of the outward appearance, or, as sartor resartus would have called it, the time-vesture and flesh-garment of that flaming light-particle which was cast hither from heaven in the person of charles dickens, and of his ways and manners while he hasted jubilantly and stormfully across the astonished earth, something must be said here.
charles dickens was born at portsea, in 1812, an offspring of what the accurate english call the
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“lower middle class.” inheriting something from a father who was decidedly micawberish, and a mother who resembled mrs. nickleby, charles was not likely to be a humdrum child. but the remarkable thing about him was the intense, aspiring, and gaily sensible spirit with which he entered into the business of developing whatever gifts he had received from his vague and amiable parents.
the fat streak of comfort in his childish years, when his proud father used to stand the tiny lad on a table to sing comic songs for an applauding audience of relatives, could not spoil him. the lean streak of misery, when the improvident family sprawled in poverty, with its head in a debtors’ prison, while the bright, delicate, hungry boy roamed the streets, or drudged in a dirty blacking-factory, could not starve him. the two dry years of school at wellington house academy could not fossilize him. the years from fifteen to nineteen, when he was earning his bread as office-boy, lawyers’ clerk, shorthand reporter, could not commercialize him. through it all he burned his way painfully and joyously.
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he was not to be detailed as a perpetual comic songster in upholstered parlors; nor as a prosperous frock-coated citizen with fatty degeneration of the mind; nor as a newspaper politician, a power beneath the footstool. none of these alluring prospects delayed him. he passed them by, observing everything as he went, now hurrying, now sauntering, for all the world like a boy who has been sent somewhere. where it was, he found out in his twenty-fifth year, when the extraordinary results of his self-education bloomed in the pickwick papers and oliver twist.
never was a good thing coming out of nazareth more promptly welcomed. the simple-minded critics of that day had not yet discovered the damning nature of popularity, and they hailed the new genius in spite of the fact that hundreds of thousands of people were reading his books. his success was exhilarating, overwhelming, and at times intoxicating.
it was roses, roses all the way.—
some of them had thorns, which hurt his thin skin horribly, but they never made him despair or doubt
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the goodness of the universe. being vexed, he let it off in anger instead of distilling it into pessimism to poison himself. life was too everlastingly interesting for him to be long unhappy. a draught of his own triumph would restore him, a slice of his own work would reinvigorate him, and he would go on with his industrious dreaming.
no one enjoyed the reading of his books more than he the making of them, though he sometimes suffered keenly in the process. that was a proof of his faith that happiness does not consist in the absence of suffering, but in the presence of joy. dulness, insincerity, stupid humbug—voilà l’ennemi! so he lived and wrote with a high hand and an outstretched arm. he made men see what he saw, and hate what he hated, and love what he loved. this was his great reward,—more than money, fame, or hosts of friends,—that he saw the children of his brain enter into the common life of the world.
charles dickens as captain bobadil in “every man in his humour.”
painted by c. r. leslie.
but he was not exempt from the ordinary laws of nature. the conditions of his youth left their marks for good and evil on his maturity. the petting of his babyhood gave him the habit of showing
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off. we often see him as a grown man, standing on the table and reciting his little piece, or singing his little song, to please an admiring audience. he delighted in playing to the galleries.
his early experience of poverty made him at once tremendously sympathetic and invincibly optimistic—both of which virtues belong to the poor more than to the rich. dickens understood this and never forgot it. the chief moralities of his poor people are mutual helpfulness and unquenchable hopefulness. from them, also, he caught the tone of material comfort which characterizes his visions of the reward of virtue. having known cold and hunger, he simply could not resist the desire to make his favourite characters—if they stayed on earth till the end of the book—warm and “comfy,” and to give them plenty to eat and drink. this may not have been artistic, but it was intensely human.
the same personal quality may be noted in his ardour as a reformer. no writer of fiction has ever done more to better the world than charles dickens. but he did not do it by setting forth programmes of legislation and theories of government. as a
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matter of fact, he professed an amusing “contempt for the house of commons,” having been a parliamentary reporter; and of sir robert peel, who emancipated the catholics, enfranchised the jews, and repealed the corn laws, he thought so little that he caricatured him as mr. pecksniff.
dickens felt the evils of the social order at the precise point where the shoe pinched; he did not go back to the place where the leather was tanned or the last designed. it was some practical abuse in poorhouses or police-courts or prisons; it was some hidden shame in the conduct of schools, or the renting of tenements; it was some monumental absurdity in the circumlocution office, some pompous and cruel delay in the course of justice, that made him hot with indignation. these were the things that he assailed with rabelaisian laughter, or over which he wept with a deeper and more sincere pity than that of tristram shandy. his idea was that if he could get people to see that a thing was both ridiculous and cruel, they would want to stop it. what would come after that, he did not clearly know, nor had he any particularly valuable suggestions
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to make, except the general proposition that men should do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with their god.
he took no stock in the doleful predictions of the politicians that england was in an awful state merely because lord coodle was going out of office, and sir thomas doodle would not come in, and each of these was the only man to save the country. the trouble seemed to him deeper and more real. it was a certain fat-witted selfishness, a certain callous, complacent blindness in the people who were likely to read his books. he conceived that his duty as a novelist was done when he had shown up the absurd and hateful things, and made people laugh at their ugliness, weep over their inhumanity, and long to sweep them away.
in this attitude, i think, dickens was not only natural, and true to his bringing-up, but also wise as a great artist in literature. for i have observed that brilliant writers, while often profitable as satirists to expose abuses, are seldom judicious as legislators to plan reforms.
before we leave this subject of the effects of
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dickens’s early poverty and sudden popularity, we must consider his alleged lack of refinement. some say that he was vulgar, others that he was ungrateful and inconsiderate of the feelings of his friends and relations, others that he had little or no taste. i should rather say, in the words of the old epigram, that he had a great deal of taste, and that some of it was very bad.
take the matter of his caricaturing real people in his books. no one could object to his use of the grotesque insolence of a well-known london magistrate as the foundation of his portrait of mr. fang in oliver twist. that was public property. but the amiable eccentricities of his own father and mother, the airy irresponsible ways of his good friend leigh hunt, were private property. yet even here dickens could not reasonably be blamed for observing them, for being amused by them, or for letting them enrich his general sense of the immense, incalculable, and fantastic humour of the world. taste, which is simply another name for the gusto of life, has a comic side; and a man who is keenly sensitive to everything cannot be expected
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to be blind to the funny things that happen among his family and friends. but when dickens used these private delights for the public amusement, and in such a form that the partial portraits of mr. and mrs. micawber, mrs. nickleby, and harold skimpole were easily identified, all that we can say is that his taste was still there, but it had gone bad. what could you expect? where, in his early years, was he likely to have learned the old-fashioned habit of reserve in regard to private affairs, which you may call either a mark of good manners, or a sign of silly pride, according to your own education?
or take his behavior during his first visit to america in 1842, and immediately after his return to england. his reception was enough to turn anybody’s head. “there never was a king or emperor,” wrote dickens to a friend, “so cheered and followed by crowds, and entertained at splendid balls and dinners, and waited upon by public bodies of all kinds.” this was at the beginning. at the end he was criticized by all, condemned by many, and abused by some of the newspapers. why? chiefly
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because he used the dinners given in his honour as occasions to convict the americans of their gross national sin of literary piracy, and because when he got home he wrote a book of american notes, containing some very severe strictures upon the country which had just entertained him so magnificently.
mr. chesterton defends dickens for his attack upon the american practice of book-stealing which grew out of the absence of an international copyright law. he says that it was only the new, raw sensibility of the americans that was hurt by these speeches. “dickens was not in the least desirous of being thought too ‘high-souled’ to want his wages.... he asked for his money in a valiant and ringing voice, like a man asking for his honour.” and this, mr. chesterton leaves us to infer, is what any bold englishman, as distinguished from a timidly refined american, would do.
precisely. but if the bold englishman had been gently-bred would he have accepted an invitation to dinner in order that he might publicly say to his host, in a valiant and ringing voice, “you owe me
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a thousand pounds”? such procedure at the dinner-table is contrary not only to good manners but also to good digestion. this is what mr. chesterton’s bold british constitution apparently prevents him from seeing. what dickens said about international copyright was right. but he was wretchedly wrong in his choice of the time and place for saying it. the natural irritation which his bad taste produced was one of the causes which delayed for fifty years the success of the efforts of american authors to secure copyright for foreign authors.
the same criticism applies to the american notes. read them again and you will see that they are not bad notes. with much that he says about yankee boastfulness and superficiality, and the evils of slavery, and the dangers of yellow journalism, every sane american will agree to-day. but the occasion which dickens took for making these remarks was not happily chosen. it was as if a man who had just been entertained at your house should write to thank you for the pleasure of the visit, and improve the opportunity to point out the shocking
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defects of your domestic service and the exceedingly bad tone which pervaded your establishment. such a “bread-and-butter letter” might be full of good morals, but their effect would be diminished by its bad manners. of this dickens was probably quite unconscious. he acted spontaneously, irrepressibly, vivaciously, in accordance with his own taste; and it surprised and irritated him immensely that people were offended by it.
it was precisely so in regard to his personal appearance. when the time suddenly arrived that he could indulge his taste in dress without fear of financial consequences, he did so hilariously and to the fullest extent. here is a description of him as he appeared to an american girl at an evening party in cincinnati eighty years ago. “he is young and handsome, has a mellow beautiful eye, fine brow and abundant hair.... his manner is easy and negligent, but not elegant. his dress was foppish.... he had a dark coat with lighter pantaloons; a black waistcoat embroidered with coloured flowers; and about his neck, covering his white shirt-front, was a black neck-cloth also embroidered with
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colours, on which were two large diamond pins connected by a chain; a gold watch-chain and a large red rose in his buttonhole completed his toilet.”
the young lady does not seem to have been delighted with this costume. but dickens did not dress to please her, he dressed to please himself. his taste was so exuberant that it naturally effervesced in this kind of raiment. there was certainly nothing immoral about it. he had paid for it and he had a right to wear it, for to him it seemed beautiful. he would have been amazed to know that any young lady did not like it; and her opinion would probably have had little effect upon him, for he wrote of the occasion on which this candid girl met him, as follows: “in the evening we went to a party at judge walker’s and were introduced to at least one hundred and fifty first-rate bores, separately and singly.”
but what does it all amount to, this lack of discretion in manners, this want of reserve in speech, this oriental luxuriance in attire? it simply goes to show that dickens himself was a dickens character.
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he was vivid, florid, inexhaustible, and untamed. there was material in the little man for a hundred of his own immortal caricatures. the self-portrait that he has drawn in david copperfield is too smooth, like a retouched photograph. that is why david is less interesting than half-a-dozen other people in the book. if dickens could have seen his own humourous aspects in the magic mirror of his fancy, it would have been among the richest of his observations, and if he could have let his enchantment loose upon the subject, not even the figures of dick swiveller and harold skimpole would have been more memorable than the burlesque of “boz” by the hand of c. d.
but the humourous, the extravagant, the wildly picturesque,—would these have given a true and complete portrait of the man? does it make any great difference what kind of clothes he wore, or how many blunders of taste and tact he made, even tragic blunders like his inability to refrain from telling the world all about his domestic unhappiness,—does all this count for much when we look back upon the wonders which his imagination
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wrought in fiction, and upon the generous fruits which his heart brought forth in life?
it is easy to endure small weaknesses when you can feel beneath them the presence of great and vital power. faults are forgiven readily in one who has the genius of loving much. better many blunders than the supreme mistake of a life that is
faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null.
charles dickens never made, nor indeed was tempted to make, that mistake. he carried with him the defects of his qualities, the marks of his early life, the penalties of his bewildering success. but, look you, he carried them—they did not crush him nor turn him from his true course. forward he marched, cheering and beguiling the way for his comrades with mirthful stories and tales of pity, lightening many a burden and consoling many a dark and lonely hour, until he came at last to the goal of honour and the haven of happy rest. those who knew him best saw him most clearly as carlyle did: “the good, the gentle, high-gifted, ever-friendly, noble dickens,—every inch of him an honest man.”
