There is one queer thing about that first book which no critic ever noticed so far as I know; it was, from beginning to end, a wholly unconscious plagiarism of David Copperfield. Had there been no Peggotty, there would have been no Sally Troman; had there been no Steerforth, there would have been no Gascoigne. The greater part of the fable and nearly all the characters I owed to Dickens, and yet I can aver in perfect honesty that, at the time of writing and for years afterwards, I was entirely unconscious of the fact One thing in the book, in any case, was real. I sent my tragic hero wandering about the country, finding shelter in all manner of low lodging-houses, and living generally the life of a tramp. Before I put him to that experience I went through it religiously myself, and for a whole seven weeks in the summer, after my return from Turkey, I was “on the road” as a casual tramp. It was my purpose to prove in my own person what I knew very well already, namely, that it was, as most unhappily it still is, actually impossible for a poor man honestly in search of work, to make his way through England and to hold body and soul together without infringing the law in one way or another.
I found that it was not possible. Well, I had seven weeks of it. I went under the name of “David Vane, compositor,” as of course, I knew something about the printing trade. My clothes were shabby at the outset, but were utterly in rags when I had done. “David Vane” had many strange adventures, but the funniest was reserved for the close. I may say that I took a ten-pound note with me, and through the Post Office sent portions of it on before me and walked towards it.
When I got to the “George” at Hereford I had £7, 13s. 6d. left out of the £10. I slept in workhouses or in the fields; the professional term for the former is the “spike,” for the latter the “skipper.” I went on “spike” and “skipper” both. I had sent a little portmanteau on before me to the “George” at Hereford, with the initials “D.C.M.” at the side. In it I had a change of clothes and a shaving kit. When I got into Hereford I had had no shave for three or four weeks, my boots were absolutely worn out, my clothes were rags and tatters, and exposure to the sun had tanned my face. I drew my money at the Post Office at Hereford, and carrying it in my hand, for all my pockets were worn out, I reached the “George,” a good old-fashioned county hotel.
A set of steps reached up to the main entrance, where stood a waiter with a professional napkin. He looked up the street, down the street, and across the street, smiling all the time—a proprietorial sort of smile. I talked to him from below—one always speaks from below with a sense of disadvantage—and said, “I want a room.” He gave a wave of his napkin in answer, and said, “Go away, go away.” But I did not go away. I went up the steps, showed him my money, and told him not to play the fool. I said, “I want a room.” He looked at me stolidly, but suddenly I discovered my portmanteau in a corner. I claimed it at once and mounted the stairs, the waiter following with his curiously feline footsteps, and murmuring at intervals, “Well, I am———!” He said it with great conviction, but he took me to the bath room nevertheless. I got a shave, changed my suit, and, as I was something of a dandy at the time, I affected certain airs as to the arrangement of my watch-chain and the like. I came out cleanshaven and with an eye-glass, and generally looking as different from the man who went in as it was possible to imagine. On the stairs I found my waiter ready, and when he saw me he said most emphatically that he was ——. He took me to the coffee room, where I had a meal. He stood behind my chair, and by means of a mirror opposite I saw him keep saying to himself that he was ——. I stayed in Hereford for some time, both to rest and to write articles about my experiences, which appeared in Mayfair, a society paper, long since dead. I took a private room, and this particular waiter seemed to be told off to attend me in all my doings. Everything seemed to surprise him; he could not measure me up at all, and he was continually saying that he was ——, although I knew quite well that he wasn't. One day his worship the Mayor of Hereford called to see me. When I asked the waiter to show his worship up he said that he was ——. The mayor was a flamboyant sort of individual, and said, “Now, Mr Christie Murray, Lord Lyttelton is in Hereford, and is most par-tic-ular-ly interested in the subject of which you are treating in Mayfair. He will be delighted to meet you, and I have arranged with his lordship that you shall meet him at my house (the mayor's house) at 7.30 on Friday. You will not fail his lordship?” I said that I would not for the world, and I escorted his worship to his carriage. At the door he turned and said, “Half-past seven on Friday, Mr Christie Murray, at my house, to meet Lord Lyttelton. Profoundly disappointed if you don't turn out. His lordship will be grieved, Mr Murray.” The mayor having gone I turned round—to encounter my waiter, and for the last time he said that he was ——. And although I had known that he was not, he said it with such sincerity that I more than half believed him.
Either the man must beg, which in itself is, of course, a misdemeanour, or he must starve. To sleep out of doors is a crime, and for a man to appeal for shelter at the workhouse means that he will be detained until every chance of obtaining employment is lost. I remember an unfortunate fellow, whom I overtook near Tewkesbury, a man of about sixty as I should judge, who was sitting by the roadside cooling his blistered heels in a little runnel of clear water, and crying quietly to himself as he tried to rid his fingers of the tar which stuck to them after his workhouse morning's experience of oakum picking. I sat down beside him and offered him a fill of tobacco, and by and by got into talk with him. He was a man of some intelligence and education, and had begun life as a journeyman watchmaker. He had risen to be an employer, and had kept a small workshop in Coventry, but misfortune had overtaken him and he had failed in business. The immediate cause of his distress was that he had received notification that employment at his trade of watchmaker was open to him at Evesham. The poor fellow was quite penniless and had been compelled to walk; his strength had failed him by the way, and he had had to take refuge in the workhouse. In payment for his lodging, his two chunks of dry bread and his pint of skilly, he had been compelled to pick his quantum of oakum. The man's fingers were, of course, as delicate as a lady's, and in the course of our talk he held them out to me, showing the tips all raw and bleeding and thick with tar. He sobbed bitterly as he told me that he would be unable to do a hand-stroke at his trade for at least a fortnight. He carried with him letters of recommendation which ought to have guaranteed him from any such usage as that to which he had been condemned. He had tried to show them to the labour master, but he had been waved contemptuously aside, and had been forced by threats of being imprisoned as a refractory pauper to betake himself to the task imposed upon him.
It need hardly be said that all the men one encountered were not of this type. I met one engaging ruffian who unbosomed himself to me with the utmost frankness. “Oi meets genelmen on the road,” he said, “as arsks me why Oi don't gaow to wurk; a great big upstandin' chap loike you, they sez, loafin' abaht and doin' nothin'—why it's disgraiceful! Well, I sez, guv'nor, I sez, 'ow can Oi go to wurk? Oi'm a skilled wurkman, I sez, in me own trade, but Oi'm froze aht by modern machinery. Oi'm a 'and comb-maker, I sez, and the trade's bin killed this dozen years. Oi'm too hold a dawg to learn new tricks, I sez, Oi'm a middle-aged man and what ham Oi to do to yearn my means of loiveli'ood.” He added with a wink that there was only one hand comb-maker in business in that wide district of England and Wales over which he wandered. “And,” said he, “you can bet your sweet loife Oi don't go nigh 'im.” This cadging rascal would very rarely have occasion to present himself as a casual pauper at the Union workhouse, but had he done so, he and the unfortunate watchmaker would have been treated on perfectly equal terms.
The whole system of casual poor law relief is about as rotten and as stupid as it can be, and its administration is in itself a scandal. There is no general rule throughout the country as to dietary or as to the nature of the labour executed, or as to the hours over which that labour shall be extended. The habitual loafer knows perfectly well the places where life is made easy to him, and as a matter of course avoids those in which the fare is poorest and the work most arduous. The honest seeker after work knows nothing of these things and the whole iniquitous and idiotic system is at once a direct bribe to the inveterate work-shirker and a scourge to the honest and industrious poor. I published the result of my own researches into it in the columns of Mayfair now nearly thirty years ago, and suggested a very simple and easy remedy for its defects. I had some hope that I might be attended to. The late Lord Lyttelton, Mr Gladstone's friend, was at one time disposed to take the matter up, but his melancholy death put an end to that, and recent inquiries assure me that the old intolerable methods of casual relief are still unreformed.
Looking back now, I can see how very large a part that seven weeks' experience played in my life as a novelist. For years afterwards it cropped up as inevitably in my work as King Charles's head in Mr Dick's Memorial, but at least it has enabled me to feel that few writers of fiction in my time have gone nearer to reality in their studies than myself. I certainly worked the little mine that I had opened for all that it was worth, and readers of mine who give themselves the trouble to remember will recall the wanderings of the hero of Skeleton Keys, of Frank Fairholt, of Hiram Search and of young George Bushell. Speaking of Hiram Search naturally reminds me of Charles Reade. I dedicated the book in which Hiram appears to that great writer and sent a copy of it to him with what I daresay was a somewhat boyish letter. I have the terms of my dedication in mind still, and I remember that I wrote of a great genius which has always been put to lofty uses. Reade's letter in response has always held a place amongst my treasures. “It is no discredit,” he wrote, “for a young man to appreciate his seniors beyond their merits.” I have always thought that very noble and modest and well-said. Reade is the only one of the writers who in my own boyhood were already reckoned great with whom it was my happiness to come into personal contact.
I have met with but four men in my experience who have been distinguished by that splendid urbanity of manner which was once thought to express the acme of high breeding. Charles Reade was one of them. I never knew him intimately enough to get beyond it, but that he himself could break through it upon occasion was known to everybody. A beautiful, stately cordiality commonly marked his social manner, but he could be moved to a towering rage by an act of meanness, treachery or oppression; and in his public correspondence he was sometimes downright vitriolic. Hardly anything could have excused the retort he flung at some unhappy disputant who had called one of his facts in question. “You have dared,” he wrote, “to contradict me on a subject in which I am profoundly learned, while you are ignorant as dirt.” It was true enough, but perhaps it was hardly worth while to say it in that fashion. Nearly all his life he was embroiled in controversy of one sort or another. He spent himself in the exposure of abuses and the people whom he exposed assailed him rashly. He took prodigious pains to be accurate, and before he assaulted the prison system in It's Never Too Late to Mend, or the conduct of private lunatic asylums in Hard Cash, he had gathered and indexed huge volumes of information culled from every available source. These memoranda he called nigri loci. His system of indexing was so precise that he could lay an instant finger on any fact of which he was in search, and nobody who ventured to impugn his facts escaped from him unmutilated. In one instance, a barrister was so misguided as to tell him publicly that a legal incident in one of the two books I have mentioned was obviously impossible and absurd.
Reade was down upon him like a hammer: “The impossibility in question disguised itself as fact and went through the hollow form of taking place” on such and such a date, in such and such a court, and the proceedings were recorded in volume so and so, on certain pages of the official Law Reports for a given year. His adversary was left with no better resource than to charge him with hurling undigested lumps of official documents at the head of the public; and this left his equanimity undisturbed.