Christmas stories are now grown so much the fashion that, whenever the season of holly and mistletoe comes round they greet us at every turn, forcing themselves upon our notice through every species of whimsical and enticing embellishment. Why is it that, amidst such a satiety of novelties we turn again and again, with an interest as keen as ever, to a perusal of the pages where little Dot Peerybingle chirps as brightly as the cricket on her own hearth, where Trotty Veck listens to the voices of the chimes, striving to comprehend what it is they say to him, and where old Scrooge’s heart is softened by his ghostly visitants? It is because Charles Dickens has made such a study of that human nature we all possess in common that he is able to strike with a practised hand upon the chords of our hearts, and draw forth harmony that vibrates from soul to soul.
It is not, however, our intention here, to follow Mr. Dickens through the whole of his long and honourable literary career, far less to undertake the superfluous task of extolling the numerous and brilliant list of writings that have followed each other in rapid and welcome succession from his indefatigable pen. All that remains for us to do now, is to notice briefly two very grave charges that have been made against the general tendency of his writings, and to bring forward some evidence in refutation of them.
These two charges are, 1, a wilful perversion of facts in describing the political and social condition of our time; 2, an irreverence for and ridicule of sacred things and persons, which (say the objectors) infuses a subtle poison through the whole of his works, and unsettles the belief of the young. We shall take these charges one at a time.
In some of his later novels, such as “Bleak House,” and “Little Dorrit,” in which he has endeavoured to grapple with the great social and political problems of the age, certain critics have accused him of exaggeration, and even of a wilful perversion of facts. Against their opinion we are pleased to be able to set that of so good an authority as the author of “Modern Painters:”—
“The essential value and truth of Dickens’s writings,” says Mr. Ruskin, “have been unwisely lost sight of by many thoughtful persons, merely because he presents his truth with some colour of caricature. Unwisely, because Dickens’s caricature, though often gross, is never mistaken. Allowing for his manner of telling them, the things he tells us are always true. I wish that he could think it right to limit his brilliant exaggeration to works written only for public amusement; and when he takes up a subject of high national importance, such as that which he handled in ‘Hard Times,’ that he would use severer and more accurate analysis. The usefulness of that work (to my mind, in several respects the greatest he has written,) is with many persons seriously diminished, because Mr. Bounderby is a dramatic monster, instead of a characteristic example of a worldly master; and Stephen Blackpool a dramatic perfection, instead of a characteristic example of an honest workman. But let us not lose the use of Dickens’s wit and insight because he chooses to speak in a circle of stage fire. He is entirely right in his main drift and purpose in every book he has written; and all of them, but especially ‘Hard Times,’ should be studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in social questions. They will find much that is partial, and, because partial, apparently unjust; but if they examine all the evidence on the other side, which Dickens seems to overlook, it will appear, after all their trouble, that his view was the finally right one, grossly and sharply told.” [33]
Secondly, Mr. Dickens is accused of an irreverence for, and unseemly ridicule of, sacred things. Any attentive reader of Dickens will have observed that he is not much in the habit of quoting from, or alluding to the writings of others; but that when he does quote or allude, it is in the great majority of cases from or to the Holy Scriptures. [34] Occasionally we come upon a reference to Shakespeare; now and then we meet with one from Swift, or Scott, or Byron; but these occur so seldom, that it may be said, once for all, that the source from which Mr. Dickens is usually in the habit of making quotations, is the Bible only. It is very interesting to find that so many of Mr. Dickens’s characters are represented as being in the habit either of regularly reading and studying the Bible, or of having it read to them by some one else.
“I ain’t much of a hand at reading writing-hand,” said Betty Higden, “though I can read my Bible and most print.” Little Nell was in the constant habit of taking the Bible with her to read while in her quiet and lonely retreat in the old church, after all her long and weary wanderings were past. In the happy time which Oliver Twist spent with Mrs. Maylie and Rose, he used to read, in the evenings, a chapter or two from the Bible, which he had been studying all the week, and in the performance of which duty he felt more proud and pleased than if he had been the clergyman himself. There was Sarah, in the “Sketches by Boz,” who regularly read the Bible to her old mistress; and in the touching sketch of “Our Next-door Neighbour” in the same book, we find the mother of the sick boy engaged in reading the Bible to him when the visitor called and interrupted her. This incident reminds us of the poor Chancery prisoner in the Fleet, who, when on his death-bed calmly waiting the release which would set him free for ever, had the Bible read to him by an old man in a cobbler’s apron. One of David Copperfield’s earliest recollections was of a certain Sunday evening, when his mother read aloud to him and Peggotty the story of Our Saviour raising Lazarus from the dead. So deep an impression did the story make upon the boy, taken in connexion with all that had been lately told him about his father’s funeral, that he requested to be carried up to his bed-room, from the windows of which he could see the quiet churchyard with the dead all lying in their graves at rest below the solemn moon. Pip, too, in “Great Expectations,” was not only in the habit of reading the Bible to the convict under sentence of death, but of praying with him as well; and Esther Summerson tells us how she used to come downstairs every evening at nine o’clock to read the Bible to her god-mother.
Not a few of the dwellings into which Mr. Dickens conducts us in the course of some of his best-known stories, have their walls decorated with prints illustrative of familiar scenes from sacred history. Thus when Martin Chuzzlewit went away from Pecksniff’s, and was ten good miles on his way to London, he stopped to breakfast in the parlour of a little roadside inn, on the walls of which were two or three highly-coloured pictures, representing the Wise Men at the Manger, and the Prodigal Son returning to his Father. On the walls of Peggotty’s charming boat-cottage there were prints, showing the Sacrifice of Isaac, and the Casting of Daniel into the Den of Lions. When Arthur Clennam came home after his long absence in the East, he found the Plagues of Egypt still hanging, framed and glazed, on the same old place in his mother’s parlour. And who has forgotten the fireplace in old Scrooge’s house, which “was paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures?”
Here are a few comparisons. Mr. Larry, in bestowing a bachelor’s blessing on Miss Cross, before “somebody” came to claim her for his own, “held the fair face from him to look at the well-remembered expression on the forehead, and then laid the bright golden hair against his little brown wig, with a genuine tenderness and delicacy which, if such things be old-fashioned, were as old as Adam.” As old as Adam here means so long ago as Adam’s time; while Methuselah suggests great age. Thus Miss Jellyby relieved her mind to Miss Summerson on the subject of Mr. Quale, in the following energetic language:—“If he were to come with his great shining, lumpy forehead, night after night, till he was as old as Methuselah, I wouldn’t have anything to say to him.” And Mr. Filer, in his eminently practical remarks on the lamentable ignorance of political economy on the part of working people in connexion with marriage, observed to Alderman Cute that a man may live to be as old as Methuselah, and may labour all his life for the benefit of such people; but there could be no more hope of persuading them that they had no right or business to be married, than he could hope to persuade them that they had no earthly right or business to be born. Miss Betsy Trotwood declared to Mr. Dick that the natural consequence of David Copperfield’s mother having married a murderer—or a man with a name very like it—was to set the boy a-prowling and wandering about the country, “like Cain before he was grown up.” Joe Gargery’s journeyman, on going away from his work at night, used to slouch out of the shop like Cain, or the Wandering Jew, as if he had no idea where he was going, and had no intention of ever coming back. Describing the state of “the thriving City of Eden,” when Martin and Mark arrived there, the author of “Martin Chuzzlewit” says—“The waters of the Deluge might have left it but a week before, so choked with slime and matted growth was the hideous swamp which bore that name.” The Deluge suggests Noah’s ark. The following reference to it is from “Little Dorrit,” descriptive of the gradual approach of darkness up among the highest ridges of the Alps:—“The ascending night came up the mountains like a rising water. When at last it rose to the walls of the convent of the great St. Bernard, it was as if that weather-beaten structure were another ark, and floated on the shadowy waves.” Here is something from the Tower of Babel:—“Looming heavy in the black wet night, the tall chimneys of the Coketown factories rose high into the air, and looked as if they were so many competing towers of Babel.” When Mortimer Lightwood inquired of Charley Hexam, with reference to the body of the man found in the river, whether or not any means had been employed to restore life, he received this reply:—“You wouldn’t ask, sir, if you knew his state. Pharoah’s multitude that were drowned in the Red Sea ain’t more beyond restoring to life.” The boy added, further, “that if Lazarus were only half as far gone, that was the greatest of all the miracles.” When the Scotch surgeon was called in professionally to see Mr. Krook’s unfortunate lodger, the Scotch tongue pronounced him to be “just as dead as Chairy.” Job’s poverty is not likely to be forgotten among the comparisons. No, Mr. Mell’s mother was as poor as Job. Nor Samson’s strength: Dot’s mother had so many infallible recipes for the preservation of the baby’s health, that had they all been administered, the said baby must have been done for, though strong as an infant Samson. Nor Goliath’s importance: John Chivery’s chivalrous feeling towards all that belonged to Little Dorrit, made him so very respectable, in spite of his small stature, his weak legs, and his genuine poetic temperament, that a Goliath might have sat in his place demanding less consideration at Arthur Clennam’s hands. Nor Solomon’s wisdom: Trotty Veck was so delighted when the child kissed him that he couldn’t help saying, “She’s as sensible as Solomon.” Miss Wade having said farewell to her fellow-travellers in the public room of the hotel at Marseilles, sought her own apartment. As she passed along the gallery, she heard an angry sound of muttering and sobbing. A door stood open, and, looking into the room, she saw therein Pet’s attendant, the maid with the curious name of Tattycoram. Miss Wade asked what was the matter, and received in reply a few short and angry words in a deeply-injured, ill-used tone. Then again commenced the sobs and tears and pinching, tearing fingers, making altogether such a scene as if she were being “rent by the demons of old.” Let us close these comparisons by quoting another from the same book, “Little Dorrit,” descriptive of the evening stillness after a day of terrific glare and heat at Marseilles:—“The sun went down in a red, green, golden glory; the stars came out in the heavens, and the fire-flies mimicked them in the lower air, as men may feebly imitate the goodness of a better order of beings; the long, dusty roads and the interminable plains were in repose, and so deep a hush was on the sea, that it scarcely whispered of the time when it shall give up its dead.”
Looking over the familiar pages of “Nicholas Nickleby,” our eye lights upon a passage, almost at opening, which refers to God’s goodness and mercy. As Nickleby’s father lay on his death-bed, he embraced his wife and children, and then “solemnly commended them to One who never deserted the widow or her fatherless children.” Towards the close of Esther Summerson’s narrative in “Bleak House” we read these touching, tender words regarding Ada’s baby:—“The little child who was to have done so much was born before the turf was planted on its father’s grave. It was a boy; and I, my husband, and my guardian gave him his father’s name. The help that my dear counted on did come to her; though it came in the Eternal Wisdom for another purpose. Though to bless and restore his mother, not his father, was the errand of this baby, its power was mighty to do it. When I saw the strength of the weak little hand, and how its touch could heal my darling’s heart and raise up hopes within her, I felt a new sense of the goodness and tenderness of God.” After these illustrations of the great lessons of the goodness of God, and that there is mercy in even our hardest trials, we come next upon one which teaches the duty of patience and resignation to God’s will. Mrs. Maylie observed to Oliver Twist, with reference to the dangerous illness of Rose, that she had seen and experienced enough to “know that it is not always the youngest and best who are spared to those that love them; but this should give us comfort in our sorrow, for Heaven is just, and such things teach us impressively that there is a brighter world than this, and that the passage to it is speedy. God’s will be done!”