In the autumn of 1851, in the flowing and rising tide of his prosperity, he removed to the now vanished Tavistock House, in Tavistock Square, and in the next six years, before his removal to Gad’s Hill, wrote Bleak House, Hard Times, and Little Dorrit, to say nothing of the numerous short stories and articles he contributed to Household Words, and began to give those public readings from his books that were in his last decade to occupy so much of his time, add so enormously to his income and his personal popularity, and play so sinister a part in the breaking down of his health and the shortening of his career.
Writing immediately after Dickens’s death, Sala said that twenty years ago the face and form of Sir Robert Peel were familiar to almost everybody who passed him in the street, and “there were as few last week who would have been unable to point out the famous novelist, with his thought-lined face, his grizzled beard, his wondrous searching eyes, his bluff presence and swinging gait as, head aloft, he strode, now through crowded streets, looking seemingly neither to the right nor the left, but of a surety looking at and into everything—now at the myriad aspects of London life, the ever-changing raree-show, the endless roundabout, the infinite kaleidoscope of wealth and pauperism, of happiness and misery, of good and evil in this Babylon—now over the pleasant meads and breezy downs which stretched round his modest Kentish demesne hard by the hoary tower of Rochester.... Who had not heard him read, and who had not seen his photographs in the shop windows? The omnibus conductors knew him, the street boys knew him; and perhaps the locality where his recognition would have been least frequent—for all that he was a member of the Athenæum Club—was Pall Mall. Elsewhere he would make his appearance in the oddest places, and in the most inclement weather: in Ratcliff Highway, on Haverstock Hill, on Camberwell Green, in Gray’s Inn Lane, in the Wandsworth Road, at Hammersmith Broadway, in Norton Folgate, and at Kensal New Town.... His carriage was remarkably upright, his mien almost aggressive in its confidence—a bronzed, weatherworn, hardy man, with somewhat of a seaman’s air about him.” London folks would draw aside, he continues, “as the great writer—who seemed always to be walking a match against Thought—strode on, and, looking after him, say, ‘There goes Charles Dickens!’ The towering stature, the snowy locks, the glistening spectacles, the listless, slouching port, as that of a tired giant, of William Makepeace Thackeray were familiar enough likewise but, comparatively speaking, only to a select few. He belonged to Clubland, and was only to be seen sauntering there or in West End squares, or on his road to his beloved Kensington.... Thackeray in Houndsditch, Thackeray in Bethnal Green or at Camden Town, would have appeared anomalous ... but Charles Dickens, when in town, was ubiquitous.”
There are statues in London of many smaller men, of many who mean little or nothing in particular to London, but there is none to Dickens, and perhaps he needs none. Little critics may decry him, but it makes no difference, it takes nothing from his immortality. “It is fatuous,” as Trollope said of his work, “to condemn that as deficient in art which has been so full of art as to captivate all men.” And to the thousands of us who know the people and the world that he created he is still ubiquitous in London here, even though he has his place for ever, as Swinburne says, among the stars and suns that we behold not:
“Where stars and suns that we behold not burn,
Higher even than here, though highest was here thy place,
Love sees thy spirit laugh and speak and shine
With Shakespeare and the soft bright soul of Sterne,
And Fielding’s kindliest might and Goldsmith’s grace;
Scarce one more loved or worthier love than thine.”
CHAPTER XVI
CONCLUSION
When I was writing of what remains to us of the London of Shakespeare, I might have mentioned the four-century-old gateway of Lincoln’s Inn, in Chancery Lane, that Ben Jonson helped to build, and close by which, at 24 Old Buildings, Cromwell’s secretary, John Thurloe, lived in 1654; and although in my first chapter I gave a fairly lengthy list of famous authors and artists who were Cockneys by birth, I by no means made it so long as I could have done. Hablot K. Browne, otherwise “Phiz,” the chief of Dickens’s artists, was born in Kennington, and lived for eight years, towards the close of his career, at 99 Ladbroke Grove Road; Lord Lytton, whom Tennyson unkindly described as “the padded man that wears the stays,” and who was for a time a more popular novelist than either Dickens or Thackeray, was born at 31 Baker Street, and lived in after years at 12 Grosvenor Square, and at 36 Hertford Street; Gibbon was born at Putney, and lived for some years at 7 Bentinck Street, which he said was “the best house in the world”; John Leech was born over his father’s coffee-shop in Ludgate Hill, and lived when he had risen to fame at 32 Brunswick Square, and passed the last years of his life at 6 The Terrace, Kensington; and one who I confess interests me at least as much as any of these, Douglas Jerrold, was born in Greek Street, Soho, lived as a boy at Broad Court, in the same neighbourhood, and afterwards shifted about into half-a-dozen different parts of London, and died in 1857 at Kilburn Priory, on the skirts of St. John’s Wood. West Lodge, his house at Lower Putney Common, still stands much as it was when he occupied it, with his mulberry tree still growing in that garden round which, one memorable summer afternoon, he and Dickens, Forster, Maclise, and Macready gave each other “backs,” and played a joyously undignified game of leapfrog. I don’t know whether anybody reads Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures now, but everybody read them and laughed over them when they were new, and Jerrold’s best jokes and witticisms are much too well known to leave me an excuse for repeating any of them here. For all his bitter tongue, he was kind, generous, sensitive, afire with a fine scorn of wrong, injustice, and every variety of social humbug and snobbery. “A small delicately-formed, bent man,” is Edmund Yates’s recollection of him, “with long grey hair combed back from his forehead, with grey eyes deep-set under penthouse brows, and a way, just as the inspiration seized him, of dangling a double-eyeglass which hung round his neck by a broad black ribbon.”