Charles Dickens

Front matter

CHARLES DICKENS

VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES

Published and In Preparation

Contents

PAGE

I A Threshold View 1

II The Man 7

CHAPTER I A Threshold View

THE facade of a quaint little building in Lincoln's Inn Field, London, bears the following words: "Old Curiosity Shop; immortalized by Charles Dickens." This is not the original building in which the writer set his famous story. And the language is that of hyperbole. No writer is known to be immortal, inasmuch as we who call him so must be ourselves immortal to pronounce judgment. Nor has any writer of them yet learned the trick of perpetuity. When we call Shakespeare or Homer "immortal," we mean, and can only mean, that a certain author has survived the obliteration of time a few hundred or a few thousand years, a mere nothing in the great onward sweep of the universe; indeed, not much in the course of the established records of men.

Nevertheless, that inscription above the portal in Portsmouth Street is significant. It gives a hint of the hold of Dickens upon the affectionate interests of readers. He is one of the very few authors using English who, more than a century after his birth, seem secure in a general regard, and whose works not merely have their place in any well-regulated library, but are in some sort a household possession to countless lovers of books. It begins to look very much as if the works of Charles Dickens were more than those of a representative author of the early Victorian period ; being, so far as we may use the word, a permanent contribution to the literature of the English-speaking peoples. Nay, since this writer 5 3 known and loved far beyond English-speaking borders, he is, I believe, a world force in letters. When I was a student in Germany, I found everywhere upon the reading tables of cultivated folk the books of just two English-using authors : Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. The wife of the leading astronomer of Holland told rac that she had brought up her husband and all her children on Dickens's works, having read them aloud to the family no less than six times through! Such facts speak for themselves. His -position solidifies with time, though the critical estimate of him shows its fluctuations. But to-day, critically, and by popular tests, he is — with the possible exception of Shakespeare — the most widely known and most beloved writer of his race. Shakespeare, if our relation to him is less personal and warm, has more of magisterial weight; he is read perforce by the many

A THRESHOLD VIEW 3

in school and college ; his plays are in libraries as a matter of course. The cultivated few read him for pleasure. About half his plays, hardly more, are really alive in the theater.

But among those who read for no other reason than for enjoyment (and what a vast host they make!), Dickens unquestionably comes first. As near as it can be said of any one person, he is the modern English author. Whatever his faults, the immense fervor of life in his books and their steady appeal to men's bosom interests and passions make him a primate among English book men. The sense of all this was crystallized and accentuated in 1912, when the centenary of his birf I was celebrated with such ample and enthusiastic recognition. It was no conventional remembering, but a tribute having in it plain elements of heartfelt spontaneity.

For a time after his death he lost ground with the critics, though never with the general reading public, in comparison with his contemporary, and in a sense his rival, Thackeray. These two, so utterly unlike in every way, are inevitably contrasted because they were distinctly the two leading authors in the middle nineteenth century; and also because the popularity of Thackeray, when he began to write his great books, was the first challenge to Dickens's unique place in the suffrages of readers of fiction in that period.

Gradually, Thackeray came more and more to be regarded as the artist of fiction, while Dickens, to whom a genius for the comic was readily granted, was denied the artistic quality awarded to the other. He was referred to increasingly as a careless workman, a writer who did not command style as did Thackeray, and one whose tendencies toward the theatric and the didactic injured his craftsmanship. This view gained such a vogue among those who put themselves in a critical attitude toward books that not many years ago, I am credibly informed, in a famous eastern university a course in nineteenth-century literature was offered in which no mention of Dickens was made.

But within the last few years a reaction, distinct and strong, from this depreciation, has come about. Critics like Andrew Lang, William E. Henley, George Gissing and C. K. Chesterton, widely divergent in type and view, but trained observers all and of commanding influence, have come forth in valiant appreciation of the man of Gadshill. And they are a unit in this : that while they are not blind to the faults of their author, they recognize the dominant and representative quality of a man of genius who has done great things and still exercises an indubitable magic.

Two antithetic literary attitudes or concepts of literature lie behind these two estimates of Dickens : that which looked at him askance and did him scant justice, and the later and present one, which most

A THRESHOLD VIEW 5

heartily cries up his undiminished worth. The former has implicit in it that conception of literature which insists that it shall not involve questions of conduct nor drag in moral issues ; but rather confine itself alone to the quality of workmanship. What a writer may choose to exhibit is primarily his affair; how he does it is the business of the critic. This critical position has been popular in our present generation, and some twenty years ago seemed authoritative. "Art for art's sake" was a catch phrase frequently heard, and to praise any writer for a healthful view or an obvious desire to do good by his writings was deemed rococo. Oscar Wilde will, perhaps, be pointed to historically as the logical extreme of this critical attitude. And a definite new school of English fiction marched under this gonfalon.

The recent reaction from this means a realization that, after all, life is larger than what is called art; that the artist of letters is only a man writing, and can not shake off the fact that he is a man, subject to the same obligations in his work as other human beings in theirs. Beauty, we are coming to see, is its own excuse for being only when it is vitally related to the life without which it could not exist, since life furnishes, and always must furnish, the raw material from which art weaves its Nisus-like robe of wonder.

And the return of this broader and saner view, for such I believe it to be, has been of advantage to Dickens; because he, of all authors, has most openly insisted on relating his work to the toiling and moiling humanity he would serve, and has even boisterously asserted his wish to help the world by his books. His claim, for these reasons, upon our acceptance is a double claim : his unexampled power of visualizing the life of his time and giving us a sense of its gusto ; and his efficacy to touch the heart with pity and love, that we may realize the universal brotherhood and try to be a part of it. Frankly, Dickens is a master of the imagination, but just as truly a mighty moralist. He stands or falls by these twin tests. All his work suggests that literature, to make a wide and steady appeal, must do, not one of these things, but both of them.

This prefatory broad statement will be amplified and illustrated, as he is considered in the particulars of his art and work, in the further critical treatment which follows the copious selections from his books.

Chapter II

THE lives of some authors hardly seem to throw light upon their works. Especially is this true in the case of novelists and dramatists, who in these objective forms of expression hide behind their characters and do not reveal the maker of these characters. It may, however, be premised that, even when the literary form is less subjective and personal, and the personality of the writer harder to detect, all authors are so interwoven with their works that, had we a magic glass to look within their minds and be aware of their every act, with its corresponding motive, we should find that the literature they made was but veiled autobiography, after all.

But some authors, far more frankly than others, put themselves into their writings, are integrally a part of it, can not be separated from it; so that a sympathetic comprehension of their personality and a knowledge of the story of their life is of great assistance in the way it aids us to understand their professional labor.

Dickens was emphatically such a man, and we may therefore set down the chief matters of his life, confident that they will be of avail in the appreciation of his books. His life story is in itself of compelling interest; its interpretative value may be added as an incentive, were any needed, to follow those details which are of particular significance, looked back upon from the place of light and leadership he attained.

When we say of a human being that he is self-made, we are using a rather shallow phrase, since we are all self-made, so far as we are made at all. What is really meant by the stock expression is that in such a case, more than is normal, character has triumphed over circumstances. In education, for example, we imply that it has been irregular or lacking in the conventional drill; as to parentage, that the person in question was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. These supposed limitations are true of Charles Dickens, whose father was a clerk in the Navy Department, in Portsmouth, when the son was born on February 7, 1812. That father, who was to be twice immortalized as Mica wber in David Copper field and the Father of the Marshalsea in Little Dorrit, was an impecunious optimist whose frequent changes of occupations and inability to pay his rent were external signs of a character which may be described, at least in retrospect, as one of lovable weakness. Restricted, impoverished, shabby genteel as was the life of the family, it is impossible to study the Dickens menage at close range without the feeling that John Dickens was, in his way, a gentleman. The letter following shows just what is meant better than any words; no vulgarian could have penned it. It was written to Chapman and Hall, long time the publishers of Dickens's novels :

"34 Edward Street, Portman Square. "Gentlemen — It has occurred to me, at a moment of some difficulty, you may be willing to extend to me your obliging assistance. If it is consistent or convenient with your arrangements, will you do me the favor to deduct the four pounds I owe you from the enclosed bill for twenty pounds due April 7, with three shillings, four pence, the amount of the interest, and let me have the balance, fifteen pounds, fifteen shillings? Do not suppose I ask this on any other footing than that of obligation conferred upon me; and I assure you, though small in amount, its effects to me are matters of grave consideration, because anything that would occasion my absence from the Gallery would be productive of fatal effects. You may consider it an intrusion that I should apply to you in a moment of difficulty. I feel it to be so ; but, recollecting how much your interests are bound up with those of my son, I flatter myself that if you can confer a favor upon the father without transgressing any rule that you have laid down, and that without inconvenience, you may feel disposed to do so. I do not enhance it when I say that the favor, though small, yet under the circumstances would be a signal obligation conferred on me. Gentlemen,

"Your obliged and obedient servant,

"John Dickens."

No lover of Charles Dickens can miss the delicious Micawberish flavor of this composition; as Percy Fitzgerald points out, it might with hardly a change appear in the pages of Copper field.

Mrs. Dickens, too, was a lady, however acidulous of temper; the fact that at one time when the family fortunes were at ebb tide (if the figure may be used, when full tide seems never to have come), she set up as principal of a female academy, points the same way of gentility. The frequent references to Dickens's background as altogether wretched and common need to be qualified by these facts and inferences. His people were poor folk of the upper middle class, neither more nor less.

The difficulties of John Dickens in the practical matter of supporting his family had its effect upon the little Charles; it gave him scant schooling, little of the tender nurture and none of the luxury and privilege of a more fortunate youth. He was left much alone, apparently; was thrown in on himself, which was not all bad for an imaginative child of reading habit. Externally the life was a series of shabby lodgings, in Portsmouth, Rochester, Chatham, and then London. But in what the elder Dickens grandiloquently referred to as his "library," meaning a shelf of well-worn books in a corner of the living-room, was fodder of the best for a future man of letters: The Arabian Nights, and Don Quixote, Swift and Sterne, Goldsmith and Crusoe, and the eighteenth-century novelists, Richardson, Fielding and Smollett. Herein browsed the little lad, rarely joining his playmates in the field sports outside; delicate, handsome, self -communing, he lived the life of dreams and of imagination. We know Smollett in special was his favorite, a very important thing to bear in mind in studying his career as writer, particularly its beginning. And of his style in general, it is not too much to say that it was based more than any one other influence on these eighteenth-century worthies; no bad literary progenitors, it will be confessed.

Given the sort of boy he was, impressionable, bookish, idealistic, two dark places in his early life may be emphasized for the light they throw. One is his brief term of employment, at the age of ten, in a shoe-blacking establishment, where his task in a dank cellar was to fill bottles with the viscous fluid for a wage of six shillings a week — pay so poor that the midday meal was omitted at times.

Dickens, the famous author, quivered sensitively when he mentioned this episode to his biographer, Forster; in his own home he never referred to it. It was a loathsome job, and he felt humiliated even by the memory of it. Some lads would have minded it less; there is nothing intrinsically degrading in such work. That Dickens took it as he did would seem to accentuate a sort of natural refinement and longing for what was fine and beautiful and romantic which was ingrain with him. He was naturally a peculiarly sensitive, high-strung fellow, delicate in his tastes, instinctively seeking what was gentle and gentlemanly. The other harsh thing was his early experience of the debtors' prison, the Marshalsea, where his father was immured for several years and where the boy Charles visited him often. Here again, the effect of the place upon such a nature as his must have been one of poignant pain; bitterly shameful the thought that his father was there as an enforced inmate!

One of the pictures we get of him is that of a sensitive-featured boy with his hair falling over his face in ringlets, walking grimy streets to and fro between his lodging and that prison. Another picture shows us the little Charles, with his ingratiating ways and attractive personality, frequenting pawn-shops to raise cash on such household goods of the family as might have some value. Who can doubt that at the base of the novelist's wonderful power of envisaging the odds and ends of humanity lay these early experiences ? Or that the sympathy which was the motor force of all he wrote was generated by the dark and stressful days of his youth and young manhood? A fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind.

At sixteen we see him as office boy to an attorney; here, in less than two years' time, he acquired that knowledge of the lower world, observed at close range — for he was the keenest of observers — yet half instinctive, too, which comes forth so richly and delightfully in some of the great books, notably Bleak House, but also Old Curiosity Shop, Copperfield, Oliver Twist, The Tale of Two Cities, and others still. Dickens worked hard in this capacity, as he always did in whatever he undertook. His honorable sense of doing thoroughly what he was at is one of the denotements of his character. He studied stenography of nights, painfully acquiring the power of shorthand reporting. His father at this time was a shorthand reporter in the House of Commons, which is another testimonial to his parts ; and the son may perhaps have felt that this was a possibility for him as well; for the law he never thought of as a potential profession. He was, too, practising authorship during these days, we may well believe; ambitious, full of dreams, eager to prove his quality, with his brain already teeming with the vision of London types and scenes. He was observing in a way that was to bear fruit in the Sketches by Boz, in Pickwick Papers and in the earliest novels.

Soon leaving the attorney's dim-lighted chambers, at nineteen he took his place, like his father, in the reporter's gallery of the House, and rapidly became known as the best journalist employed for that purpose ; one who could be trusted to get his copy back to the city in time for press, wherever over England he had gone to chronicle political gatherings. By this activity, his knowledge of men and things, and of Nature's face under all possible circumstances, was broadened and enriched. His own description of this newspaper life gives a lively idea of the nature of his occupation. It was all good preparation, albeit unconscious (perhaps the better for that reason) for the future writer and depicter of humanity. He began, with fear and trembling, to write out these observations and note-book jottings, and we get a picturesque account of how he surreptitiously dropped a manuscript into a letter box in Fleet Street and of the wild delight that filled him when it was accepted by a magazine. Here was the beginning of what was to eventuate in the first book, the Sketches by Boz, the collection of character studies, scenes and tales with which Dickens made his literary bow at the age of twenty- four, though much of the contents of the volume was written during the preceding years, when he was hardly more than a boy. One of Charles's brothers was Moses by name; this was affectionately contracted to "Mos," after the familiar manner of family life. If you pronounce "Mos" with a cold in your head, it sounds like Boz; and we get the origin of the pen name used in our writer's first book; incidentally, too, we get a suggestion that the word has the long sound instead of the short one commonly given it to-day.

Sketches by Boz, in comparison with the mature work of Dickens, is exactly like the preliminary studio studies of a coming great painter. The tales, sketches, scenes and character delineations which make it up have the keen observational eye so typical of the author; the lively sense of humor of the external kind (the kind that rests in appearances), and the feeling for the dramatic contrasts of life. Potentially, you feel that Charles Dickens is here; yet such was his subsequent growth in depth, breadth and fellow feeling that you mark the immaturity of this firstling of his genius. The Sketches bear about the same relation to the Dickens of Copper field and Our Mutual Friend that George Eliot's Scenes from Clerical Life bear to The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch.

It was The Old Monthly Magazine to which he had sent that contribution, A Dinner' in Poplar Walk, not included afterward in the Boz sketches. Mr. Hogarth, the managing editor of The Morning Chronicle, with which the young author was then engaged, thought highly of the Boz papers; and the mention of Hogarth's name serves to introduce another vastly important aspect of Charles Dickens's life, for the connection with the Hogarths qualified his whole after life.

It was natural that the young writer should have been admitted on terms of familiarity to the Hogarth home, where three agreeable girls, daughters of the house, were ready to welcome and make much of him. The eldest, Catherine, he was to marry; the youngest, Mary, who died at seventeen, in the sweet bloom of her youth, he tenderly loved and memorialized as Little Nell ; the third sister, Georgina, remained as his life-long friend and house mate up to the day of his death, and only passed away herself in 1917. Why Dickens chose the less ethereal Catherine, in the light of subsequent happenings, will always remain a mystery. In a sketch of the author by two Frenchmen, Messieurs Keim and Lumet, an acute remark is made to the effect that Dickens at this period was in love with love rather than with a specific woman. He had been lonely, neglected ; suddenly he entered into the heart-warming society of attractive girls, and was sensitively responsive to all that it meant. The woman who was his choice was his faithful companion for years, and bore him ten children. There was no scandal involved in their'separation, which occurred in 1857. The whole story will never be known ; in truth, can the inner psychology of such experiences ever be revealed? But when the reader is asking himself why Charles Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, he must not for a moment forget that the young writer had a love romance. Two years before his marriage in 1836, he had met Maria Beadwell, daughter of a wealthy banker, and fallen romantically in love with her. The family, not unnaturally, objected ; the girl was sent to Paris. Returning, she renewed relations with him, letters being exchanged through the kind intermediary of a friend. Then the family again stepped in, this time finally, and Maria, who does not appear to have cared overmuch, definitely gave her lover up and married one Winter, a wealthy merchant. That this affair was serious with Dickens we know ; his passionate loveletters have of late been published (one of those publications which we welcome, because of the immense autobiographic value, and yet shrink from, as seeming too sacredly personal for the world's gaze) ; and when, twenty years afterward, the lady in question wrote the great novelist, he responded in a way to show that the young idyl remained such still in his memory. They met, and the illusion was gone forever. Alas, the Maria of the young dream was portly, scant of breath, and, far worse, rather simpering and commonplace. She who was Dora, the child wife of Copperfield, became the silly Mrs. Finching of Little Dorr it.

With this episode in mind, it is impossible not to inquire if Catherine Hogarth were chosen in contrast with, in reaction from, the Dora fragile butterfly type ; Catherine being the Agnes who succeeded the earlier and lighter girl? It is at least a plausible conjecture; and, in any case, the Beadwell episode can never be overlooked in any attempt to understand the heart history of Charles Dickens. At the age of twenty- four, then, Dickens married. His sketches and papers, later to be brought together under the pen name of "Boz," had been appearing for some three years and had met with some favor, though by no means creating any sensation. They were issued in book form this year of his marriage and attracted favorable attention to the clever young journalist, without setting the Thames afire. But Dickens was earning what was for those days a very good income by his journalistic connections and these occasional contributions of his pen to imaginative letters. He had a right to enter matrimony, yet felt that his spurs were to win, that he must labor hard to express what was in him, and to support his prospective family properly. He was of the type to be stimulated, not discouraged, in the fact that he had given hostages to fortune. Meanwhile, the opportunity offered which was to result in a book that at a bound made him a national figure, starting him on the long and splendid career of nearly forty years as public entertainer, counselor, reformer, and friend. The familiar story of the genesis of Pickwick must be here retold once more.

Chapman and Hall, the publishers so long to be honorably identified with Dickens, had brought out his Boz sketches. They proposed to the noted caricaturist, Seymour, who wished to do a series of sporting scenes for them, that he should get the cooperation of Dickens in the way of letter-press. They thought well enough of his lively pen to select him for the task. The pay was fourteen pounds for each monthly instalment; it meant an addition of nearly one hundred dollars a month to the young husband's income (remember that each dollar bought more then than it does now), and Dickens gladly accepted. It is interesting to see that at the beginning of this famous bargain the pictures were the main thing; later, when Pickwick was born and Sam Weller began to talk, the tail wagged the dog, the letter-press ran away with the illustrations, to which may be added the tragic fact that Seymour, like so many humorists a man of melancholy disposition, committed suicide after the first issue — the no less famed Phiz going on with that aspect of the joint work in pictures now world known and loved.

At first the thing rather hung fire; Seymour's tragic withdrawal was a bad effect in itself; and Dickens's early pages did not arouse immediate wide interest. Then, enter the beloved Sam Weller, and from that moment the success of Pickwick was assured. The young writer, the husband who could not brook failure, was able to draw a deep breath in the knowledge that he really had something to say which England, not merely literary critics and his fellow journalists, but the great general reading public was eager and glad to hear. From that moment the anxieties of Charles Dickens, writer, so far as the question of his reception by the world was concerned, were over.

The remainder of Dickens's life was, externally viewed, that of a famous literary man, courted, beloved, and honored to a degree seldom witnessed in literary annals. His books with scarcely an exception, and there were, from Pickwick to the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood, sixteen of them, only added to his reputation and helped to amass the considerable fortune acquired by his pen between 1836 and 1870, his death year. * Looked at from without, and making a generalization, we might say that it is the record of one of Fortune's favorites, a sort of English wunderkind. And it may be added that Dickens himself enjoyed it all enormously, for his was a nature peculiarly gifted in that sympathetic appreciation of this world and all it embraces which insures vivid living. Dickens could have said earlier what Bernard Shaw has said in our time: "I want to be thoroughly used up when I die." Indeed, he was, for he had lived intensely during his eight and fifty years. As he prospered in this world's goods, his manner of life kept pace with his increased means, and he lived more genially, on a more generous scale. His successive residences, Tavistock House, Devonshire Terrace, and the final country place famed as Gadshill, where the author in his maturity was able to inhabit a house his father had shown him as a boy and prophesied his ownership of, were outward indications of his substantial progress in a worldly sense. Dickens lived freely and handsomely as his income increased ; his large family entailed an expensive establishment, and to the day of his death he felt the need of lashing his remarkable powers of production in order to keep up the scale of living and provide for others at his departure. He found in his public readings a way to add substantially to his fortunes, and doubtless his efforts in this field shortened his days. Some, including close friends, 'resented his doing this as below his dignity as a great author. Others attribute it to his greed for gold. It must be remembered that, even with the money thus acquired, Dickens's fortune amounted to less than half a million of American money; surely not sufficient to justify the charge, in view of his being for a generation by all odds the best remunerated English author.

In attempting to come close to the man and understand his personality in relation to those common human experiences which mean life for us all, certain events and characteristics stand out for emphasis. Throughout his writing days, this author worked very hard at his adopted profession of letters, and there is always a sense of struggle as one follows his life-story, year by year. He took himself and his work seriously, and strove with all his powers to improve his gift and develop such skill as to make himself worthy of the great influence he exercised over his readers. No man of letters was more conscientious in this way than he; and it should be borne in mind when we ask, What of Dickens's artistry? Whatever the skill in craftsmanship he attained, however short he fell of the full perfection of his art, it was not done carelessly; he tried his very best to make himself a fine workman in the novel as a literary form. Thackeray, of the two, took his craft the more debonairly; there can be no doubt of this, after a careful study of the two careers. In judging Dickens's- books, too, it must always be remembered that he, as well as Thackeray, was under constant journalistic pressure and did not give his work the shaping forethought, at times, and the revision which a latter day would demand. His stories were serialized and written with that fact in mind ; a regrettable thing, for it sometimes meant undue haste, and the subordination of parts to the whole, which makes for symmetry. It is beyond doubt that Dickens's work suffered in some measure for this reason. Any literary man is to be judged by the standards and conditions of his time, and the generation of these two major Victorian novelists was easy-going in these respects compared with our own. For a large part of his literary life, too, Dickens was the editor of important publications; not an editor who makes a sinecure of his position, but one who really "slogged at his trade," giving fully of his time and strength. He edited Household Words, and later All the Year Round. That he shaped his own writings to the exigencies of his magazines can not be questioned. A critic who studied the fiction of Dickens in relation to its serial appearance and noted to what extent the author wrought with this necessity before him, would do much service to Dickens!s study. The need to arrange climaxes, for example, in such wise as to prove most effective at the end of an instalment, would condition the technic of the story as a whole. Dickens here did what leading authors have prevailingly done; he allowed financial considerations to qualify his artistic ideal. He is to be blamed neither more nor less than the others.