Springtime and Other Essays Part 15

COUNTESS GREY, 21_st Dec._ 1842.-"I am quite delighted with the railroad.

I came down in the public carriages without any fatigue. . . . Distance is abolished-scratch that out of the catalogue of human evils."

C. d.i.c.kENS, 6_th Jan._ 1843.-"You have been so used to these sort of impertinences that I believe you will excuse me for saying how very much I am pleased with the first numbers of your new work. Pecksniff and his daughters, and Pinch, are admirable-quite first-rate painting, such as no one but yourself can execute."

"P.S.-Chuffey is admirable. I never read a finer piece of writing; it is deeply pathetic and affecting."

Miss G. HARCOURT, 29_th March_ 1843.-"My dear G---

The pain in my knee Would not suffer me To drink your bohea.

I can laugh and talk But I cannot walk; And I thought His Grace would stare, If I put my leg on a chair.

And to give the knee its former power, It must be fomented for half an hour; And in this very disagreeable state If I had come at all, I should have been too late."

JOHN MURRAY, 4_th June_ 1843.-"My youngest brother died suddenly, leaving behind him 100,000 and no will. A third of this therefore fell to my share, and puts me at my ease for my few remaining years."

MRS GROTE, 17_th July_ 1843.-"I met Brunel at the Archbishop's and found him a very lively and intelligent man. He said that when he coughed up the piece of gold, the two surgeons, the apothecary, and physician all joined hands, and danced round the room for ten minutes, without taking the least notice of his convulsed and half-strangled state. I admire this very much."

"I much doubt if I have ever gained 1500 by my literary labours in the course of my life" (31_st Aug._ 1843).

C. d.i.c.kENS, 21_st Feb._ 1844,-"Many thanks for the 'Christmas Carol,'

which I shall immediately proceed upon, in preference to six American pamphlets . . . all promising immediate payment!"

COUNTESS GREY, 11_th Oct._ 1844.-"See what rural life is:-

"Combe Florey Gazette.

"Mr Smith's large red cow is expected to calve this week.

"Mr Gibbs has bought Mr Smith's lame mare.

"It rained yesterday, and, a correspondent observes is not unlikely to rain to-day.

"Mr Smith is better.

"Mrs Smith is indisposed.

"A nest of black magpies was found near the village yesterday."

Sydney Smith died 22nd February 1845.

CHARLES d.i.c.kENS

My aim is to give some account of Charles d.i.c.kens' personality, to think of him as a man rather than a writer. For the facts of his life I have to depend largely on Forster's biography, {199} which is doubtless trustworthy, but the personality of the author does not tend to make it attractive. In this way the little book by Miss M. d.i.c.kens is valuable: it gives in simple and touching words an impression of the affection that d.i.c.kens inspired.

She writes:-"No man was so inclined naturally to derive his happiness from home affairs. He was full of the kind of interest in a house which is commonly confined to women, and his care of and for us as wee children did most certainly 'pa.s.s the love of women.' His was a tender and most affectionate nature."

When he "was arranging and rehearsing his readings from _Dombey_, the death of 'little Paul' caused him such real anguish, that he told us he could only master his intense emotion by keeping the picture of Plorn, {200a} well, strong, and hearty, steadily before his eyes." {200b}

He took the children every 24th December to a toy-shop in Holborn to choose their own Christmas presents and any that they liked to give to their friends.

"Although I believe we were often an hour or more in the shop before our several tastes were satisfied, he never showed the least impatience, was always interested, and as desirous as we, that we should choose exactly what we liked best. . . ."

"My father insisted that my sister Katie and I should teach the polka step to Mr Leech and himself, . . . often he would practise gravely in a corner, without either partner or music." He once got out of bed having waked with the fear he had forgotten it, and rehea.r.s.ed to his own whistling by the light of a rushlight.

Miss d.i.c.kens continues:-"There never existed, I think, in all the world, a more thoroughly tidy or methodical creature than was my father. He was tidy in every way-in his mind, in his handsome and graceful person, in his work, in keeping his writing, table drawers, in his large correspondence-in fact in his whole life.

"And then his punctuality! It was almost frightful to an unpunctual mind. This again was another phase of his extreme tidiness; it was also the outcome of his excessive thoughtfulness and consideration for others."

Naturally enough Miss d.i.c.kens makes no reference to the unhappy separation of d.i.c.kens and his wife, which took place in 1858. In the article on d.i.c.kens in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, Carlyle is quoted as saying:-"No crime and no misdemeanour specifiable on either side; _unhappy_ together, these two, good many years past, and they at length end it."

The father of Charles d.i.c.kens was not a successful personage. He was in the Navy Pay Office; he was generally in financial trouble, and is indeed supposed to be the original of Micawber. Like that personage he was imprisoned for debt, and thus Charles d.i.c.kens learned early in life the misery as well as the comedy of a debtor's prison, an experience of which he made brilliant use in Little Dorrit and elsewhere.

Forster points out that David Copperfield, who was in many ways drawn from his creator, had as a man a strong memory of his childhood; the most durable of his early impressions were received at Chatham, and, as Forster remarks, "the a.s.sociations that were around him when he died were those which at the outset of his life had affected him most strongly."

In an essay on travelling, d.i.c.kens {201} describes his meeting a "very queer small boy" whom he takes in his carriage, and as they pa.s.s Gads-hill Place (where d.i.c.kens afterwards lived and died) the boy begs him to stop that they may look at the house. On being asked whether he admired the house:-"Bless you, sir," said the very queer small boy, "when I was not more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be brought to look at it-And . . . my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often said to me, _If you were to be very persevering __and were to work hard_, _you might some day come to live in it_. Though that's impossible." d.i.c.kens was actually a queer small boy-very small, very sickly, who was unable to join in the active games of his schoolfellows.

In 1855 we again meet with the house that was to be his home for the remainder of his life. He wrote to Wills (Letters, i. 393):-"I saw, at Gads Hill . . . a little freehold to be sold. The spot and the very house are literally 'a dream of my childhood,' and I should like to look at it before I go to Paris."

One of the many things in _David Copperfield_ which are autobiographical is the account {202a} of his delight over his father's little collection of books. "From that blessed little room, _Roderick Random_, _Peregrine Pickle_, _Humphrey Clinker_, _Tom Jones_, _the Vicar of Wakefield_, _Don Quixote_, _Gil Blas_, and _Robinson Crusoe_ {202b} came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time-they, and the _Arabian Nights_, and the _Tales of the Genii_-and did me no harm. . . . I have been Tom Jones (a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together. . . . I had a greedy relish for a few volumes of voyages and travels . . . . and for days and days I can remember to have gone about my region of our house, armed with the centre-piece out of an old set of boot-trees: the perfect realisation of Captain Somebody of the Royal British Navy."

After a time they moved to London, where they lived poorly in what was then a wretched enough neighbourhood, Bayham St., Camden-town. There he degenerated into a neglected domestic drudge, apparently quite without education, a state of things he inwardly resented.

In reading George Colman's _Broad Grins_ he came upon a description of Covent Garden, and "stole to the market by himself to compare it with the book." He remembered Covent Garden in writing _Pickwick_. In chap.

xlvii., Job Trotter is sent in the evening to tell Perker that Dodson and Fogg have taken Mrs Bardell in execution for her costs. Perker goes back to his dinner guests, and poor Job has to spend the night in a vegetable basket in Covent Garden.

d.i.c.kens the elder was arrested for debt and imprisoned in the Marshalsea, and the description of borrowing Captain Porter's knife and fork, and his thinking that he should not like to borrow that gentleman's comb, were written before he ever thought of David Copperfield. {203} There is, of course, much that is autobiographical in _David Copperfield_. "For, the poor little lad, with good ability and a most sensitive nature, turned at the age of ten into a 'labouring hind' in the service of Murdstone and Grinby" . . . was indeed himself. d.i.c.kens described in an autobiographical fragment the details of the mechanical work of covering the pots of paste-blacking. It is interesting to find d.i.c.kens making use in _Oliver Twist_ of the name f.a.gin, who was one of his fellow pasters.

Another boy was Poll Green, part of whose name appears in that of the celebrated Mr Sweelepipe in _Martin Chuzzlewit_. Another of his characters is connected with this period, for during his father's imprisonment the boy lodged with an old lady subsequently immortalised as Mrs Pipchin. Afterwards he remonstrated with his father with many tears, and a lodging was found for him in Lant Street in the Borough as being nearer to the prison, and here it was that Bob Sawyer lodged. The little maid who waited on his father and mother in the Marshalsea was the model for the Marchioness in the _Old Curiosity Shop_ (Forster, i., p. 39).

After a time his father came out of prison, and Charles the younger got some schooling at Wellington House Academy, which supplied "some of the lighter traits of Salem-house" in _David Copperfield_.

d.i.c.kens began life as a lawyer's clerk of a humble sort, and thus gained the knowledge of which he made such admirable use in _Pickwick_ and elsewhere.

But his energy in learning shorthand and becoming a professional reporter at the age of nineteen was a much more important step. Forster quotes Beard, "the friend he first made in that line when he entered the gallery," as saying that "there never was such a reporter."

d.i.c.kens saw the last of the old coaching days, and he describes his experience as a reporter-work which largely contributed to his literary success:-

"I have had to charge for half a dozen breakdowns in half a dozen times as many miles. Also for the damage of a great-coat from the drippings of a blazing wax-candle, in writing through the smallest hours of the night in a swiftly flying carriage and pair."

"I have been . . . belated on miry by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheel-less carriage with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and have got back in time for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr Black . . .

in the broadest of Scotch."

We see plainly enough whence came the description {205} of the chase after Jingle and Miss Wardle. "'I see his head,' exclaimed the choleric old man, 'Damme, I see his head. . . ' The countenance of Mr Jingle, completely coated with mud thrown up by the wheels, was plainly discernible at the window of his chaise, and the motion of his arm, which he was waving violently towards the postillions, denoted that he was encouraging them to increased exertion."

"I never did feel such a jolting in my life," said poor Mr Pickwick; but it was under such conditions that d.i.c.kens worked through the nights transcribing his shorthand notes.

While he was still a reporter his career as an author began.