Perhaps Thackeray's "Phil Fogarty of the Fighting Onety Oneth," may also outlive its originals, the military novels of Charles Lever (1806-1872), tales of the camp, the march and the battle. Yet they lose great pleasure who neglect Major Monsoon, Micky Free, and Baby Blake, in Lever's "Charles O'Malley"; the major is a jewel of a character. The early scenes at Trinity College, Dublin, and in the Galway of the old days of claret and pistols are admirable; and Lever knew many anecdotes of the Peninsular War to which he does full justice. He was in his early years a most spirited narrator, full of humour, with sometimes a cloud of melancholy crossing the landscape which dwells in the memory. No man could always maintain the high spirits of "Charles O'Malley" and "Harry Lorrequer," and Lever turned to tales of a more subdued and ordinary kind. One of them, "A Day's Ride: a Life's Romance," considerably lowered the circulation of Dickens's "All the Year Round". But it will be in a sad kind of world that "Charles O'Malley" will die.
Edward George Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873) was (perhaps after Robert Chambers, but far more conspicuously) the most versatile man of letters of his age. He entered Parliament very early, before the passing of the Reform Bill, and already he had impressed Scott by his novel "Pelham". Sir Walter wrote to Lockhart, curious about "Pelham" and its author. Lockhart, replied curtly that "Pelham is a puppy," and its author, like Disraeli, certainly aimed at being a dandy, and had a Byronic pose. Perhaps for this reason Thackeray regarded Lytton as a mass of affectations in thought and style, with his pretensions to classical learning and Neo-Platonic lore, and mysticism, and his affection for virtuous criminals as in "Eugene Aram". Thackeray's burlesque of Lytton, "George de Barnwell," was his favourite among his own works, and is a joy for ever with its sham history, sham classics, and sham sentiment. When Lytton, in a satire, attacked Tennyson as "Miss Alfred" the poet finished the fight in a single round. However, Lytton's novels continued to win admiration, whether they were historical romances (of these "The Last Days of Pompeii" is probably the best of all tales which introduce early Christians, and is still very readable) or whether they were stories of modern life. "Zanoni" has several times defeated the present writer; but "The Caxtons" is full of interest. There is no better romance of the supernormal than "A Strange Story"; and perhaps a kind of sketch for it, "The Haunted and the Haunters," is at least as good. The marvels, we may say, are "spread too thick," but Lytton manifestly had in his mind the well-authenticated story of Willington Mill. To the last Lytton kept changing his manner and working, with wonderful freshness, in new fields. He missed being in the first rank of novelists, and the bloom is very early off the rye of novelists who fall short of that rank.
Of Lockhart's novels, though he tried his hand four times (once in the unlucky early Christian period with "Valerius"), only one is read, "Adam Blair," a vigorous and gloomy study of the temptation and fall of a Scottish parish minister. Hogg's "Confessions of a Justified Sinner" is a most astonishing work, when once it gets under way, anticipating R. L. Stevenson's handling o the terrible in a lonely upland parish (see "Thrawn Janet"). But if the story is tardy in its earlier chapters, in the later, it rivals not only Stevenson but Hawthorne, yet few people can be induced to give it a trial.
Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848) is a novelist of the days of Nelson's fleet, and nothing is more surprising, nothing in the same field more distressing, than the neglect into which the nautical novels of the creator of "Peter Simple," "Mr. Midshipman Easy," "Masterman Ready" and "Snarley-yow" appear to have fallen. They are full of humour, high spirits, genuine adventures, and sound honest views of life and duty. Carlyle ungratefully called them "nonsense," but he read them when under the blow of the destruction of his manuscript of the French Revolution. They are the best sort of boys' books, but the inexplicable taste of boys leads them to prefer the works of Mr. Henty to those which their grandfathers read, the books of Scott, Dumas, Thackeray, Dickens, and Captain Marryat.
They were not so fond of Michael Scott's "Tom Cringle's Log," and "The Cruise of the Midge," but they did read and shudder over Mrs. Shelley's best novel, "Frankenstein". Of infinitely more merit than these novelists are the glories of the Victorian period, Dickens, Thackeray, and Charlotte Brontë.
Dickens.
"A star danced and under that was he born" might have been the astrological explanation of the genius of Charles Dickens (born at Portsmouth, 1812). Explorers of "heredity" can find no source of the humour and art of Dickens in his father (Mr. Micawber), a dockyard clerk whose fortunes were never so high as his buoyant hopes; and who was in prisons often for debt. As Mrs. Dickens, the mother, confessedly lent traits to Mrs. Nickleby, we need not look for genius on that side. Dickens's early literary education was mainly derived from some old books which he found in a cupboard. There were "The Arabian Nights," for example, and Fielding's novels (he played at being Tom Jones, a child's Tom Jones, an innocent creature), stories of shipwrecks (he went about in fear of savages and determined to sell his life dearly), in fact there was plenty of good reading. He seems also to have had a nurse who told stories delightfully "frightening". We see many traits of his fantastic childish thoughts and dreams in the early Pip of "Great Expectations"; there are memories, too, in Little Dombey, and in the infancy of David Copperfield. He was, in short, born with an elfish imagination; always he retained the primitive habit of giving souls and characters to lifeless things. His power of minute observation was precocious, and he was a dreamer of day-dreams till the poverty, and negligence, of his family sent him to win his tiny wages and choose his own poor meals, in the service of a warehouse.
All this bitter part of his life made him a close observer of poverty; a schemer of expedients; a little man of a child. The improvement of his family's affairs gave him some rather irregular schooling; it was enough to teach him to draw inimitably well the various kinds of schoolboy, except the cruel bully, whom he would have found rampant and abominable at any public school. Like David Copperfield he learned shorthand, was a reporter in Parliament, and conceived a contempt for Parliamentary institutions. We all know how he felt when his first magazine article was published: in 1836 papers of his appeared as "Sketches by Boz," and in them his peculiar humour, not without debt to Theodore Hook and other well forgotten comic contemporaries, is already conspicuous.
In 1836 he was asked to write papers of the comic and sporting sort, for illustrations of the adventures of a club of citizens. "I thought of Mr. Pickwick," he says, and, though Mr. Pickwick did not often run, he ran away with Dickens's fancy as Dugald Dalgetty ran away with Scott's. The peripatetic Socrates of his younger companions, Messrs. Snodgrass, Winkle, find Tracy Tupman, Mr. Pickwick kept on improving as vir pietate gravis, chivalrous as Don Quixote, adventurous as he, benevolent, and innocent as a child, yet dignified, and to be trifled with by no man or cabman. We remember Mr. Pickwick's idea of an attitude of self-defence! The influence of Smollett is on Dickens as on Fanny Burney; "Pickwick" is a sequel of adventures of the road and of the inn, filled full of the highest animal-spirits, witness the adventure of The Lady with Yellow Curl-papers! Some extraneous stories are placed in the middle of the tale, as by Fielding and Smollett: the book is not a novel, it is something better, it is "Pickwick"!
Already, like Fielding, and with more pertinacity, Dickens was attacking social abuses, imprisonment for debt, the Fleet Prison, the Law, as represented by Messrs. Dodson and Fogg and Mr. Justice Stareleigh. Accidental happy thoughts occurred to him, Mr. Samuel Weller for one, as the tale went on appearing in monthly numbers, and the author was never much ahead of the printer. This mode of publication is responsible for the length and diffuseness of many of the novels both of Dickens and Thackeray. The sheets had to be filled: compression and construction could not be attained; and, in later works, when Dickens did labour hard to construct a plot, we find it, often, as involuted and obscure as the plots of Congreve's comedies.