Victorian worthies

by George Henry Blore

In the years following the American voyage the chief landmarks were the production of Dombey and Son (begun in 1846) and David Copperfield (begun in 1849). From many points of view they may be regarded as his masterpieces, where his art is best seen in depicting character and constructing a story, though the infectious gaiety of the earlier novels may at times be missed. Dickens's insight into human nature had ripened, and he had learnt to group his lesser figures and episodes more skilfully round the central plot. And David Copperfield has the peculiar interest which attaches to those works where we seem to read the story of the author's own life. Evidently we have memories here of his childhood, of his school-days and his apprenticeship to work, and of the first gleams of success which met him in life. It is generally assumed that the book throws light on his own family relations; but it would be rash to argue confidently about this, as the inventive impulse was so strong in him. At least we may say that it is the book most necessary for a student who wishes to understand Dickens himself and his outlook on the world.

Also David Copperfield may be regarded as the central point and the culmination of Dickens's career as a novelist. Before it, and again after it, he had a spell of about fifteen years' steady work at novel writing, and no one would question that the first spell was productive of the better work. Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend all show evidence of greater effort and are less happy in their effect. No man could live the life that Dickens had lived for fifteen years and not show some signs of exhaustion; the wonder is that his creative power continued at all. He was capable of brilliant successes yet. The Tale of Two Cities is among the most thrilling of his stories, while Edwin Drood and parts of Great Expectations show as fine imagination and character drawing as anything which he wrote before 1850; but there is no injustice in drawing a broad distinction between the two parts of his career.

His home during the most fertile period of his activity was in Devonshire Terrace, near Regent's Park, a house with a garden of considerable size. Here he was within reach of his best friends, who were drawn from all the liberal professions represented in London. First among them stands John Forster, lawyer, journalist, and author, his adviser and subsequently his biographer, the friend of Robert Browning, a man with a genius for friendship, unselfish, loyal, discreet and wise in counsel. Next came the artists Maclise and Clarkson Stanfield, the actor Macready, Talfourd, lawyer and poet, Douglas Jerrold and Mark Lemon, the two famous contributors to Punch, and some fellow novelists, of whom Harrison Ainsworth was conspicuous in the earlier group and Wilkie Collins in later years. Less frequent visitors were Carlyle, Thackeray, and Bulwer Lytton, but they too were proud to welcome Dickens among their friends. With some of these he would walk, ride, or dine, go to the theatre or travel in the provinces and in foreign countries. His biographer loves to recall the Dickens Dinners, organized to celebrate the issue of a new book, when songs and speeches were added to good cheer and when 'we all in the greatest good-humour glorified each other'. Dickens always retained the English taste for a good dinner and was frankly fond of applause, and there was no element of exclusive priggishness about the cordial admiration which these friends felt for one another and their peculiar enthusiasm for Dickens and his books. Around him the enthusiasm gathered, and few men have better deserved it.

When he was writing he needed quiet and worked with complete concentration; and when he had earned some leisure he loved to spend it in violent physical exercise. He would suddenly call on Forster to come out for a long ride on horseback to occupy the middle of the day; and his diligent friend, unable to resist the lure of such company, would throw his own work to the winds and come. Till near the end of his life Dickens clung to these habits, thinking nothing of a walk of from twenty to thirty miles; and there seems reason to believe that by constant over-exertion he sapped his strength and shortened his life. But lameness in one foot, the result of an illness early in 1865, handicapped him severely at times; and in the same year he sustained a rude shock in a railway accident where his nerves were upset by what he witnessed in helping the injured. He ought to have acquired the wisdom of the middle-aged man, and to have taken things more easily, but with him it was impossible to be doing nothing; physical and mental activity succeeded one another and often went together with a high state of nervous tension.

This love of excitement sometimes took forms which modern taste would call excessive and unwholesome. His attendance at the public execution of the Mannings in 1849, his going so often to the Morgue in Paris, his visit to America to 'the exact site where Professor Webster did that amazing murder', may seem legitimate for one who had to study crime among the other departments of life; but at times he revels in gruesome details in a way which jars on our feeling, and betrays too theatrical a love of sensation. However, no one could say that Dickens is generally morbid, in view of the sound and hearty appreciation which he had for all that is wholesome and genial in life.

In many ways the latter part of his life shows a less even tenor, a less steady development. Though he was so domestic in his tastes and devoted to his children, his relations with his wife became more and more difficult owing to incompatibility of temperament; and from 1858 they found it desirable to live apart. This no doubt added to his restlessness and the craving for excitement, which showed itself in the ardour with which he took up the idea of public readings. These readings are only less famous than his writings, so prodigious was their success. His great dramatic gifts, enlisted in the service of his own creations, made an irresistible appeal to the public, and till the day of his collapse, ten years later, their popularity showed no sign of waning. The amount of money which he earned thereby was amazing; the American tour alone gave him a net profit of £20,000; and he expected to make as much more in two seasons in England. But he paid dearly for these triumphs, being often in trouble with his voice, suffering from fits of sleeplessness, aggravating the pain in his foot, and affecting his heart. In spite, then, of the success of the readings, his faithful friends like Forster would gladly have seen him abandon a practice which could add little to his future fame, while it threatened to shorten his life. But, however arduous the task which he set himself, when the moment came Dickens could brace himself to meet the demands and satisfy the high expectations of his audience. His nerves seemed to harden, his voice to gain strength; his spirit flashed out undimmed, and he won triumph after triumph, in quiet cathedral cities, in great industrial towns, in the more fatiguing climate of America and before the huge audiences of Philadelphia and New York. He began his programme with a few chosen pieces from Pickwick and the Christmas Books, and with selected characters like Paul Dombey and Mrs. Gamp; he added Dotheboys Hall and the story of David Copperfield in brief; in his last series, against the advice of Forster, he worked up the more sensational passages from Oliver Twist. His object, he says, was 'to leave behind me the recollection of something very passionate and dramatic, done with simple means, if the act would justify the theme'. It was because the art of reading was unduly strained that Forster protested, and his judgement is confirmed by Dickens's boast (perhaps humorously exaggerated) that 'at Clifton we had a contagion of fainting, and yet the place was not hot—a dozen to twenty ladies taken out stiff and rigid at various times'. The physical effects of this fresh strain soon appeared. After a month his doctor ordered him to cease reading; and, though he resumed it after a few days' rest, in April 1869 he had a worse attack of giddiness and was obliged to abandon it permanently. The history of these readings illustrates the character of Dickens perhaps better than any other episode in his later life.

But the same restless energy is visible even in his life at Gadshill, which was his home from 1860 to 1870. The house lies on the London road a few miles west of Rochester, and can easily be seen to-day, almost unaltered, by the passer-by. It had caught his fancy in his childhood before the age of ten when he was walking with his father, and his father had promised that, if he would only work hard enough, he might one day live in it. The associations of the place with the Falstaff scenes in Henry IV had also endeared it to him; and so, when in 1855 he heard that it was for sale, he jumped at the opportunity. For some years after purchasing it he let it to tenants, but from 1860 he made it his permanent abode. It has no architectural features to charm the eye; with its many changes and additions made for comfort, its bow-windows and the plantations in the garden, it is a typical Victorian home. Here Dickens could live at ease, surrounded by his children, his dogs, his books, his souvenirs of his friends, and the Kentish scenery which he loved. To the north lay the flat marshlands of the lower Thames, to the south and west lay rolling hills crowned with woodlands, with hop gardens on the lower slopes; to the east lay the valley of the Medway with the quaint old streets of Rochester and the bustling dockyard of Chatham. All that makes the familiar beauty and richness of English landscape was here, above all the charm of associations. So many names preserved memories of his books. To Rochester the Pickwickians had driven on their first search for knowledge; to Cobham Mr. Winkle had fled, and at the 'Leather Bottle' his friends had found him; in the marshlands Joe Gargery and Pip had watched for the escaped convict; in the old gateway by the cathedral Jasper had entertained Edwin Drood on the eve of his disappearance; along that very high-road over which Dickens's windows looked the child David Copperfield had tramped in his journey from London to Dover.

Meanwhile, though his creative vein may have been less fertile than of old, his efforts for the good of his fellow men were no less continuous and sincere. His first books had aimed at killing by ridicule certain social institutions which had sunk into abuses. The pictures of parliamentary elections, of schools, of workhouses, had not only created a hearty laugh, but they had disposed the public to listen to the reformers and to realize the need for reform. As he grew older he went deeper into the evil, and he also blended his reforming purpose better with his story. The characters of Mr. Dombey and the Chuzzlewits are not mere incidents in the tale, nor are they monstrosities which call forth immediate astonishment and horror. But in each case the ingrained selfishness which spreads misery through a family is the very mainspring of the story; and the dramatic power by which Dickens makes it reveal itself in action has something Shakespearian in it. Here there is still a balance between the different elements, the human interest and the moral lesson, and as works of art they are on a higher plane than Hard Times, where the purpose is too clearly shown. Still if we wish to understand this side of Dickens's work, it is just such a book as Hard Times that we must study.

It deals with the relation of classes to one another in an industrial district, and especially with the faults of the class that rose to power with the development of manufacturing. Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby, the well-meaning pedant and the offensive parvenu, preach the same gospel. Political economy, as they understand it, is to rule life, and this dismal science is not concerned with human well-being and happiness, but only with the profit and loss on commercial undertakings. Hard facts then are to be the staple of education; memory and accurate calculation are to be cultivated; the imagination is to be driven out. In depicting the manner of this education Dickens rather overshoots the mark. The visit of Mr. Gradgrind to Mr. M'Choakumchild's school (when the sharp-witted Bitzer defines the horse according to the scientific handbook, while poor Cissy, who has only an affection for horses, indulges in fancies and collapses in disgrace) is too evident a caricature. But the effects of this kind of teaching are painted with a powerful hand, and we see the faculty for joy blighted almost in the cradle. And the lesson is enforced not only by the working man and his family but by Gradgrind's own daughter, who pitilessly convicts her father of having stifled every generous impulse in her and of having sacrificed her on the altar of fancied self-interest.

Side by side with the dismal Mr. Gradgrind is the poor master of the strolling circus, Mr. Sleary, with his truer philosophy of life. He can see the real need that men have for amusement and for brightness in their lives; and, though he lives under the shadow of bankruptcy, he can hold his head up and preach the gospel of happiness. This was a cause which never failed to win the enthusiastic advocacy of Dickens. He fought, as men still have to fight to-day, against those Pharisees who prescribe for the working classes how they should spend their weekly day of freedom; he supported the opening on Sunday of parks, museums, and galleries; whole-heartedly he loved the theatre and the circus, and he wished as many as possible to share those delights. In defiance of 'Mrs. Grundy' he ventured to maintain that the words 'music-hall' and 'public-house', rightly understood, should be held in honour. It is one thing to hate drunkenness and indecency; it is quite another to assume that these must be found in the poor man's place of recreation, and this roused him to anger. To him 'public-house' meant a place of fellowship, and 'music-hall' a place of song and mirth; and if some critics complain of an excess of material good-cheer in his picture of life, Dickens is certainly here in sympathy with the bulk of his fellow-countrymen.