T CHAPTER XV Dickens O make millions laugh and weep, and while making them laugh and weep to arouse them, by the sincerity of his appeal, to the need of bringing about reforms in the laws and customs of nation, was the work of Charles Dickens. Neither a deep thinker nor a philosopher, a stylist nor a scholar, by the sheer force of his genial heart and alert mind he has so interested all classes that his name has become a household word from India and Australia to Canada and Louisiana-in fact, wherever the art of reading the English language is practiced. His characters like Pickwick, Sam Weller, and Micawber have taken hold of the English mind so firmly that they are known as familiarly as Hamlet, Falstaff, and Shylock. "He was the Hogarth of literature," writes Herbert Paul, "painting with a broad brush, never ashamed of caricature, but always an artist, and not a dauber." Birth and Parents. - Charles John Huffman Dickens was born at Landport, Portsea, February 7, 1812. John Dickens, the father, held a clerkship in the Navy Pay Office, and when Charles was born was employed in the Portsmouth Dockyard. When Charles, the second child and the oldest son in a family which afterwards numbered eight children, was two years old, the father was recalled to London, and two years later the family migrated to Chatham, near the old city of Rochester. In later years the fancy of Dickens loved to revert to this neighborhood of chalk hills and deep green lanes and woodlands and marshes." In Pickwick Mr. Jingle discourses upon the fame and virtues of Rochester; at Chatham little David Copperfield passed a night in sleep "near a cannon, happy in the society of the sentry's footsteps." Near Rochester is the house of Gadshill where Dickens spent the last years of his life, and at Rochester is the scene of his last novel, the unfinished Edwin Drood. Much has been written about the influence of mothers upon men of genius, and many examples can be cited of men who born amid untoward circumstances have owed all to the finer instincts and loving devotion of a mother. Of the mother of Dickens we do not know much; what little Dickens himself has written about her is not especially favorable. He always resented that it was his mother who opposed his quitting his child labor of pasting labels on blacking-pots. John Dickens, the father, as is generally understood, is the original of the immortal Micawber. Charming as is the generous, grandiloquent, impecunious Micawber, one may question the delicacy of taste that prompts a son to give this "bad eminence" to a father. In translating fiction into fact one dare not be too literal, and we must not forget that Micawber is not the father of Dickens. John Dickens was not devoid of those virtues which endear a father to his children. From him Dickens likely caught that happy optimism which permeates even the most wretched scenes of his fiction. The son's own testimony is that the father was industrious, patient, loyal to his friends, "as kind-hearted and generous a man as ever lived in the world." His one defect was that he belonged to the unfortunate race who cannot, or at least do not, pay their debts. In middle life we find Dickens saying that as he grew older, the more highly he thought of his father; and it is pleasant to record that when the celebrated author was prospering he made careful provision for his father's comfort. Childhood Days.—In the year 1821 the family moved to London, taking residence in Bayham Street, Camden Town. Owing to the inability of the father to pay his debts, the lot of the family was not a happy one. The boy Dickens was obliged to work for six shillings a week in a warehouse among sordid companions, an experience so humiliating to the sensitive boy that in later years he never mentioned it to any one, not even his wife, except to his intimate friend and biographer, Forster. In a fragment of autobiography he writes: "It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me -a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally-to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar school, and going to Cambridge." To get at his own impressions of his childhood one should read David Copperfield, his favorite novel, for there we have along with the Dichtung considerable of the Wahrheit of his childhood days. Like David he had been poor and neglected, and forced to work in mean surroundings; like him he knew the oppressiveness of duns and debts and the misery within the walls where men were imprisoned for debt. Education. His mother, be it said to her credit, had taught him to read, and with his sister Fanny, in his early days, he had attended a day school kept by a William Giles. And later in London when twelve years of age he attended an ordinary day school. But the schooldays of Dickens must be counted by months rather than by years, for in the conventional sense he had but little education. In his day the lack of a "classical education" was felt to be more of a detriment than it is today, and of a highly sensitive nature he always wished to be considered a well-educated man. In his earlier writings, however, he ridicules the pretensions of the classically educated. Mr. Feeder, Dr. Blimber, and Dr. Strong are satirized. In his later writings, after his own sons have been educated in the traditional manner, he portrays a classical tutor, Mr. Crisparkle in Edwin Drood, as a gentleman of sense and culture. In the real sense of the word, Dickens, like Washington and Lincoln, Shakspere and Bunyan, was a very well educated man. He knew how to subdue his environment for the purposes he had in view. He learned from life rather than from books, and what he learned he assimilated. London with its courts and jails, blacking warehouses and tenements, schools and homes and shops, theaters, clubs, and streets was the encyclopaedia of life whose pages he diligently conned. It is always dangerous to speculate what a man would have been had his training and environment been different. It is highly probable that Dickens, both as man and artist, would have had more of balance had he had a liberal education, but it is also probable that a wider acquaintance with the great masters of the past, and a mind disciplined by the rigors of a classical education, would have produced a different Dickens. But who is so hardy as to assert that a different Dickens would have been a greater Dickens? Dickens was never a wide reader. As a child, however, he read books of travel and tales like the Arabian Nights. To this must be added the works of Fielding and Smollett, Cervantes and Le Sage, a strange diet for a child of eight or nine. It is fortunate that the natural innocence of a child's mind carries its own antiseptic for much of the poison that lurks in some of the great literature of the past, for otherwise he might have been tainted with vulgarity and indecency. From David Copperfield and other sources we get a catalog of the books which he read in his youth-Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights, and Tale of the Genii; also the essays in The Idler, The Tattler, The Spectator, The Citizen of the World, and a Collection of Farces edited by Mrs. Inchbald. A Reporter.- Before May, 1827, he had entered the office of a solicitor in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and on this date we find him entering the office of another solicitor in Gray's Inn at a salary of thirteen shillings and sixpence a week. Here he remained a year and a half, after which he entered upon the work of a reporter. Whatever Dickens undertook to do, whether pasting labels on blacking pots or giving public readings, he did with his whole might. Consequently we find him learning shorthand and devoting hours to general reading in the British Museum that he might become a first-class reporter. Late in life, in 1865, when presiding at a public dinner given in behalf of the Newspaper Press Fund, he gave this account of his reportorial experience: "I have pursued the calling of a reporter under circumstances of which many of my brethren at home in England here, many of my modern successors, can form no adequate conception. I have often transcribed for the printer, from my shorthand notes, important public speeches, in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been, to a young man, severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post chaise and four, galloping through a wild country, and through the dead of the night, at the surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour. . . . I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back row of the old gallery in the old House of Commons; and I have worn my feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords, where we used to be huddled together like so many sheep, kept in waiting, say, until the woolsack might want restuffing. Returning home from excited political meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country. I have been in my time belated in miry by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses, and drunken postboys, and have got back in time for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr. Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from the broadest of hearts I ever knew." Beginnings as Writer.-A Dinner at Poplar Walk, afterwards changed to Mr. Minns and His Cousin, published in the Monthly Magazine, December, 1833, is his first story in print. By February, 1835, ten of his stories had appeared in the same magazine. To one of these papers he had signed the name of "Boz," the nickname of one of his brothers. The first remuneration for his stories was that received for his contributions to the Evening Chronicle. His salary for his regular work on the Morning Chronicle, a paper published by the same firm that issued the Evening Chronicle, was increased from five to seven guineas a week. These stories were collected and published in two volumes in 1836 under the title, Sketches by Boz. For the copyright the author received £150. As might be expected the Sketches lack the finish of his later work; but they contain the germ of his future mastery of middle class London life. |