
+ originals of the Garland family, i. 60;
+ original of the poet in Jarley's wax-work, i. 70;
+ the story commenced, i. 200;
+ disadvantages of weekly publication, i. 203;
+ changes in proofs, i. 206;
+ Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness, i. 207;
+ effect of story upon the writer, i. 208;
+ death of Little Nell, i. 210;
+ close of the tale, i. 210;
+ success of, i. 211;
+ characterized, i. 212-214;
+ a tribute by Bret Harte, i. 215, 216;
+ characters in, iii. 345.
+
+ _Old Monthly Magazine_, Dickens's first published piece in, i. 97;
+ other sketches in, i. 104.
+
+ _Oliver Twist_, commenced in _Bentley's Miscellany_, i. 121;
+ characters in, real to Dickens, i. 125, 139;
+ the story characterized, i. 146, 147, 158, 160;
+ Dickens at work on, i. 149;
+ the last chapter of, i. 153;
+ the Cruikshank illustrations to, 154-157;
+ reputation of, i. 156;
+ reply to attacks against, i. 160-162;
+ teaching of, i. 161;
+ "adapted" for the stage, i. 174, 175;
+ noticed in the _Quarterly Review_, i. 184;
+ copyright of, repurchased, i. 224;
+ original of Mr. Fang, iii. 25;
+ character-drawing in, iii. 343;
+ proposed reading from, iii. 448;
+ facsimile of portion of MS. of, iii. 469.
+
+ Opium-den, an, iii. 528 (and see 464 note).
+
+ Osnaburgh-terrace, Dickens in, ii. 106.
+
+ _Our Mutual Friend_, title chosen for, iii. 271;
+ hints for, in Memoranda, iii. 280, 281;
+ first notion for, iii. 371;
+ original of Mr. Venus in, iii. 374;
+ Marcus Stone chosen as illustrator, iii. 373;
+ the story reviewed, iii. 377-379.
+
+ Ouvry (Frederic), iii. 434, 539;
+ clause inserted by, in agreement for _Edwin Drood_, iii. 461 note;
+ humorous letter of Dickens to, iii. 522.
+
+ Overs (John), Dickens's interest in, ii. 109;
+ death of, ii. 109 note.
+
+ Over-work, remains of, ii. 297.
+
+ Owen (Prof.), ii. 477.
+
+
+ PAINTINGS, Dickens on, ii. 167-169.
+
+ _Paradise Lost_ at the Ambigu, Paris, iii. 130, 131.
+
+ Paris, Dickens's first day in, ii. 316;
+ Sunday in, ii. 317;
+ Dickens's house in, described, ii. 317-319;
+ unhealthy political symptoms at, ii. 321, 334;
+ the Morgue at, ii. 321;
+ incident in streets of, ii. 321;
+ hard frost at, ii. 324;
+ Dickens's alarming neighbour, ii. 325;
+ begging-letter writers in, ii. 327;
+ sight-seeing at, ii. 330;
+ theatres at, ii. 331;
+ Bibliotheque Royale, ii. 333;
+ the Praslin tragedy in, ii. 386;
+ Dickens's life in, iii. 121-153;
+ Dickens's house in, iii. 124;
+ personal attentions to Dickens, iii. 124;
+ theatres of, iii. 126-134;
+ illumination of, iii. 144;
+ New-year's day in, iii. 144, 145;
+ results of imperial improvement in, iii. 145 note;
+ Art Exposition at, iii. 146-148;
+ a Duchess murdered in, iii. 150, 151.
+
+ Parliament, old Houses of, inconvenience of the, i. 100.
+
+ Parr (Harriet), iii. 494 note.
+
+ Parry (John), ii. 475.
+
+ Pawnbrokers, Dickens's early experience of, i. 46.
+
+ Peel (Sir Robert) and his party, i. 277;
+ Lord Ashley and, i. 283;
+ the Whigs and, ii. 261.
+
+ _Pen Photographs_ (Miss Field's) iii. 235 note.
+
+ Perth, reading at, iii. 234.
+
+ Peschiere, Palazzo (Genoa), rooms in the, hired by Dickens, ii. 129;
+ a fellow-tenant in, ii. 129;
+ described, ii. 139-142;
+ view of the, ii. 141;
+ revisited, iii. 79;
+ dinner-party at, ii. 172;
+ owner of the, iii. 79.
+
+ Petersham, athletic sports at, i. 183.
+
+ Phelps (Mr.), ii. 475.
+
+ Philadelphia, Dickens at, i. 335-344;
+ penitentiary at, i. 345-347;
+ letters from, iii. 413-415 (and see ii. 38, 39).
+
+ _Pickwick Papers_, materials for, i. 66;
+ first number of, i. 108;
+ origin of, i. 110;
+ Seymour's illustrations to, i. 111 note;
+ Thackeray's offer to illustrate, i. 115, 116;
+ the debtor's prison in, i. 128, 129;
+ popularity of, i. 129 (and see iii. 385, 386);
+ reality of characters in, i. 130, 131;
+ inferior to later books, i. 131;
+ Mr. Pickwick an undying character, i. 131 (and see 112);
+ piracies of, i. 137;
+ completion of, i. 143;
+ payments for, i. 145;
+ a holy brother of St. Bernard and, ii. 276;
+ characters in, iii. 343;
+ where it was begun, iii. 528.
+
+ _Pictures from Italy_, original of the courier in, ii. 171-173;
+ publication commenced in the _Daily News_, ii. 219.
+
+ _Pic Nic Papers_ published, i. 241.
+
+ "Piljians Projiss," a new, ii. 376-384.
+
+ Pig-market at Boulogne, iii. 104.
+
+ Pipchin (Mrs.) in _Dombey_, original of, i. 55, ii. 355, 356;
+ various names proposed for, ii. 355 note.
+
+ Pirates, literary, ii. 97;
+ proceedings in Chancery against, ii. 97-99;
+ warning to, ii. 100 note.
+
+ Pisa, a jaunt to, iii, 81.
+
+ Pittsburg (U. S.), description of, i. 373;
+ solitary prison at, i. 378.
+
+ Poets, small, iii. 489.
+
+ Pollock (Chief Baron) on the death of Dickens, iii. 247 note.
+
+ Poole (John), aid rendered to, by Dickens, ii. 370;
+ civil-list pension granted to, ii. 393.
+
+ Poor, Dickens's sympathy with the, i. 167, 168 (and see 250),
+ ii. 146, 147, 240.
+
+ Popularity, distresses of, i. 324.
+
+ Porte St. Martin (Paris), Dickens at the, iii. 129.
+
+ Portland (U. S.) burnt and rebuilt, iii. 438.
+
+ Portrait painter, story of a, iii. 523.
+
+ Portsea, birth of Dickens at, i. 21.
+
+ Prairie, an American, i. 393, 394;
+ pronunciations of the word, i. 396.
+
+ Praslin tragedy in Paris, ii. 386.
+
+ Prayer, Dickens on personal, iii. 485.
+
+ Preston, a strike at, iii. 69, 70;
+ _Hamlet_ at, iii. 70.
+
+ Primrose (Mr.), i. 258.
+
+ Printers' Pension fund dinner, presided over by Dickens, ii. 55.
+
+ Prisons, London, visits to, i. 280;
+ American, i. 339-344, 345-347, 378;
+ comparison of systems pursued in, ii. 234.
+
+ Procter (Bryan Waller), iii. 27, 28;
+ Dickens's affection for, ii. 467.
+
+ Procter (Adelaide), Dickens's appreciation of poems by, iii. 495.
+
+ Publishers, hasty compacts with, i. 121;
+ Dickens's agreements with, ii. 88, iii. 56 (and see 240-243).
+
+ Publishers, authors and, ii. 64, 72, iii. 489, 490.
+
+ Puddings, a choice of, i. 55, 56.
+
+ "_Punch_ people," Lord Brougham and the, ii. 469;
+ at Mansion-house dinner, ii. 477.
+
+
+ Q, Dickens's secretary in the United States, i. 303, 315, 322, 328,
+ 344, 348, 366, 370, 374, 375, 393, 397, 400, 411;
+ described, i. 410-412 (and see iii. 389 note).
+
+ _Quarterly Review_, prophecy in not fulfilled, i. 139 note;
+ notice of _Oliver Twist_ in, i. 184;
+ on Cruikshank and Leech, ii. 418.
+
+ Queen (Her Majesty the) and Auber, iii. 134, 135;
+ alleged offers to Dickens, iii. 503, and 503, 504 note;
+ desire of, to see Dickens act, iii. 506;
+ Thackeray's copy of the _Carol_ purchased by, iii. 506, 507 note;
+ Dickens's interview with, iii. 507, 508;
+ grief at Dickens's death, iii. 542.
+
+
+ RACHEL (Madame), caprice of, iii. 137.
+
+ Ragged schools, Dickens's interest in, ii. 57;
+ results of, ii. 57 note (and see ii. 494);
+ proposed paper on, by Dickens, declined by _Edinburgh Review_,
+ ii. 58.
+
+ Railroads, American, ladies' cars on, i. 338.
+
+ Railway travelling, effect on Dickens, iii. 450;
+ in America, i. 336-338, 368, iii. 398, 405, 435, 436.
+
+ Ramsay (Dean) on _Bleak House_ and Jo, iii. 47, 48.
+
+ Ramsgate, entertainments at, ii. 214 note.
+
+ Raven, death of Dickens's first, i. 235-239;
+ of second, ii. 215.
+
+ Raymond (George), ii. 476.
+
+ Reade (Charles), _Hard Cash_ contributed by, to _All the Year
+ Round_, iii. 245.
+
+ Readings, gratuitous, iii. 61 note;
+ private, in Scheffer's atelier, iii. 148;
+ in Lincoln's-inn-fields, ii. 162, 174, 175.
+ public, Dickens's first thoughts of, ii. 174, 284, iii. 60;
+ argument against paid, iii. 61, 189;
+ idea of, revived, iii. 189;
+ opinions as to, asked and given, iii. 189, 190 note;
+ disadvantages of, iii. 191;
+ proposal from Mr. Beale respecting, iii. 196;
+ first rough notes as to, iii. 198, 199 note;
+ various managers employed by Dickens, iii. 223;
+ hard work involved by, iii. 224, 445;
+ study given to, iii. 318.
+ first series of, iii. 223-238;
+ sale of books of, iii. 232 note;
+ subjects of, iii. 235.
+ second series of, iii. 255-274;
+ what it comprised, iii. 259;
+ new subjects for, iii. 260.
+ third series of, iii. 298-324;
+ Messrs. Chappell's connection with, iii. 306-310.
+ American, iii. 388-443;
+ result of, iii. 415, 441.
+
+ Readings given by Dickens:
+ Australian, contemplated, iii. 270 note (but see 272);
+ Bulwer's opinion of, iii. 271 note.
+ last series of, iii. 444-460 (and see 437 note).
+
+ Readings (alphabetical list of):
+ Aberdeen, iii. 234.
+ Albany (U. S.), iii. 435;
+ receipts at, iii. 441.
+ Baltimore (U. S.), iii. 418, 419, 427;
+ receipts at, iii. 441.
+ Belfast, iii. 229.
+ Berwick-on-Tweed, iii. 266.
+ Birmingham, iii. 311.
+ Boston (U. S.), iii. 391, 403, 440;
+ receipts at, iii. 441.
+ Brighton, iii. 263.
+ Brooklyn (New York), iii. 416;
+ receipts at, iii. 442.
+ Buffalo (U. S.), iii. 431;
+ receipts at, iii. 441.
+ Cambridge, iii. 317.
+ Canterbury, iii. 264.
+ Chester, iii. 268, 313.
+ Dover, iii. 264.
+ Dublin, iii. 220-228, 317.
+ Dundee, iii. 233.
+ Edinburgh, iii. 233, 267, 451, and 450 note.
+ Exeter, iii. 224, 268.
+ Glasgow, iii. 234.
+ Harrogate, iii. 230.
+ Hartford (U. S.), iii. 441.
+ Liverpool, iii. 225, 268, 311, 313, 314.
+ London, iii. 223, 234, 258, 269.
+ Manchester, iii. 232, 268, 308, 311, 314.
+ New Bedford (U. S.), iii. 437;
+ receipts at, iii. 441.
+ Newcastle, iii. 265, 315.
+ Newhaven (U. S.), iii. 428;
+ receipts at, iii. 441.
+ New York, iii. 393, 410, 441;
+ receipts at, iii. 441.
+ Norwich, iii. 262.
+ Paris, iii. 272.
+ Perth, iii. 234.
+ Philadelphia (U. S.), iii. 414, 418, 427;
+ receipts at, iii. 441.
+ Portland (U. S.), iii. 438;
+ receipts at, iii. 441.
+ Providence (U. S.), iii. 428;
+ receipts at, iii. 441.
+ Rochester (U. S.), iii. 431;
+ receipts at, iii. 441.
+ Springfield (U. S.), iii. 441.
+ Syracuse (U. S.), iii. 431;
+ receipts at, iii. 441.
+ Torquay, iii. 268, 451.
+ Washington (U. S.), iii. 421, 425, 426;
+ receipts at, iii. 441.
+ Worcester (U. S.), iii. 441.
+ York, iii. 231, 454.
+
+ Reeves (Sims), ii, 475.
+
+ Reformers, administrative, iii. 70, 71 note.
+
+ Regiments in the streets of Paris, iii. 143 note.
+
+ Regnier (M.) of the Francais, ii. 330, 429, iii. 127, 137.
+
+ Rehearsals, troubles at, ii. 371.
+
+ Religion, what is the true, ii. 149.
+
+ Reporters' gallery, Dickens enters the, i. 96;
+ ceases connection with, i. 116.
+
+ Reporter's life, Dickens's own experience of a, i. 99-101
+ (and see ii. 265).
+
+ Revolution at Geneva, ii. 298-301;
+ traces left by, ii. 300;
+ abettors of, ii. 301.
+
+ Rhine, Dickens on the, ii. 222, 223;
+ travelling Englishmen on the, ii. 223.
+
+ _Richard Doubledick, story of_, iii. 154.
+
+ Richardson (Sir John), iii. 519.
+
+ Richardson's show, a religious, iii. 273.
+
+ Richmond (U. S.), levees at, i. 354.
+
+ Rifle-shooting, Lord Vernon's passion for, ii. 270;
+ at Lausanne, ii. 247, 298, 299.
+
+ _Rising Generation_ (Leech's), Dickens on, ii. 414-418.
+
+ Ristori (Mad.) in _Medea_, iii. 137.
+
+ Roberts (David), iii. 85.
+
+ Robertson (Peter), i. 259, ii. 135, 475;
+ sketch of, i. 253, 254.
+
+ Robertson (T. W.), iii. 530, 531.
+
+ _Robinson Crusoe_, Dickens's opinion of, iii. 135 note
+ (and see i. 264 note).
+
+ Roche (Louis), employed by Dickens as his courier in Italy, ii. 106;
+ resources of, ii. 172, 196, 199 (and see 111, 325);
+ Count d'Orsay and, ii. 204 note;
+ illness of, ii. 421;
+ death of, ii. 255 note.
+
+ Rochester, early impressions of, i. 28 (and see iii. 213);
+ Watts's Charity at, iii. 154 note.
+
+ Rochester Castle, adventure at, ii. 22.
+
+ Rochester Cathedral, brass tablet in, to Dickens's memory,
+ iii. 154 note.
+
+ Rochester (U. S.), alarming incident at, iii. 431.
+
+ Rockingham-castle, Dickens's visit to, ii. 481-483;
+ private theatricals at, ii. 481, iii. 83.
+
+ Rocky Mountain Sneezer, a, iii. 409.
+
+ Rogers (Samuel), i. 251, ii. 190;
+ sudden illness of, ii. 466 (and see 486 note).
+
+ Rome, Dickens's first impressions of, ii. 185;
+ Dickens at, iii. 85-89;
+ a "scattering" party at Opera at, iii. 86, 87;
+ marionetti at, iii. 87, 88;
+ malaria at, iii. 88, 89.
+
+ Rosemont (Lausanne), taken by Dickens, ii. 225;
+ view of, ii. 229;
+ Dickens's neighbours at, ii. 231, 242 note, 252;
+ _Dombey_ begun at, ii. 241;
+ the landlord of, ii. 246 note.
+
+ Rothamsted, Rev. Mr. Lawes's club at, iii. 244.
+
+ Royal Academy dinner, Dickens's last public words spoken at,
+ iii. 537.
+
+ Roylance (Mrs.), the original of Mrs. Pipchin in _Dombey_, i. 55,
+ ii. 355.
+
+ Ruskin (Mr.) on _Hard Times_, iii. 66, 67.
+
+ Russell (Lord J.), a friend of letters, ii. 369, 393;
+ on Dickens's letters, iii. 481;
+ dinner with, ii. 483;
+ Dickens's tribute to, iii. 501, and note.
+
+ Ryland (Arthur), letter of Dickens to, iii. 56 note.
+
+
+ SALA (G. A.), Dickens's opinion of, ii. 454 note;
+ tribute by, to Dickens's memory, iii. 516.
+
+ Salisbury Plain, superiority of, to an American prairie, i. 394;
+ a ride over, ii. 461.
+
+ Sand (Georges), iii. 138, 139.
+
+ Sandusky (U. S.), discomforts of inn at, i. 400.
+
+ Sardinians, Dickens's liking for, iii. 92.
+
+ _Satirist_, editor of, hissed from the Covent-garden stage, ii. 50.
+
+ _Saturday Review_ on the realities of Dickens's characters, i. 166.
+
+ Scene-painting, iii. 166.
+
+ Scheffer (Ary), portrait of Dickens by, iii. 148, 149;
+ reading of _Cricket on the Hearth_ in atelier of, iii. 149.
+
+ Scheffer (Henri), iii. 150.
+
+ Schools, public, Dickens on, iii. 236.
+
+ Scotland, readings in, iii. 232-235.
+
+ Scott (Sir W.), real people in novels of, iii. 22, 29.
+
+ Scott monument at Edinburgh, ii. 392.
+
+ Scribe (M.), dinner to, ii. 469;
+ social intercourse of Dickens with, iii. 134, 135;
+ author-anxieties of, iii. 136;
+ a fine actor lost in, iii. 138.
+
+ Scribe (Madame), iii. 136.
+
+ Sea-bathing and authorship, ii. 28.
+
+ Seaside holidays, Dickens's, ii. 403-441, iii. 97-120.
+
+ Sebastopol, reception in France of supposed fall of, iii. 110.
+
+ Serenades at Hartford and Newhaven (U. S.), i. 314.
+
+ Servants, Swiss, excellence of, ii. 246.
+
+ Seven Dials, ballad literature of, i. 230.
+
+ Seymour (Mr.) and the _Pickwick Papers_, i. 111 note;
+ death of, i. 115.
+
+ Shaftesbury (Lord) and ragged schools, i. 283, ii. 57, 58 note,
+ 493, 494 (and see 494).
+
+ Shakespeare Society, the, i. 185.
+
+ Shakespeare on the actor's calling, iii. 191.
+
+ Shakespeare's house, purchase of, ii. 392.
+
+ Sheffield, reading at, iii. 232.
+
+ Sheil (Richard Lalor), ii. 53.
+
+ Shepherd's-bush, the home for fallen women at, ii. 488.
+
+ Sheridans (the), ii. 468.
+
+ Ship news, i. 296.
+
+ Short-hand, difficulties of, i. 91.
+
+ Shows, Saturday-night, i. 61.
+
+ Siddons (Mrs.), genius of, ii. 473, 474.
+
+ Sierra Nevada, strange encounter on the, iii. 385, 386.
+
+ _Sikes and Nancy_ reading, proposed, iii. 448;
+ at Clifton, iii. 451;
+ Macready on the, iii. 451;
+ at York, iii. 454, and note;
+ Dickens's pulse after, iii. 532.
+
+ Simplon, passing the, ii. 174.
+
+ "Six," Bachelor, iii. 124.
+
+ _Sketches by Boz_, first collected and published, i. 113;
+ characterized, i. 114.
+
+ Slavery in America, i. 327, 352-354, 388-390;
+ the ghost of, iii. 419.
+
+ Slaves, runaway, i. 389.
+
+ Sleeplessness, Dickens's remedy for, iii. 249.
+
+ Sleighs in New York, iii. 397.
+
+ "Slopping round," iii. 432.
+
+ "Smallness of the world," i. 372, ii. 222, iii. 204.
+
+ Small-pox, American story concerning, iii. 305 note.
+
+ Smith (Albert), _Battle of Life_ dramatized by, ii. 323.
+
+ Smith (Arthur), iii. 168;
+ first series of Dickens's readings under management of,
+ iii. 199, 200 (and see 263 note);
+ distresses of, iii. 225 note;
+ first portion of second series planned by, iii. 258;
+ serious illness of, iii. 260, 261;
+ death of, iii. 261;
+ touching incident at funeral, iii. 261 note.
+
+ Smith (Bobus), ii. 190.
+
+ Smith (O.), acting of, i. 174, ii. 96.
+
+ Smith (Porter), ii. 476.
+
+ Smith (Southwood), ii. 53, 108.
+
+ Smith (Sydney), i. 311, ii. 108;
+ on _Nicholas Nickleby_, i. 168, 176 note;
+ death of, ii. 190.
+
+ Smithson (Mr.), i. 182;
+ death of, ii. 93.
+
+ Smoking party, a feminine, ii. 292, 293.
+
+ Smollett (Tobias), a recollection of, i. 128;
+ real people in novels of, iii. 22.
+
+ Snuff-shop readings, ii. 336.
+
+ Solitary confinement, effects of, i. 345, 346, ii. 234, 235.
+
+ _Somebody's Luggage_, the Waiter in, iii. 351, 370.
+
+ Sortes Shandyanae, ii. 242.
+
+ Sparks (Jared), i. 304.
+
+ Speculators, American, iii. 391, 393, 408, 409, 411, 428.
+
+ Spiritual tyranny, ii. 231 note.
+
+ Spittoons in America, i. 338.
+
+ _Squib Annual_, the, i. 109, 110.
+
+ St. Bernard, Great, proposed trip to, ii. 271;
+ ascent of the mountain, ii. 274;
+ the convent, ii. 274;
+ scene at the top, ii. 274, 275;
+ bodies found in the snow, ii. 275;
+ the convent a tavern in all but sign, ii. 276;
+ Dickens's fancy of writing a book about the, iii. 184.
+
+ St. George (Madame), ii. 176.
+
+ St. Giles's, Dickens's early attraction of repulsion to, i. 39;
+ original of Mr. Venus found in, iii. 374.
+
+ St. Gothard, dangers of the, ii. 198, 199.
+
+ St. James's Hall, Dickens's final readings at, iii. 532, 533.
+
+ St. Leger, Dickens's prophecy at the, iii. 175.
+
+ St. Louis (U. S.), levee at, i. 386;
+ slavery at, i. 388;
+ pretty scene at, i. 390, 392;
+ duelling in, i. 396.
+
+ Stage-coach, queer American, i. 363, 364.
+
+ Stage, training for the, ii. 213, 214, (and see iii. 191).
+
+ Stanfield (Clarkson), i. 181, ii. 47 note, 160, 162, 175,
+ iii. 521;
+ sketches in Cornwall by, ii. 42;
+ illustrations by, to _Battle of Life_, ii. 310;
+ price realized at the Dickens sale for the Lighthouse scenes,
+ iii. 71 note (and see ii. 296, iii. 164, 243);
+ at work, iii. 166;
+ death of, iii. 320.
+
+ Stanfield Hall, Dickens at, ii. 462
+
+ Stanley (Dr. A. P.), Dean of Westminster, compliance with general
+ wish, iii. 543;
+ letter and sermon iii. 544.
+
+ Stanton (Secretary), curious story told by, iii. 422, 423
+ (and see 508).
+
+ Staplehurst accident, iii. 304;
+ effect on Dickens, iii. 376.
+
+ Staples (J. V.), letter from Dickens to, ii. 90 note.
+
+ Statesmen, leading American, i. 349, 350.
+
+ State Trials, story from the, iii. 283, 284.
+
+ Stealing, Carlyle's argument against, i. 333.
+
+ Steamers, perils of, i. 293, 305, 326, 331 (and see iii. 80-83).
+
+ Stevenage, visit to the hermit near, iii. 246.
+
+ Stirling (Mr.), a theatrical adapter, i. 174.
+
+ Stone (Frank), ii. 385. iii. 105;
+ sketch of Sydney Dickens by, ii. 368, 369 note;
+ fancy sketch of, ii. 383;
+ death of, iii. 256 note.
+
+ Stone (Marcus), designs supplied by, to _Our Mutual Friend_,
+ iii. 373 note.
+
+ Streets, Dickens's craving for crowded, ii. 144, 151, 277, 281,
+ 282, 283, 287, iii. 515.
+
+ _Strange Gentleman_, a farce written by Dickens, i. 116.
+
+ Stuart (Lord Dudley), ii. 472.
+
+ Sue (Eugene), ii. 331.
+
+ Sumner (Charles), i. 305, iii. 421, 426.
+
+ Sunday, a French, ii. 317, 485 note.
+
+ Swinburne (Algernon), ii. 428.
+
+ Switzerland; splendid scenery of, ii. 198;
+ villages in, ii. 199;
+ Dickens resolves to write new book in, ii. 220;
+ early impressions of, ii. 226, 227;
+ climate of, ii. 244 note;
+ the people of, ii. 245, 246, 259;
+ mule-travelling in, ii. 253;
+ Protestant and Catholic cantons in, ii. 260;
+ Dickens's last days in, ii. 311-315;
+ pleasures of autumn in, ii. 313;
+ revisited, iii. 76-95.
+
+ Syme (Mr.), opinion of, as to Dickens's lameness, iii. 453, 454.
+
+ Syracuse (U. S.), reading at, iii. 431.
+
+
+ TAGART (EDWARD), ii. 59, 470.
+
+ Taine (M.), on _Martin Chuzzlewit_, ii. 78;
+ criticisms by, on Dickens, ii. 102
+ (and see 251 note, iii. 326-331);
+ a hint for, ii. 419;
+ on Hard Times, iii. 67 note;
+ Fielding criticized by, iii. 348.
+
+ _Tale of Two Cities_, titles suggested for, iii. 279;
+ first germ of Carton in, iii. 280 (and see 360);
+ origin of, iii. 354;
+ the story reviewed, iii. 354-360;
+ titles suggested for, iii. 354, 355.
+
+ Talfourd (Judge), i. 180, ii. 97, 98, 293, 294, 427, 470
+ (and see iii. 509);
+ Dickens's affection for, ii. 427.
+
+ _Tatler_ (Hunt's), sayings from, iii. 26 note.
+
+ Tauchnitz (Baron), letter from, iii. 57 note;
+ intercourse of, with Dickens, iii. 462 note (and see 125 note).
+
+ Tavistock-house, sketch of, iii. 54;
+ a scene outside, iii. 165;
+ Stanfield scenes at, iii. 243;
+ sale of, iii. 257;
+ startling message from servant at, iii. 276.
+
+ Taylor (Tom), ii. 472.
+
+ Taylor (the Ladies), ii. 271.
+
+ Telbin (William), at work, iii. 166.
+
+ Temperance agitation, Dickens on the, ii. 409, 410.
+
+ Temperature, sudden changes of, in America, i. 347.
+
+ Temple (Hon. Mr.), ii. 190.
+
+ Tennent (Sir Emerson), ii. 476, iii. 80;
+ death and funeral of, iii. 454.
+
+ Tennyson (Alfred), Dickens's allegiance to, ii. 25, 136, 472,
+ iii. 357 note.
+
+ Ternan (Ellen Lawless), iii. 561.
+
+ Tete Noire Pass, ii. 255;
+ accident in, ii. 256, 257.
+
+ Thackeray (W. M.), ii. 188;
+ offers to illustrate _Pickwick_, i. 115, 116;
+ on Maclise's portrait of Dickens, i. 178 note;
+ on the _Carol_, ii. 89 (and see ii. 53, 470);
+ dinner to, iii. 73;
+ at Boulogne, iii. 105 note;
+ in Paris, iii. 126;
+ tribute to, by Dickens, iii. 236;
+ death of, iii. 298-300;
+ estrangement between Dickens and, iii. 298 note.
+
+ Thanet races, Dickens at the, ii. 24.
+
+ Theatre Francais (Paris), conventionalities of the, iii. 128.
+
+ Theatres, Italian, ii. 182;
+ French, ii. 330, 331.
+
+ Theatrical Fund dinner, Dickens's speech at, ii. 491, 492
+ (and see 221, iii. 537).
+
+ Theatricals, private, at Montreal, i. 413-415;
+ at Rockingham, ii. 481;
+ at Tavistock House, iii. 62-64 (and see ii. 108).
+
+ Thomas (Owen P.), recollections of Dickens at school, i. 76-81.
+
+ Thompson (Mr. T. I.), ii. 476.
+
+ Thompson (Sir Henry), consulted by Dickens, iii. 321;
+ a reading of Dickens's stopped by, iii. 452;
+ opinion as to Dickens's lameness, iii. 453, 454.
+
+ Ticknor (George), i. 304, 308.
+
+ Ticknor & Fields (Messrs.), commission received by, on the American
+ readings, iii. 446.
+
+ Timber Doodle (Dickens's dog), ii. 24, 25, 28, ii. 134 note;
+ death of, iii. 144 note.
+
+ _Times_, the, on Dickens's death, iii. 542, 543 note.
+
+ Tintoretto, Dickens on the works of, ii. 168, iii. 92.
+
+ Titian's Assumption, effect of, on Dickens, ii. 168.
+
+ Tobin (Daniel), a schoolfellow of Dickens, i. 76;
+ assists Dickens as amanuensis, but finally discarded, i. 81.
+
+ Toole (J. L.), encouragement given to in early life, by Dickens,
+ iii. 54 (and see iii. 302 note).
+
+ Topping (Groom), i. 220, 221, 234, 235, 413.
+
+ Toronto, toryism of, i. 412.
+
+ Torquay, readings at, iii. 268, 451.
+
+ Torrens (Mrs.), ii. 476.
+
+ _Tour in Italy_ (Simond's), ii. 116 note.
+
+ Townshend (Chauncy Hare), iii. 256;
+ death and bequest of, iii. 417.
+
+ Tracey (Lieut.), i. 280, ii. 23.
+
+ Tramps, ways of, iii. 210 note, 249, 250.
+
+ Tremont House (Boston, U. S.), Dickens at, i. 300.
+
+ Trossachs, Dickens in the, i. 264.
+
+ _True Sun_, Dickens reporting for the, i. 96.
+
+ Turin, Dickens at, iii. 92, 93.
+
+ Turner (J. M. W.), ii. 110.
+
+ Tuscany, wayside memorials in, ii. 188 note.
+
+ Twickenham, cottage at, occupied by Dickens, i. 180-182;
+ visitors at, i. 180-182;
+ childish enjoyments at, i. 182 note.
+
+ Twiss (Horace), ii. 468.
+
+ Tyler (President), i. 350.
+
+ Tynemouth, scene at, iii. 315, 316.
+
+
+ _Uncommercial Traveller_, Dickens's, iii. 247-253.
+
+ _Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down_, contemplated, iii. 270.
+
+ Undercliff (Isle of Wight), Dickens's first impressions of, ii. 426;
+ depressing effect of climate of, ii. 431-433.
+
+ Unitarianism adopted by Dickens for a short time, ii. 59.
+
+ Upholsterer, visit to an, i. 189;
+ visit from an, i. 190.
+
+ _Up the Rhine_ (Hood's), Dickens on, i. 185.
+
+ Utica (U. S.), hotel at, iii. 435.
+
+
+ VAUXHALL, the Duke and party at, ii. 470.
+
+ Venice, Dickens's impressions of, ii. 163-166, iii. 90;
+ habits of gondoliers at, iii. 90;
+ theatre at, iii. 91.
+
+ Verdeil (M.), ii. 233.
+
+ Vernet (Horace), iii. 147 note.
+
+ Vernon (Lord), eccentricities of, ii. 270, 271, 298.
+
+ Vesuvius, Mount, iii. 83.
+
+ Viardot (Madame) in _Orphee_, iii. 138 note.
+
+ _Village Coquettes_, the story and songs for, written by Dickens,
+ i. 116.
+
+ Vote, value of a, in America, iii. 420.
+
+
+ WALES, Prince of, and Dickens, iii. 509.
+
+ Wainewright (the murderer), recognized by Macready in Newgate,
+ i. 184 (and see ii. 334 note);
+ made the subject of a tale in the _New York Ledger_, iii. 253;
+ portrait of a girl by, ii. 334 note (and see ii. 468, iii. 279).
+
+ Wales, North, tour in, i. 184.
+
+ Ward (Professor) on Dickens, iii. 352, 353 note.
+
+ Washington (U. S.), hotel extortion at, i. 345;
+ climate of, i. 347;
+ Congress and Senate at, i. 349;
+ a comical dog at reading at, iii. 425;
+ readings at, iii. 424, 425.
+
+ Wassail-bowl presented to Dickens at Edinburgh, iii. 197.
+
+ _Waterloo, Battle of_, at Vauxhall, ii. 470.
+
+ Watson, Mr. (of Rockingham), ii. 231, 264, 479;
+ death of, iii. 55.
+
+ Watson (Sir Thomas), note by, of Dickens's illness in April, 1869,
+ iii. 457-459;
+ readings stopped by, iii. 458;
+ guarded sanction given to additional readings, iii. 458
+ (and see 466, 531 note);
+ Dickens's letter to, iii. 459 note.
+
+ Watts's Charity at Rochester, iii. 154 note.
+
+ Webster (Daniel), Dickens on, i. 308.
+
+ Webster (Mr.), ii. 475.
+
+ Webster murder at Cambridge (U. S.), iii. 402, 403.
+
+ Well-boring at Gadshill, iii. 209.
+
+ Weller (Sam) a pre-eminent achievement in literature, i. 131.
+
+ Wellington, Duke of, fine trait of, ii. 264.
+
+ Wellington House Academy (Hampstead-road), Dickens a day-scholar at,
+ i. 74-84;
+ described in _Household Words_, i. 75;
+ Dickens's schoolfellows at, i. 76-84;
+ Beverley painting scenes at, i. 84;
+ revisited after five-and-twenty years, i. 76.
+
+ Weyer (M. Van de), ii. 477.
+
+ Whig jealousies, i. 250 (and see ii. 261).
+
+ Whitechapel workhouse, incident at, iii. 75.
+
+ White-conduit-house, reminiscence of, ii. 132.
+
+ Whitefriars, a small revolution in, ii. 302.
+
+ White (Rev. James), character of, ii. 424-426 (and see ii. 426,
+ iii. 126).
+
+ White (Grant) on the character of Carton in the _Tale of Two Cities_,
+ iii. 359, 360.
+
+ Whitehead (Charles), i. 109.
+
+ Whitworth (Mr.), ii. 475.
+
+ Wieland the clown, death of, iii. 166 note.
+
+ Wig experiences, ii. 380.
+
+ Wilkie (Sir David), on the genius of Dickens, i. 178;
+ death of, i. 252.
+
+ Willis (N. P.), fanciful description of Dickens by, i. 107 note.
+
+ Wills (W. H.), ii. 453, iii. 256, 493.
+
+ Wilson (Professor), i. 259;
+ sketch of, i. 253, 254;
+ speeches of, i. 255 note, ii. 136.
+
+ Wilson (Mr.) the hair-dresser, fancy sketch of, ii. 379-383.
+
+ Wilton (Marie) as Pippo in the _Maid and Magpie_, iii. 236, 237 note.
+
+ Women, home for fallen, ii. 488 (and see iii. 286).
+
+ Wordsworth, memorable saying of, iii. 381.
+
+ Worms, the city of, ii. 223.
+
+
+ YARMOUTH first seen by Dickens, ii. 462.
+
+ Yates (Edmund), tales by, in _All the Year Round_, iii. 245;
+ Dickens's interest in, iii. 495.
+
+ Yates (Mr.), acting of, i. 174, ii. 96.
+
+ _Yesterdays with Authors_ (Fields'), ii. 42 note.
+
+ York, readings at, iii. 231, 454.
+
+ Yorkshire, materials gathered in, for _Nickleby_, i. 172.
+
+ _Young Gentlemen_ and _Young Couples_,
+ sketches written by Dickens for Chapman & Hall, i. 149 note.
+
+
+ ZOOLOGICAL Gardens, feeding the serpents at, iii. 169 note.
+
+ Zouaves, Dickens's opinion of the, iii. 143, 144.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Volume III
+
+Page xi, "a" changed to "at" (Scene at Tynemouth)
+
+Page 46, "inpressed" changed to "impressed" (impressed on the better)
+
+Page 108, "Gore-House" changed to "Gore-house" to match rest of usage
+(often at Gore-house)
+
+Page 129, "Ca" changed to "Ca" (the Ca Ira!)
+
+Page 130, "Ca" changed to "Ca" (memory--Ca Ira)
+
+Page 137, "entertaiments" changed to "entertainments" (the day
+entertainments)
+
+Page 141, "diner" changed to "diner" (Le diner que)
+
+Page 166, "hereon" changed to "thereon" (thereon may be beheld)
+
+Page 166, "under aking" changed to "undertaking" (of the little
+undertaking)
+
+Page 175, "Th" changed to "The" (The landlord came up)
+
+Page 214, "chesnuts" changed to "chestnuts" (limes and chestnuts)
+
+Footnote 224, "chalet" changed to "chalet" ("The chalet," he wrote)
+
+Page 241, "cap ble" changed to "capable" (might be capable)
+
+Page 241, "Sha espeare" changed to "Shakespeare" (a line from
+Shakespeare)
+
+Page 245, "alled" changed to "called" (it called for)
+
+Illustration entitled THE CHALET, "CHALET" changed to "CHALET".
+
+Page 324, "hi" changed to "his" (interval of his)
+
+Footnote 259, "counils" changed to "councils" (held several councils)
+
+Footnote 260, "nett" changed to "net" (out the net profit)
+
+Page 339, "delf" changed to "delft" (worked in delft)
+
+Page 404, "diner" changed to "diner" (diner a tout)
+
+Page 539, "for" changed to "four" (four figures representing)
+
+Page 581, "iii." inserted into text (storm at, iii. 264.)
+
+Page 581, "Duplessis" changed to "Du Plessis" (Du Plessis (Marie))
+
+Page 581, "iii." inserted into text (amount paid for, iii. 461 note)
+
+Page 582, "chalet" changed to "chalet" (chalet presented by)
+
+Page 583, "Hill" changed to "hill" (Fox-under-the-hill)
+
+Page 583, "Chalet" changed to "Chalet" (sketch of Chalet at)
+
+Page 583, "christian" changed to "Christian" (list of Christian)
+
+Page 584, "Halevy" changed to "Halevy" (Halevy (M.))
+
+The volume number was added to the following entries in the index:
+
+ the editor's modest estimate of it, i. 142
+ death of, i. 234, 235;
+
+
+To retain the integrity of the original text, varied hyphenations,
+capitalizations, and, at times, spellings were retained.
+
+For example:
+
+Varied hyphenation and capitalization of Devonshire Terrace was
+retained. Also fac-simile and facsimile. Varied spelling of
+A'Beckett/A'Becket was retained.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol.
+I-III, Complete, by John Forster
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