Changes in Writing.—For a time he edited The New Monthly Magazine, and a change came over the spirit of his novels. This was first noticed in his Ernest Maltravers, and the sequel, Alice, or the Mysteries, which are marked by sentimental passion and mystic ideas. In Night and Morning he is still mysterious: a blind fate seems to preside over his characters, robbing the good of its free merit and condoning the evil.
In 1838 he was made a baronet. His versatile pen now turned to the drama; and although he produced nothing great, his Lady of Lyons, Richelieu, Money, and The Sea Captain have always since been favorites upon the stage, subsidizing the talents of actors like Macready, Kean, and Edwin Booth.
We must now chronicle another change, from the mystic to the supernatural, as displayed in Zanoni and Lucretia, and especially in A Strange Story, which is the strangest of all. It was at the same period that he wrote The Last of the Barons, or the story of Warwick the king-maker, and Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings. Both are valuable to the student of English history as presenting the fruits of his own historic research.
The last and most decided, and, we may add, most beneficial, change in Bulwer as a writer, was manifested in his publication of the Caxtons, the chief merit of which is as an usher of the novels which were to follow. Pisistratus Caxton is the modern Tristram Shandy, and becomes the putative editor of the later novels. First of these is My Novel, or Varieties of English Life. It is an admirable work: it inculcates a better morality, and a sense of Christian duty, at which Pelham would have laughed in scorn. Like it, but inferior to it, is What Will He do with It? which has an interesting plot, an elevated style, and a rare human sympathy.
Among other works, which we cannot mention, he wrote The New Timon, and King Arthur, in poetry, and a prose history entitled Athens, its Rise and Fall.
Without the highest genius, but with uncommon scholarship and great versatility, Bulwer has used the materials of many kinds lying about him, to make marvellous mosaics, which imitate very closely the finest efforts of word-painting of the great geniuses of prose fiction.
Charles Dickens.—Another remarkable development of the age was the use of prose fiction, instead of poetry, as the vehicle of satire in the cause of social reform. The world consents readily to be amused, and it likes to be amused at the expense of others; but it soon tires of what is simply amusing or satirical unless some noble purpose be disclosed. The novels of former periods had interested by the creation of character and scenes; and there had been numerous satires prompted by personal pique. It is the glory of this latest age that it demands what shall so satirize the evil around it in men, in classes, in public institutions, that the evil shall recoil before the attack, and eventually disappear. Chief among such reformers are Dickens and Thackeray.
Charles Dickens, the prince of modern novelists, was born at Landsport, Portsmouth, England, in 1812. His father was at the time a clerk in the Pay Department of the Navy, but afterwards became a reporter of debates in Parliament. After a very hard early life and an only tolerable education, young Dickens made some progress in the study of law; but soon undertook his father's business as reporter, in which he struggled as he has made David Copperfield to do in becoming proficient.
His first systematic literary efforts were as a daily writer and reporter for The True Sun; he then contributed his sketches of life and character, drawn from personal observation, to the Morning Chronicle: these were an earnest of his future powers. They were collected as Sketches by Boz, in two volumes, and published in 1836.
Pickwick.—In 1837 he was asked by a publisher to prepare a series of comic sketches of cockney sportsmen, to illustrate, as well as to be illustrated by, etchings by Seymour. This yoking of two geniuses was a trammel to both; but the suicide of Seymour dissolved the connection, and Dickens had free play to produce the Pickwick Papers, by Boz, which were illustrated, as he proceeded, by H. K. Browne (Phiz). The work met and has retained an unprecedented popularity. Caricature as it was, it caricatured real, existent oddities; everything was probable; the humor was sympathetic if farcical, the assertion of humanity bold, and the philosophy of universal application. He had touched our common nature in all ranks and conditions; he had exhibited men and women of all types; he had exposed the tricks of politics and the absurdity of elections; the snobs of society were severely handled. He was the censor of law courts, the exposer of swindlers, the dread of cockneys, the friend of rustics and of the poor; and he has displayed in the principal character, that of the immortal Pickwick, the power of a generous, simple-hearted, easily deceived, but always philanthropic man, who comes through all his trials without bating a jot of his love for humanity and his faith in human nature. But the master-work of his plastic hand was Sam Weller, whose wit and wisdom pervaded both hemispheres, and is as potent to excite laughter to-day as at the first.