"We then strolled farther down to watch the fading light. The tide came rippling in. The night grew darker,—starless, moonless. Dickens seemed suddenly to be possessed with the spirit of mischief; he threw his arm around me, and ran me down the inclined plane to the end of the jetty till we reached the toll-post. He put his other arm around this, and exclaimed in theatrical tones that he intended to hold me there till the sad sea waves should submerge us. 'Think of the sensation we shall create.' Here I implored him to let me go, and struggled hard to release myself. 'Let your mind dwell upon the column in the "Times" wherein will be vividly described the pathetic fate of the lovely E. P., drowned by Dickens in a fit of dementia. Don't struggle, poor little bird; you are helpless.' By this time the last gleam of light had faded out, and the water close to us looked uncomfortably black. The tide was coming up rapidly, and surged over my feet. I gave a loud shriek, and tried to bring him back to common-sense by reminding him that my dress—my best dress, my only silk dress—would be ruined. Even this climax did not soften him; he still went on with his serio-comic nonsense, shaking with laughter all the time, and panting with his struggles to hold me. 'Mrs. Dickens,' I shrieked, 'help me! Make Mr. Dickens let me go—the waves are up to my knees.' 'Charles,' cried Mrs. Dickens, 'how can you be so silly? You will both be carried off by the tide!' And it was not until my dress had been completely ruined that I succeeded in wresting myself from him. Upon two other occasions he seized me and ran with me under the cataract, and held me there until I was thoroughly baptized and my bonnets a wreck of lace and feathers."
The same writer says,—and she is one who writes from familiar personal acquaintance,—"To describe Dickens as always amiable, always just, and always in the right, would be simply false and untrue to Nature;" and she relates several anecdotes going to prove that he was sometimes capricious, not always responsive to appeals for help, and other things of that sort; all of which may be true and not be very damaging. This writer tells still another story of his reckless fun-making, as follows:—
"We were about to make an excursion to Pegwell Bay, and lunch there. Presently Dickens came in in high glee, flourishing about a yard of ballads, which he had bought from a beggar in the street. 'Look here,' he cried exultingly, 'all for a penny. One song alone is worth a Jew's eye,—quite new and original, the subject being the interesting announcement by our gracious Queen.' He commenced to give us a specimen, but after hearing one verse there arose a cry of universal execration. He pretended to be vexed at our 'shutting him up.' said there was nothing wrong in it, he had written a great deal worse himself; and when we were going to enter the carriages he said: 'Now, look here! I give due notice to all and sundry, that I mean to sing that song, and a good many others, during the ride; so those ladies who think them vulgar can go in the other carriages. I am not going to invest my hard-earned penny for nothing.' I was quite certain that Charles Dickens was the last man in the world to shock the modesty of any female, and too much of a gentleman to do anything that was annoying to us, but I thought it as well to go in the other carriage; and so he had no ladies with him but his wife and Mrs. S——. I was not sorry, however, to be where I was, as I heard for the next half-hour portions of those songs wafted on the breeze; and the bursts of laughter from ladies and gentlemen and the mischievous twinkle in Dickens's eye proved that he was in such a madcap mood that it was as well there were none but married people with him,—the subject being of a 'Gampish' nature. But he was not always full of spirits or even-tempered,—indeed, I was sometimes puzzled by the variability of his moods."
Anecdotes like the following, told by Blanchard Jerrold, abound in all writers who wrote of Dickens from personal knowledge:—
"A very dear friend of mine, and of many others to whom literature is a staff, had died. To say that his family had claims upon Dickens is to say that they were promptly acknowledged and satisfied, with the grace and heartiness which double the gift, sweeten the bread, and warm the wine. I asked a connection of our dead friend whether he had seen the poor wife and children. 'Seen them?' he answered. 'I was there to-day. They are removed into a charming cottage. They have everything about them; and just think of this: when I burst into the room, in my eager survey of the new home, I saw a man in his shirt-sleeves up some steps, hammering away lustily. He turned. It was Charles Dickens, and he was hanging the pictures for the widow. . . . Dickens was the soul of truth and manliness as well as kindness, so that such a service as this came as naturally to him as help from his purse.'"
Jerrold continues:—
"There was that boy-element in him which has been so often remarked of men of genius. 'Why, we played a game of knock 'em down only a week ago,' a friend remarked to me last June, with beaming eyes, 'and he showed all the old astonishing energy and delight in taking aim at Aunt Sally.' My own earliest recollections of Dickens are of his gayest moods, when the boy in him was exuberant, and leap-frog and rounders were not sports too young for the player who had written 'Pickwick' twenty years before. The sweet and holy lessons which he presented to humanity out of the humble places in the world could not have been evolved out of a nature less true and sympathetic than his. It wanted such a man as Dickens was in his life to be such a writer as he was for the world."
One more anecdote. J. C. Young tells us that one day Mrs. Henry Siddons, a neighbor and intimate of Lord Jeffrey, who often entered his library unannounced, opened the door very gently to see if he were there, and saw enough at a glance to convince her that the visit was ill-timed. The hard critic of the "Edinburgh Review" was sitting in his chair with his head on the table in deep grief. As Mrs. Siddons was retiring, in the hope that her entrance had been unnoticed, Jeffrey raised his head and kindly beckoned her back. Perceiving that his cheek was flushed and his eyes suffused with tears, she begged permission to withdraw. When he found that she was intending to leave him, he rose from his chair, took her by both hands, and led her to a seat.
"Don't go, my dear friend; I shall be right again in another minute."
"I had no idea you had had any bad news, or cause for grief, or I would not have come. Is any one dead?"