DOTHEBOYS HALL, BOWES. ([Page 126].)
Visited by Dickens when writing “Nicholas Nickleby.”
In 1847 Dickens and his distinguished company of amateur actors gave a representation in Liverpool of Ben Jonson’s comedy, “Every Man in His Humour,” for the benefit of Leigh Hunt. The Reading tours in the fifties and sixties again called him to that busy mercantile centre, one of the readings taking place in St. George’s Hall—“the beautiful St. George’s Hall,” as he described it: “brilliant to see when lighted up, and for a reading simply perfect.” One of the closing incidents of his life was the great Liverpool banquet, which took place on April 10, 1869, in St. George’s Hall, after his country Readings, the late Marquis of Dufferin presiding, the function being made memorable by an eloquent speech by the novelist, replying to a remonstrance from Lord Houghton against his (Dickens’s) objection to entering public life.[70] While sojourning at Liverpool he usually stayed at the Adelphi Hotel. In 1844 he made Radley’s Hotel his headquarters.
It is quite in accordance with our expectations to find frequent mention of Liverpool throughout Dickens’s works. For descriptive passages we must turn to the pages of “Martin Chuzzlewit” and certain of his minor writings, where we discover interesting and important references “to that rich and beautiful port,” as he calls it in one instance. Apropos of the return to England of Martin Chuzzlewit the younger and his faithful companion Mark Tapley after their trying experiences in the New Country, the novelist, in thus depicting Liverpool and the Mersey, doubtless records his own impressions of some two years previous on his arrival there at the termination, in 1842, of his American tour:
“It was mid-day and high-water in the English port for which the Screw was bound, when, borne in gallantly upon the fulness of the tide, she let go her anchor in the river.
“Bright as the scene was—fresh, and full of motion; airy, free, and sparkling—it was nothing to the life and exaltation in the hearts of the two travellers at sight of the old churches, roofs, and darkened chimney-stacks of home. The distant roar that swelled up hoarsely from the busy streets was music in their ears; the lines of people gazing from the wharves were friends held dear; the canopy of smoke that overhung the town was brighter and more beautiful to them than if the richest silks of Persia had been waving in the air. And though the water, going on its glistening track, turned ever and again aside to dance and sparkle round great ships, and heave them up, and leaped from off the blades of oars, a shower of diving diamonds, and wantoned with the idle boats, and swiftly passed, in many a sporting chase, through obdurate old iron rings, set deep into the stonework of the quays, not even it was half so buoyant and so restless as their fluttering hearts, when yearning to set foot once more on native ground.”
In one of “The Uncommercial Traveller” papers (1860) will be found this vivid pen-picture of the slums of Liverpool, favoured by seafaring men of the lower class, a district probably little altered since those lines were penned:
“A labyrinth of dismal courts and blind alleys, called ‘entries,’ kept in wonderful order by the police, and in much better order than by the Corporation, the want of gaslight in the most dangerous and infamous of these places being quite unworthy of so spirited a town.... Many of these sailors’ resorts we attained by noisome passages so profoundly dark that we felt our way with our hands. Not one of the whole number we visited was without its show of prints and ornamental crockery, the quantity of the latter, set forth on little shelves and in little cases in otherwise wretched rooms, indicating that Mercantile Jack must have an extraordinary fondness for crockery to necessitate so much of that bait in his traps ... etc.”[71]
With the characteristics of that other great Lancashire town, Manchester, the novelist became, perhaps, even more intimate. “Manchester is (for Manchester) bright and fresh,” he wrote to Miss Hogarth from the Queen’s Hotel in 1869, where he stayed on the occasion of his Farewell Readings in the provinces, and where the chimney of his sitting-room caught fire and compelled him to “turn out elsewhere to breakfast.” Long before this date—that is, in 1843—the people of Manchester were first privileged to meet him on the occasion of a bazaar in the Free Trade Hall in aid of the fund for improving the financial condition of the Athenæum, then sadly in debt. The bazaar was followed by a soirée, held in the same building, under the presidency of Dickens, who then delivered a speech which has been described as “a masterpiece of graceful eloquence.” The subject thereof forcibly appealed to him—viz., the education of the very poor, for he did not believe in the old adage that averred a little learning to be a “dangerous thing,” but rather that the most minute particle of knowledge is preferable to complete and consummate ignorance. This memorable function is noteworthy also by reason of the fact that among the speakers who addressed the vast audience were Disraeli and Cobden. Dickens expressed a wish to become a member of the Athenæum, but left Manchester without going through the necessary formalities—an oversight soon rectified, however.
In 1852, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Manchester Public Free Libraries, the novelist accepted an invitation to be present at an important meeting held at Campfield, the “first home” of these free libraries (formerly known as “The Hall of Science”); the meeting was attended by a number of distinguished men, including Bulwer Lytton, Thackeray, John Bright, Peter Cunningham, etc., and it naturally fell to Dickens to make a speech, having the use of literature as its theme. Thackeray, by the way, had prepared a careful oration, but, after delivering half a sentence, ignominiously sat down! Public oratory was not his forte. In 1858 Dickens presided at the annual meeting of the Institutional Association of Lancashire and Cheshire, held in the Manchester Athenæum and the Free Trade Hall, and handed prizes to candidates from more than a hundred local mechanics’ institutes affiliated to the association. “Knowledge has a very limited power indeed,” he observed, in the speech delivered on behalf of the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute in Cooper Street, “when it informs the head alone; but when it informs the head and heart too, it has power over life and death, the body and the soul, and dominates the universe.” We are reminded that this peroration is an echo of words in “Hard Times” (written four years previously), and that his exhortation to the Manchester audience practically reproduced the leading thought in that powerful novel—a story which impelled the admiration of Ruskin, who, commenting upon it, said that the book “should be studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in social questions.” In “Hard Times” Manchester is disguised as matter-of-fact Coketown, and the presentment is easily recognisable: