Home Life of Great Authors

by Hattie Tyng Griswold

CHARLES DICKENS.

No novelist has dealt so directly with the home life of the world as Charles Dickens. He has painted few historic pictures; he has dealt mostly in interiors,—beautiful bits of home life, full of domestic feeling. Indeed, we may say that his background is always the home, and here he paints his portraits, often like those of Hogarth for strength and grotesque effect. Here, too, he limns the scenes of his comedy-tragedy, and depicts the changing fashions of the time. The color is sometimes a little crude, laid on occasionally with too coarse a brush; but the effect is always lifelike, and our interest in it is never known to flag.

Nowhere else in all the range of literature have we such tender description of home life and love, such intuitive knowledge of child life, such wonderful sympathy with every form of domestic wrong and suffering, such delicate appreciation of the shyest and most unobtrusive of social virtues; nowhere else such indignation at any neglect or desecration of the home, as in Mrs. Jellyby with her mission, in Mrs. Pardiggle with her charities, Mr. Pecksniff with his hypocrisy, and Mr. Dombey with his unfeeling selfishness. In short, Dickens is pre-eminently the prophet and the poet of the home.

Now, can it be possible that we must say of such a man as this, that in his own life he was the opposite of all that which he so feelingly describes,—that he desecrated the very home he so apostrophizes,—that he put all his warmth, geniality, and tenderness into his books and kept for his own fireside his sour humors and unhappy moods,—that he was "ill to live with," as Mrs. Carlyle puts it? We cannot believe it in so bald a form, but we are forced to admit that his married life seems to have been in every way unhappy and unfortunate. No one could state this more strongly than Dickens himself, in the letter he wrote at the time of the separation. He said:—

"Mrs. Dickens and I have lived unhappily for many years. Hardly any one who has known us intimately can fail to have known that we are in all respects of character and temperament wonderfully unsuited to each other. I suppose that no two people, not vicious in themselves, were ever joined together, who had greater difficulty in understanding one another, or who had less in common. An attached woman-servant (more friend to both of us than servant), who lived with us sixteen years and had the closest familiar experience of this unhappiness in London, in the country, in France, in Italy, wherever we have been, year after year, month after month, week after week, day after day, will bear testimony to this. Nothing has on many occasions stood between us and a separation but Mrs. Dickens's sister, Georgina Hogarth. From the age of fifteen, she has devoted herself to our home and our children. She has been their playmate, nurse, instructress, friend, protectress, adviser, companion. In the manly consideration towards Mrs. Dickens, which I owe to my wife, I will only remark of her that the peculiarity of her character has thrown all the children on some one else. I do not know, I cannot by any stretch of fancy imagine, what would have become of them but for this aunt, who has grown up with them, to whom they are devoted, and who has sacrificed the best part of her youth and life to them. She has remonstrated, reasoned, suffered, and toiled, and come again to prevent a separation between Mrs. Dickens and me. Mrs. Dickens has often expressed to her her sense of her affectionate care and devotion in the house,—never more strongly than within the last twelve months."

Again, in the public statement which he prepared for "Household Words," alluding to a multitude of damaging rumors which were quickly put in circulation, he says:—

"By some means, arising out of wickedness or out of folly or out of inconceivable wild chance, or out of all three, this trouble has been made the occasion of misrepresentations most grossly false, most monstrous, and most cruel,—involving not only me, but innocent persons dear to my heart, and innocent persons of whom I have no knowledge, if indeed they have any existence,—and so widely spread that I doubt if one reader in a thousand will peruse these lines by whom some touch of the breath of these slanderers will not have passed like an unwholesome air.

"Those who know me and my nature need no assurance under my hand that such calumnies are as irreconcilable with me as they are in their frantic incoherence with one another. But there is a great multitude who know me through my writings and who do not know me otherwise, and I cannot bear that one of them should be left in doubt or hazard of doubt through my poorly shrinking from taking the unusual means to which I now resort of circulating the truth. I most solemnly declare then—and this I do both in my own name and my wife's name—that all lately whispered rumors touching the trouble at which I have glanced are abominably false; and that whosoever repeats one of them, after this denial, will lie as wilfully and as foully as it is possible for any false witness to lie before heaven and earth."

This denial, coming from a man of truth and honor like Charles Dickens, must, once for all, dispose of that convenient way of accounting for the sad estrangement.