Dickens Part 4

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

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

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

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

Lawrence Boythorn is described by Mr. Sydney Colvin as drawn from Walter Savage Landor with his intellectual greatness left out. It was, of course, unlikely that his intellectual greatness should be left in, the intention obviously being to reproduce what was eccentric in the ways and manner, with a suggestion of what was n.o.ble in the character, of d.i.c.kens's famous friend. Whether, had he attempted to do so, d.i.c.kens could have drawn a picture of the whole Landor, is another question. Landor, who could put into a cla.s.sic dialogue that sense of the _naf_ to which d.i.c.kens is generally a stranger, yet pa.s.sionately admired the most _sentimental_ of all his young friend's poetic figures; and it might almost be said that the intellectual natures of the two men were drawn together by the force of contrast. They appear to have first become intimate with one another during Landor's residence at Bath--which began in 1837--and they frequently met at Gore House. At a celebration of the poet's birthday in his lodgings at Bath, so Forster tells us in his biography of Landor, "the fancy which took the form of Little Nell in the _Curiosity Shop_ first dawned on the genius of its creator." In Landor's s.p.a.cious mind there was room for cordial admiration of an author the bent of whose genius differed widely from that of his own; and he could thus afford to sympathise with his whole heart in a creation which men of much smaller intellectual build have p.r.o.nounced mawkish and unreal. d.i.c.kens afterwards gave to one of his sons the names of Walter Landor; and when the old man died at last, _after_ his G.o.dson, paid him an eloquent tribute of respect in _All the Year Round_. In this paper the personal intention of the character of Boythorn is avowed by implication; but though Landor esteemed and loved d.i.c.kens, it might seem matter for wonder, did not eccentrics after all sometimes cherish their own eccentricity, that his irascible nature failed to resent a rather doubtful compliment. For the character of Boythorn is whimsical rather than, in any but the earlier sense of the word, humorous.

But the portrait, however imperfect, was in this instance, beyond all doubt, both kindly meant and kindly taken; though it cannot be said to have added to the attractions of the book into which it is introduced.

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

While d.i.c.kens was engaged upon a literary work such as would have absorbed the intellectual energies of most men, he not only wrote occasionally for his journal, but also dictated for publication in it, the successive portions of a book altogether outside his usual range of authors.h.i.+p. This was _A Child's History of England_, the only one of his works that was not written by his own hand. A history of England, written by Charles d.i.c.kens for his own or any one else's children, was sure to be a different work from one written under similar circ.u.mstances by Mr. Freeman or the late M.

Guizot. The book, though it cannot be called a success, is, however, by no means devoid of interest. Just ten years earlier he had written, and printed, a history of England for the benefit of his eldest son, then a hopeful student of the age of five, which was composed, as he informed Douglas Jerrold at the time, "in the exact spirit" of that advanced politician's paper, "for I don't know what I should do if he were to get hold of any Conservative or High Church notions; and the best way of guarding against any such horrible result is, I take it, to wring the parrots' necks in his very cradle." The _Child's History of England_ is written in the same spirit, and ill.u.s.trates more directly, and, it must be added, more coa.r.s.ely, than any of d.i.c.kens's other works his hatred of ecclesiasticism of all kinds. Thus, the account of Dunstan is pervaded by a prejudice which is the fruit of anything but knowledge; Edward the Confessor is "the dreary old" and "the maudlin Confessor;" and the Pope and what belongs to him are treated with a measure of contumely which would have satisfied the heart of Leigh Hunt himself. To be sure, if King John is dismissed as a "miserable brute," King Henry the Eighth is not more courteously designated as a "blot of blood and grease upon the history of England." On the other hand, it could hardly be but that certain pa.s.sages of the national story should be well told by so great a master of narrative; and though the strain in which parts of the history of Charles the Second are recounted strikes one as hardly suitable to the young, to whom irony is in general _caviare_ indeed, yet there are touches both in the story of "this merry gentleman"--a designation which almost recalls f.a.gin--and elsewhere in the book not unworthy of its author. Its patriotic spirit is quite as striking as its Radicalism; and vulgar as some of its expressions must be called, there is a pleasing glow in the pa.s.sage on King Alfred, which declares the "English-Saxon" character to have been "the greatest character among the nations of the earth;" and there is a yet n.o.bler enthusiasm, such as it would indeed be worth any writer's while to infuse into the young, in the pa.s.sionate earnestness with which, by means of the story of Agincourt, the truth is enforced that "nothing can make war otherwise than horrible."

This book must have been dictated, and some at least of the latter portion of _Bleak House_ written, at Boulogne, where, after a spring sojourn at Brighton, d.i.c.kens spent the summer of 1853, and where were also pa.s.sed the summers of 1854 and 1856. Boulogne, where Le Sage's last years were spent, was _Our French Watering-place_, so graphically described in a paper in _Household Words_ as a companion picture to the old familiar Broadstairs.

The family were comfortably settled on a green hill-side close to the town, "in a charming garden in a very pleasant country," with "excellent light wines on the premises, French cookery, millions of roses, two cows--for milk-punch--vegetables cut for the pot, and handed in at the kitchen window; five summer-houses, fifteen fountains--with no water in 'em--and thirty-seven clocks--keeping, as I conceive, Australian time, having no reference whatever to the hours on this side of the globe." The energetic owner of the Villa des Moulineaux was the "M. Loyal Deva.s.seur"

of _Our French Watering-place_--jovial, convivial, genial, sentimental too as a Buonapartist and a patriot. In 1854 the same obliging personage housed the d.i.c.kens family in another abode, at the top of the hill, close to the famous Napoleonic column; but in 1856 they came back to the Moulineaux. The former year had been an exciting one for Englishmen in France, with royal visits to and fro to testify to the _entente cordiale_ between the governments. d.i.c.kens, notwithstanding his humorous a.s.sertions, was only moderately touched by the Sebastopol fever; but when a concrete problem came before him in the shape of a festive demonstration, he addressed himself to it with the irrepressible ardour of the born stage-manager. "In our own proper illumination," he writes, on the occasion of the Prince Consort's visit to the camp at Boulogne, "I laid on all the servants, all the children now at home, all the visitors, one to every window, with everything ready to light up on the ringing of a big dinner-bell by your humble correspondent. St. Peter's on Easter Monday was the result."

Of course, at Boulogne, d.i.c.kens was cut off neither from his business nor from his private friends. His hospitable invitations were as urgent to his French villa in the summer as to his London house in the winter, and on both sides of the water the _Household Words_ familiars were as sure of a welcome from their chief. During his absences from London he could have had no trustier lieutenant than Mr. W. H. Wills, with whom, being always ready to throw himself into a part, he corresponded in an amusing paragraphed, semi-official style. And neither in his working nor in his leisure hours had he by this time any more cherished companion than Mr.

Wilkie Collins, whose progress towards brilliant success he was watching with the keenest and kindliest interest. With him and his old friend Augustus Egg, d.i.c.kens, in October, 1853, started on a tour to Switzerland and Italy, in the course of which he saw more than one old friend, and revisited more than one known scene--ascending Vesuvius with Mr. Layard and drinking punch at Rome with David Roberts. It would be absurd to make any lofty demands upon the brief records of a holiday journey; and, for my part, I would rather think of d.i.c.kens a.s.siduous over his Christmas number at Rome and at Venice, than weigh his moralisings about the electric telegraph running through the Coliseum. His letters written to his wife during this trip are bright and gay, and it was certainly no roving bachelor who "kissed almost all the children he encountered in remembrance of the sweet faces" of his own, and "talked to all the mothers who carried them." By the middle of December the travellers were home again, and before the year was out he had read to large audiences at Birmingham, on behalf of a public inst.i.tution, his favourite Christmas stories of _The Christmas Carol_ and _The Cricket on the Hearth_. As yet, however, his mind was not seriously intent upon any labours but those proper to his career as an author, and the year 1854 saw, between the months of April and August, the publication in his journal of a new story, which is among the most characteristic, though not among the most successful, of his works of fiction.

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

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

Unfortunately, however, a work of art with a didactic purpose is only too often p.r.o.ne to exaggerate what seems of special importance for the purpose in question, and to heighten contrasts which seem likely to put it in the clearest light. "Thomas Gradgrind, sir"--who announces himself with something of the genuine Lancas.h.i.+re roll--and his system are a sound and a laughable piece of satire, to begin with, only here and there marred by the satirist's imperfect knowledge of the details which he caricatures.

The "Manchester School," which the novel strives to expose, is in itself to a great extent a figment of the imagination, which to this day serves to round many a hollow period in oratory and journalism. Who, it may fairly be asked, were the parliamentary politicians satirized in the member for c.o.ketown, deaf and blind to any consideration but the multiplication-table? But in any case the cause hardly warrants one of its consequences as depicted in the novel--the utter brutalization of a stolid nature like "the Whelp's." When Gradgrind's son is about to be s.h.i.+pped abroad out of reach of the penalties of his crime, he reminds his father that he merely exemplifies the statistical law that "so many people out of so many will be dishonest." When the virtuous Bitzer is indignantly asked whether he has a heart, he replies that he is physiologically a.s.sured of the fact; and to the further inquiry whether this heart of his is accessible to compa.s.sion, makes answer that "it is accessible to reason, and to nothing else." These returnings of Mr. Gradgrind's philosophy upon himself savour of the moral justice represented by Gratiano in the fourth act. So, again, c.o.ketown, with its tall chimneys and black river, and its thirteen religious denominations, to which whoever else belonged the working-men did _not_, is no perverse contradiction of fact. But the influence of c.o.ketown, or of a whole wilderness of c.o.ketowns, cannot justly be charged with a tendency to ripen such a product as Josiah Bounderby, who is not only the "bully of humanity," but proves to be a mean-spirited impostor in his pretensions to the glory of self-help. In short, _Hard Times_ errs by its attempt to prove too much.

Apart, however, from the didactic purposes which overburden it, the pathos and humour of particular portions of this tale appear to me to have been in no wise overrated. The domestic tragedy of Stephen and Rachael has a subdued intensity of tenderness and melancholy of a kind rare with d.i.c.kens, upon whom the example of Mrs. Gaskell in this instance may not have been without its influence. Nor is there anything more delicately and at the same time more appropriately conceived in any of his works than poor Rachael's dominion over the imagination as well as over the affections of her n.o.ble-minded and unfortunate lover: "As the s.h.i.+ning stars were to the heavy candle in the window, so was Rachael, in the rugged fancy of this man, to the common experiences of his life." The love-story of poor Louisa is of a different kind, and more wordy in the telling; yet here also the feelings painted are natural and true. The humorous interest is almost entirely concentrated upon the company of horse-riders; and never has d.i.c.kens's extraordinary power of humorous observation more genially a.s.serted itself. From Mr. Sleary--"thtout man, game-eye"--and his protagonist, Mr. E. W. B. Childers, who, when he shook his long hair, caused it to "shake all at once," down to Master Kidderminster, who used to form the apex of the human pyramids, and "in whose young nature there was an original flavour of the misanthrope,"

these honest equestrians are more than worthy to stand by the side of Mr.

Vincent Crummles and his company of actors; and the fun has here, in addition to the grotesqueness of the earlier picture, a mellowness of its own. d.i.c.kens's comic genius was never so much at its ease and so inexhaustible in ludicrous fancies as in the depiction of such groups as this; and the horse-riders, skilfully introduced to ill.u.s.trate a truth, wholesome if not novel, would have insured popularity to a far less interesting and to a far less powerful fiction.

The year after that which saw the publication of _Hard Times_ was one in which the thoughts of most Englishmen were turned away from the problems approached in that story. But if the military glories of 1854 had not aroused in him any very exuberant enthusiasm, the reports from the Crimea in the ensuing winter were more likely to appeal to his patriotism as well as to his innate impatience of disorder and incompetence. In the first instance, however, he contented himself with those grumblings to which, as a sworn foe of red tape and a declared disbeliever in our parliamentary system, he might claim to have a special right; and he seems to have been too restless in and about himself to have entered very closely into the progress of public affairs. The Christmas had been a merry one at Tavistock House; and the amateur theatricals of its juvenile company had pa.s.sed through a most successful season. Their history has been written by one of the performers--himself not the least distinguished of the company, since it was he who, in d.i.c.kens's house, caused Thackeray to roll off his seat in a fit of laughter. d.i.c.kens, who with Mark Lemon disported himself among these precocious minnows, was, as our chronicler relates, like Triplet, "author, manager, and actor too," organiser, deviser, and harmoniser of all the incongruous a.s.sembled elements; it was he "who improvised costumes, painted and corked our innocent cheeks, and suggested all the most effective business of the scene." But, as was usual with him, the transition was rapid from play to something very like earnest; and already, in June, 1855, the Tavistock House theatre produced Mr. Wilkie Collins's melodrama of _The Light-house_, which afterwards found its way to the public stage. To d.i.c.kens, who performed in it with the author, it afforded "scope for a piece of acting of great power," the old sailor Aaron Gurnock, which by its savage picturesqueness earned a tribute of recognition from Carlyle. No less a hand than Stanfield painted the scenery, and d.i.c.kens himself, besides writing the prologue, introduced into the piece a ballad called _The Story of the Wreck_, a not unsuccessful effort in Cowper's manner. At Christmas, 1856-'57, there followed _The Frozen Deep_, another melodrama by the same author; and by this time the management of his private theatricals had become to d.i.c.kens a serious business, to be carried on seriously for its own sake. "It was to him," he wrote, "like writing a book in company;" and his young people might learn from it "that kind of humility which is got from the earned knowledge that whatever the right hand finds to do must be done with the heart in it, and in a desperate earnest." _The Frozen Deep_ was several times repeated, on one occasion for the benefit of the daughter of the recently deceased Douglas Jerrold; but by the end of January the little theatre was finally broken up; and though d.i.c.kens spent one more winter season at Tavistock House, the shadow was then already falling upon his cheerful home.

In the midst of his children's Christmas gaieties of the year 1855 d.i.c.kens had given two or three public readings to "wonderful audiences" in various parts of the country. A trip to Paris with Mr. Wilkie Collins had followed, during which, as he wrote home, he was wandering about Paris all day, dining at all manner of places, and frequenting the theatres at the rate of two or three a night. "I suppose," he adds, with pleasant self-irony, "as an old farmer said of Scott, I am 'makin' mysel'' all the time; but I seem to be rather a free-and-easy sort of superior vagabond."

And in truth a roving, restless spirit was strong upon him in these years.

Already, in April, he speaks of himself as "going off; I don't know where or how far, to ponder about I don't know what." France, Switzerland, Spain, Constantinople, in Mr. Layard's company, had been successively in his thoughts, and, for aught he knew, Greenland and the North Pole might occur to him next. At the same time he foresaw that the end of it all would be his shutting himself up in some out-of-the-way place of which he had not yet thought, and going desperately to work there.

Before, however, these phantasmagoric schemes had subsided into the quiet plan of an autumn visit to Folkestone, followed during the winter and spring by a residence at Paris, he had at least found a subject to ponder on, which was to suggest an altogether novel element in his next work of fiction. I have said that though, like the majority of his fellow-countrymen, d.i.c.kens regarded our war with Russia as inevitable, yet his hatred of all war, and his impatience of the exaggerations of pa.s.sion and sentiment which all war produces, had preserved him from himself falling a victim to their contagion. On the other hand, when in the winter of 1854-'55 the note of exultation in the bravery of our soldiers in the Crimea began to be intermingled with complaints against the grievously defective arrangements for their comfort and health, and when these complaints, stimulated by the loud-voiced energy of the press, and extending into censures upon the whole antiquated and perverse system of our army administration, speedily swelled into a roar of popular indignation, sincere conviction ranged him on the side of the most uncompromising malcontents. He was at all times ready to give vent to that antipathy against officialism which is shared by so large a number of Englishmen. Though the son of a dock-yard official, he is found roundly a.s.serting that "more obstruction of good things and patronage of bad things has been committed in the dock-yards--as in everything connected with the misdirection of the navy--than in every other branch of the public service put together, including"--the particularisation is hard--"even the Woods and Forests." He had listened, we may be sure, to the scornful denunciations launched by the prophet of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ against Downing Street and all its works, and to the proclamation of the great though rather vague truth that "reform in that Downing Street department of affairs is precisely the reform which were worth all others." And now the heart-rending sufferings of mult.i.tudes of brave men had brought to light, in one department of the public administration, a series of complications and perversities which in the end became so patent to the Government itself that they had to be roughly remedied in the very midst of the struggle. The cry for administrative reform, which arose in the year 1855, however crude the form it frequently took, was in itself a logical enough result of the situation; and there is no doubt that the angriness of the complaint was intensified by the att.i.tude taken up in the House of Commons by the head of the Government towards the pertinacious politician who made himself the mouthpiece of the extreme demands of the feeling outside. Mr. Layard was d.i.c.kens's valued friend; and the share is thus easily explained which--against his otherwise uniform practice of abstaining from public meetings--the most popular writer of the day took in the Administrative Reform meetings, held in Drury Lane Theatre, on June 27, 1855. The speech which he delivered on this occasion, and which was intended to aid in forcing the "whole question" of Administrative Reform upon the attention of an unwilling Government, possesses no value whatever in connexion with its theme, though of course it is not devoid of some smart and telling hits. Not on the platform, but at his desk as an author, was d.i.c.kens to do real service to the cause of administrative efficiency. For whilst invective of a general kind runs off like water from the rock of usage, even Circ.u.mlocution Offices are not insensible to the acetous force of satire.

d.i.c.kens's caricature of British officialism formed the most generally attractive element in the story of _Little Dorrit_--originally intended to be called _n.o.body's Fault_--which he published in monthly numbers, from December, 1855, that year, to June, 1857. He was solemnly taken to task for his audacity by the _Edinburgh Review_, which reproached him for his persistent ridicule of "the inst.i.tutions of the country, the laws, the administration, in a word, the government under which we live." His "charges" were treated as hardly seriously meant, but as worthy of severe reprobation, because likely to be seriously taken by the poor, the uneducated, and the young. And the caricaturist, besides being reminded of the names of several eminent public servants, was specially requested to look, as upon a picture contrasting with his imaginary Circ.u.mlocution Office, upon the Post Office, or--for the choice offered was not more extensive--upon the London police, so liberally praised by himself in his own journal. The delighted author of _Little Dorrit_ replied to this not very skilful diatribe in a short and spirited rejoinder in _Household Words_. In this he judiciously confined himself to refuting an unfounded incidental accusation in the Edinburgh article, and to dwelling, as upon a "Curious Misprint," upon the indignant query: "How does he account for the career of _Mr. Rowland Hill_?" whose name, as an example of the ready intelligence of the Circ.u.mlocution Office, was certainly an odd _erratum_.

Had he, however, cared to make a more general reply to the main article of the indictment, he might have pointed out that, as a matter of fact, our official administrative machinery _had_ recently broken down in one of its most important branches, and that circ.u.mlocution in the literal sense of the word--circ.u.mlocution between department and department, or office and office--had been one of the princ.i.p.al causes of the collapse. The general drift of the satire was, therefore, in accordance with fact, and the satire itself salutary in its character. To quarrel with it for not taking into consideration what might be said on the other side, was to quarrel with the method of treatment which satire has at all times considered itself ent.i.tled to adopt; while to stigmatise a popular book as likely to mislead the ill-informed, was to suggest a restraint which would have deprived wit and humour of most of their opportunities of rendering service to either a good or an evil cause.

A far more legitimate exception has been taken to these Circ.u.mlocution Office episodes as defective in art by the very reason of their being exaggerations. Those best acquainted with the interiors of our government offices may be right in denying that the Barnacles can be regarded as an existing type. Indeed, it would at no time have been easy to point to any office quite as labyrinthine, or quite as bottomless, as that permanently presided over by Mr. t.i.te Barnacle; to any chief secretary or commissioner so absolutely wooden of fibre as he; or to any private secretary so completely absorbed in his eye-gla.s.s as Barnacle junior. But as satirical figures they one and all fulfil their purpose as thoroughly as the picture of the official sanctum itself, with its furniture "in the higher official manner," and its "general bamboozling air of how not to do it." The only question is, whether satire which, if it is to be effective, must be of a piece and in its way exaggerated, is not out of place in a pathetic and humorous fiction, where, like a patch of too diverse a thread, it interferes with the texture into which it is introduced. In themselves these pa.s.sages of _Little Dorrit_ deserve to remain unforgotten amongst the masterpieces of literary caricature; and there is, I do not hesitate to say, something of Swiftian force in their grotesque embodiment of a popular current of indignation. The mere name of the Circ.u.mlocution Office was a stroke of genius, one of those phrases of d.i.c.kens which Professor Ma.s.son justly describes as, whether exaggerated or not, "efficacious for social reform." As usual, d.i.c.kens had made himself well acquainted with the formal or outside part of his subject; the very air of Whitehall seems to gather round us as Mr. t.i.te Barnacle, in answer to a persistent enquirer who "wants to know" the position of a particular matter, concedes that it "may have been, in the course of official business, referred to the Circ.u.mlocution Office for its consideration," and that "the department may have either originated, or confirmed, a minute on the subject." In the _Household Words_ paper called _A Poor Man's Tale of a Patent_ (1850) will be found a sufficiently elaborate study for Mr.

Doyce's experiences of the government of his country, as wrathfully narrated by Mr. Meagles.

With the exception of the Circ.u.mlocution Office pa.s.sages--advent.i.tious as they are to the progress of the action--_Little Dorrit_ exhibits a palpable falling-off in inventive power. Forster ill.u.s.trates by a striking fac-simile the difference between the "labour and pains" of the author's short notes for _Little Dorrit_ and the "lightness and confidence of handling" in what hints he had jotted down for _David Copperfield_.

Indeed, his "tablets" had about this time begun to be an essential part of his literary equipment. But in _Little Dorrit_ there are enough internal signs of, possibly unconscious, la.s.situde. The earlier, no doubt, is, in every respect, the better part of the book; or, rather, the later part shows the author wearily at work upon a canvas too wide for him, and filling it up with a crowd of personages in whom it is difficult to take much interest. Even Mr. Merdle and his catastrophe produce the effect rather of a ghastly allegory than of an "extravagant conception," as the author ironically called it in his preface, derived only too directly from real life. In the earlier part of the book, in so far as it is not once again concerned with enforcing the moral of _Hard Times_ in a different way, by means of Mrs. Clennam and her son's early history, the humour of d.i.c.kens plays freely over the figure of the Father of the Marshalsea. It is a psychological masterpiece in its way; but the revolting selfishness of Little Dorrit's father is not redeemed artistically by her own long-suffering; for her pathos lacks the old irresistible ring. Doubtless much in this part of the story--the whole episode, for instance, of the honest turnkey--is in the author's best manner. But, admirable as it is, this new picture of prison-life and prison-sentiment has an undercurrent of bitterness, indeed, almost of contemptuousness, foreign to the best part of d.i.c.kens's genius. This is still more perceptible in a figure not less true to life than the Father of the Marshalsea himself--Flora, the overblown flower of Arthur Clennam's boyish love. The humour of the conception is undeniable, but the whole effect is cruel; and, though greatly amused, the reader feels almost as if he were abetting a profanation. d.i.c.kens could not have become what he is to the great mult.i.tude of his readers had he, as a humourist, often indulged in this cynical mood.

There is in general little in the characters of this fiction to compensate for the sense of oppression from which, as he follows the slow course of its far from striking plot, the reader finds it difficult to free himself.

A vein of genuine humour shows itself in Mr. Plornish, obviously a favourite of the author's, and one of those genuine working-men, as rare in fiction as on the stage, where Mr. Toole has reproduced the species; but the relation between Mr. and Mrs. Plornish is only a fainter revival of that between Mr. and Mrs. Bagney. Nor is there anything fresh or novel in the characters belonging to another social sphere. Henry Gowan, apparently intended as an elaborate study in psychology, is only a very tedious one; and his mother at Hampton Court, whatever phase of a dilapidated aristocracy she may be intended to caricature, is merely ill-bred. As for Mrs. General, she is so sorry a burlesque that she could not be reproduced without extreme caution even on the stage--to the reckless conventionalities of which, indeed, the whole picture of the Dorrit family as _nouveaux riches_ bears a striking resemblance. There is, on the contrary, some good caricature, which, in one instance at least, was thought transparent by the knowing, in the _silhouettes_ of the great Mr. Merdle's professional guests; but these are, like the Circ.u.mlocution Office puppets, satiric sketches, not the living figures of creative humour.

I have spoken of this story with a censure which may be regarded as exaggerated in its turn. But I well remember, at the time of its publication in numbers, the general consciousness that _Little Dorrit_ was proving unequal to the high-strung expectations which a new work by d.i.c.kens then excited in his admirers, both young and old. There were new and striking features in it, with abundant comic and serious effect, but there was no power in the whole story to seize and hold, and the feeling could not be escaped that the author was not at his best. And d.i.c.kens was not at his best when he wrote _Little Dorrit_. Yet while nothing is more remarkable in the literary career of d.i.c.kens than this apparently speedy decline of his power, nothing is more wonderful in it than the degree to which he righted himself again, not, indeed, with his public, for the public never deserted its favourite, but with his genius.

A considerable part of _Little Dorrit_ must have been written in Paris, where, in October, after a quiet autumn at Folkestone, d.i.c.kens had taken a family apartment in the Avenue des Champs elysees, "about half a quarter of a mile above Franconi's." Here, after his fas.h.i.+on, he lived much to himself, his family, and his guests, only occasionally finding his way into a literary or artistic _salon_; but he sat for his portrait to both Ary and Henri Scheffer, and was easily persuaded to read his _Cricket on the Hearth_ to an audience in the atelier. Macready and Mr. Wilkie Collins were in turn the companions of many "theatrical and lounging" evenings.

Intent as d.i.c.kens now had become upon the technicalities of his own form of composition, this interest must have been greatly stimulated by the frequent comparison of modern French plays, in most of which nicety of construction and effectiveness of situation have so paramount a significance. At Boulogne, too, Mr. Wilkie Collins was a welcome summer visitor. And in the autumn the two friends started on the _Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices_. It came to an untimely end as a pedestrian excursion, but the record of it is one of the pleasantest memorials of a friends.h.i.+p which brightened much of d.i.c.kens's life and intensified his activity in work as well as in pleasure.

"Mr. Thomas Idle" had indeed a busy time of it in this year 1857. The publication of _Little Dorrit_ was not finished till June, and in August we find him, between a reading and a performance of _The Frozen Deep_ at Manchester--then in the exciting days of the great Art Exhibition--thus describing to Macready his way of filling up his time: "I hope you have seen my tussle with the _Edinburgh_. I saw the chance last Friday week, as I was going down to read the _Carol_ in St. Martin's Hall. Instantly turned to, then and there, and wrote half the article, flew out of bed early next morning, and finished it by noon. Went down to Gallery of Ill.u.s.tration (we acted that night), did the day's business, corrected the proofs in Polar costume in dressing-room, broke up two numbers of _Household Words_ to get it out directly, played in _Frozen Deep_ and _Uncle John_, presided at supper of company, made no end of speeches, went home and gave in completely for four hours, then got sound asleep, and next day was as fresh as you used to be in the far-off days of your l.u.s.ty youth." It was on the occasion of the readings at St. Martin's Hall, for the benefit of Douglas Jerrold's family, that the thought of giving readings for his own benefit first suggested itself to d.i.c.kens; and, as will be seen, by April, 1858, the idea had been carried into execution, and a new phase of life had begun for him. And yet at this very time, when his home was about to cease being in the fullest sense a home to d.i.c.kens, by a strange irony of fortune, he had been enabled to carry out a long-cherished fancy and to take possession, in the first instance as a summer residence, of the house on Gad's Hill, of which a lucky chance had made him the owner rather more than a twelvemonth before.

"My little place," he wrote in 1858, to his Swiss friend Cerjat, "is a grave red-brick house (time of George the First, I suppose), which I have added to and stuck bits upon in all manner of ways, so that it is as pleasantly irregular, and as violently opposed to all architectural ideas, as the most hopeful man could possibly desire. It is on the summit of Gad's Hill. The robbery was committed before the door, on the man with the treasure, and Falstaff ran away from the identical spot of ground now covered by the room in which I write. A little rustic ale-house, called 'The Sir John Falstaff,' is over the way--has been over the way ever since, in honour of the event.... The whole stupendous property is on the old Dover road...."

Among "the blessed woods and fields" which, as he says, had done him "a world of good," in a season of unceasing bodily and mental unrest, the great English writer had indeed found a habitation fitted to become inseparable from his name and fame. It was not till rather later, in 1860, that, after the sale of Tavistock House, Gad's Hill Place became his regular abode, a London house being only now and then taken for the season, while furnished rooms were kept at the office in Wellington Street for occasional use. And it was only gradually that he enlarged and improved his Kentish place so as to make it the pretty and comfortable country-house which at the present day it appears to be; constructing, in course of time, the pa.s.sage under the high-road to the shrubbery, where the Swiss chalet given to him by Mr. Fechter was set up, and building the pretty little conservatory, which, when completed, he was not to live many days to enjoy. But an old-fas.h.i.+oned, homely look, free from the slightest affectation of quietness, belonged to Gad's Hill Place, even after all these alterations, and belongs to it even at this day, when d.i.c.kens's solid old-fas.h.i.+oned furniture has been changed. In the pretty little front hall still hangs the illuminated tablet recalling the legend of Gad's Hill; and on the inside panels of the library door remain the facetious sham book-t.i.tles: "Hudson's _Complete Failure_," and "_Ten Minutes in China_," and "Cats' _Lives_" and, on a long series of leather backs, "Hansard's _Guide to Refres.h.i.+ng Sleep_." The rooms are all of a modest size, and the bedrooms--amongst them d.i.c.kens's own--very low; but the whole house looks thoroughly habitable, while the views across the cornfields at the back are such as in their undulation of soft outline are nowhere more pleasant than in Kent. Rochester and the Medway are near, even for those who do not--like d.i.c.kens and his dogs--count a stretch past three or four "mile-stones on the Dover road" as the mere beginning of an afternoon's walk. At a distance little greater there are in one direction the green glades of Cobham Park, with Chalk and Gravesend beyond; and in another the flat country towards the Thames, with its abundance of market-gardens. There, too, are the marshes on the border of which lie the ma.s.sive ruin of Cooling Castle, the refuge of the Lollard martyr who was _not_ concerned in the affair on Gad's Hill, and Cooling Church and church-yard, with the quaint little gravestones in the gra.s.s. London and the office were within easy reach, and Paris itself was, for practical purposes, not much farther away, so that, in later days at all events, d.i.c.kens found himself "crossing the Channel perpetually."

The name of d.i.c.kens still has a good sound in and about Gad's Hill. He was on very friendly terms with some families whose houses stand near to his own; and though nothing was farther from his nature, as he says, than to "wear topboots" and play the squire, yet he had in him not a little of what endears so many a resident country gentleman to his neighbourhood. He was head organiser rather than chief patron of village sports, of cricket matches and foot races; and his house was a dispensary for the poor of the parish. He established confidential relations between his house and the Falstaff Inn over the way, regulating his servants' consumption of beer on a strict but liberal plan of his own devising; but it is not for this reason only that the successor of Mr. Edwin Trood--for such was the veritable name of mine host of the "Falstaff" in d.i.c.kens's time--declares that it was a bad day for the neighbourhood when d.i.c.kens was taken away from it. In return, nothing could exceed the enthusiasm which surrounded him in his own country, and Forster has described his astonishment at the manifestation of it on the occasion of the wedding of the youngest daughter of the house in 1860. And, indeed, he was born to be popular, and specially among those by whom he was beloved as a friend or honoured as a benefactor.

But it was not for long intervals of either work or rest that d.i.c.kens was to settle down in his pleasant country house, nor was he ever, except quite at the last, to sit down under his own roof in peace and quiet, a wanderer no more. Less than a year after he had taken up his residence for the summer on Gad's Hill, his home, and that of his younger children, was his wife's home no longer. The separation, which appears to have been preparing itself for some, but no very long, time, took place in May, 1858, when, after an amicable arrangement, Mrs. d.i.c.kens left her husband, who henceforth allowed her an ample separate maintenance, and occasionally corresponded with her, but never saw her again. The younger children remained in their father's house under the self-sacrificing and devoted care of Mrs. d.i.c.kens's surviving sister, Miss Hogarth. Shortly afterwards, d.i.c.kens thought it well, in printed words which may be left forgotten, to rebut some slanderous gossip which, as the way of the world is, had misrepresented the circ.u.mstances of this separation. The causes of the event were an open secret to his friends and acquaintances. If he had ever loved his wife with that affection before which so-called incompatibilities of habits, temper, or disposition fade into nothingness, there is no indication of it in any of his numerous letters addressed to her. Neither has it ever been pretended that he strove in the direction of that resignation which love and duty together made possible to David Copperfield, or even that he remained in every way master of himself, as many men have known how to remain, the story of whose wedded life and its disappointments has never been written in history or figured in fiction.

It was not inc.u.mbent upon his faithful friend and biographer, and much less can it be upon one whom nothing but a sincere admiration of d.i.c.kens's genius ent.i.tles to speak of him at all, to declare the standard by which the most painful transaction in his life is to be judged. I say the most painful, for it is with a feeling akin to satisfaction that one reads, in a letter three years afterwards to a lady in reference to her daughter's wedding: "I want to thank you also for thinking of me on the occasion, but I feel that I am better away from it. I should really have a misgiving that I was a sort of a shadow on a young marriage, and you will understand me when I say so, and no more." A shadow, too--who would deny it?--falls on every one of the pictures in which the tenderest of modern humourists has painted the simple joys and the sacred sorrows of that home life of which to his generation he had become almost the poet and the prophet, when we remember how he was himself neither blessed with its full happiness nor capable of accepting with resignation the imperfection inherent in it, as in all things human.

CHAPTER VI.

LAST YEARS.

[1858-1870.]

The last twelve years of d.i.c.kens's life were busy years, like the others; but his activity was no longer merely the expression of exuberant force, and long before the collapse came he had been repeatedly warned of the risks he continued to defy. When, however, he first entered upon those public readings, by persisting in which he indisputably hastened his end, neither he nor his friends took into account the fear of bodily ill-effects resulting from his exertions. Their misgivings had other grounds. Of course, had there been any pressure of pecuniary difficulty or need upon d.i.c.kens when he began, or when on successive occasions he resumed, his public readings, there would be nothing further to be said.

But I see no suggestion of any such pressure. "My worldly circ.u.mstances,"

he wrote before he had finally made up his mind to read in America, "are very good. I don't want money. All my possessions are free and in the best order. Still," he added, "at fifty-five or fifty-six, the likelihood of making a very great addition to one's capital in half a year is an immense consideration." Moreover, with all his love of doing as he chose, and his sense of the value of such freedom to him as a writer, he was a man of simple though liberal habits of life, with no taste for the gorgeous or capricious extravagances of a Balzac or a Dumas, nor can he have been at a loss how to make due provision for those whom in the course of nature he would leave behind him. Love of money for its own sake, or for that of the futilities it can purchase, was altogether foreign to his nature. At the same time, the rapid making of large sums has potent attractions for most men; and these attractions are perhaps strongest for those who engage in the pursuit for the sake of the race as well as of the prize. d.i.c.kens's readings were virtually something new; their success was not only all his own, but unique and unprecedented--what n.o.body but himself ever had achieved or ever could have achieved. Yet the determining motive--if I read his nature rightly--was, after all, of another kind. "Two souls dwelt in his breast;" and when their aspirations united in one appeal it was irresistible. The author who craved for the visible signs of a sympathy responding to that which he felt for his mult.i.tudes of readers, and the actor who longed to impersonate creations already beings of flesh and blood to himself, were both astir in him, and in both capacities he felt himself drawn into the very publicity deprecated by his friends. He liked, as one who knew him thoroughly said to me, to be face to face with his public; and against this liking, which he had already indulged as fully as he could without pa.s.sing the boundaries between private and professional life, arguments were in vain. It has been declared sheer pedantry to speak of such boundaries; and to suggest that there is anything degrading in paid readings such as those of d.i.c.kens would, on the face of it, be absurd. On the other hand, the author who, on or off the stage, becomes the interpreter of his writings to large audiences, more especially if he does his best to stereotype his interpretation by constantly repeating it, limits his own prerogative of being many things to many men; and where the author of a work, more particularly of a work of fiction, adjusts it to circ.u.mstances differing from those of its production, he allows the requirements of the lesser art to prejudice the claims of the greater.

d.i.c.kens cannot have been blind to these considerations; but to others his eyes were never opened. He found much that was inspiriting in his success as a reader, and this not only in the large sums he gained, or even in the "roaring sea of response," to use his own fine metaphor, of which he had become accustomed to "stand upon the beach." His truest sentiment as an author was touched to the quick; and he was, as he says himself, "brought very near to what he had sometimes dreamed might be his fame," when, at York, a lady, whose face he had never seen, stopped him in the street, and said to him, "Mr. d.i.c.kens, will you let me touch the hand that has filled my house with many friends?" or when, at Belfast, he was almost overwhelmed with entreaties "to shake hands, Misther d.i.c.kens, and G.o.d bless you, sir; not ounly for the light you've been in mee house, sir--and G.o.d love your face!--this many a year." On the other hand--and this, perhaps, a nature like his would not be the quickest to perceive--there was something vulgarising in the constant striving after immediate success in the shape of large audiences, loud applause, and satisfactory receipts.

The conditions of the actor's art cannot forego these stimulants; and this is precisely his disadvantage in comparison with artists who are able to possess themselves in quiet. To me, at least, it is painful to find d.i.c.kens jubilantly recording how at Dublin "eleven bank-notes were thrust into the pay-box--Arthur saw them--at one time for eleven stalls;" how at Edinburgh "neither Grisi, nor Jenny Lind, nor anything, nor anybody, seems to make the least effect on the draw of the readings;" while, every allowance being made, there is something almost ludicrous in the double a.s.sertion, that "the most delicate audience I had ever seen in any provincial place is Canterbury; but the audience with the greatest sense of humour certainly is Dover." What subjects for parody d.i.c.kens would have found in these innocent ecstasies if uttered by any other man!

Undoubtedly, this enthusiasm was closely connected with the very thoroughness with which he entered into the work of his readings. "You have no idea," he tells Forster, in 1867, "how I have worked at them.

Finding 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 pa.s.sion 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." "From ten years ago to last night," he writes to his son from Baltimore in 1868, "I have never read to an audience but I have watched for an opportunity of striking out something better somewhere." The freshness with which he returned night after night and season after season to the sphere of his previous successes, was itself a genuine actor's gift. "So real," he declares, "are my fictions to myself, that, after hundreds of nights, I come with a feeling of perfect freshness to that little red table, and laugh and cry with my hearers as if I had never stood there before."

d.i.c.kens's first public readings were given at Birmingham, during the Christmas week of 1853-'54, in support of the new Midland Inst.i.tute; but a record--for the authenticity of which I cannot vouch--remains, that with true theatrical instinct he, before the Christmas in question, gave a trial reading of the _Christmas Carol_ to a smaller public audience at Peterborough. He had since been repeatedly found willing to read for benevolent purposes; and the very fact that it had become necessary to decline some of these frequent invitations had again suggested the possibility--which had occurred to him eleven years before--of meeting the demand in a different way. Yet it may, after all, be doubted whether the idea of undertaking an entire series of paid public readings would have been carried out, had it not been for the general restlessness which had seized upon d.i.c.kens early in 1858, when, moreover, he had no special task either of labour or of leisure to absorb him, and when he craved for excitement more than ever. To go home--in this springtime of 1858--was not to find there the peace of contentment. "I must do _something_," he wrote in March to his faithful counsellor, "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."

So by April the die was cast, and on the 29th of that month he had entered into his new relation with the public. One of the strongest and most genuine impulses of his nature had victoriously a.s.serted itself, and according to his wont he addressed himself to his task with a relentless vigour which flinched from no exertion. He began with a brief series at St. Martin's Hall, and then, his invaluable friend Arthur Smith continuing to act as his manager, he contrived to cram not less than eighty-seven readings into three months and a half of travelling in the "provinces,"

including Scotland and Ireland. A few winter readings in London, and a short supplementary course in the country during October, 1859, completed this first series. Already, in 1858, we find him, in a letter from Ireland, complaining of the "tremendous strain," and declaring, "I seem to be always either in a railway carriage, or reading, or going to bed. I get so knocked up, whenever I have a minute to remember it, that then I go to bed as a matter of course." But the enthusiasm which everywhere welcomed him--I can testify to the thrill of excitement produced by his visit to Cambridge, in October, 1859--repaid him for his fatigues. Scotland thawed to him, and with Dublin--where his success was extraordinary--he was so smitten as to think it at first sight "pretty nigh as big as Paris." In return, the Boots at Morrison's expressed the general feeling in a patriotic point of