To a wholly different class belonged the once famous Samuel Warren. He was a barrister and the author of several legal works, but his literary career was determined rather by a short period of medical study in Edinburgh, before he resolved to be a barrister. His acquaintance with Christopher North opened the pages of Blackwood to him, and he utilised his medical training in the Diary of a Late Physician, an unpleasantly realistic book which first appeared in that magazine. Ten Thousand a Year (1841), though commonplace in substance, was interesting. Warren lived upon the reputation of this book. His subsequent attempts were failures, and he was known through life as the author of Ten Thousand a Year.
CHAPTER V.
FICTION: THE INTERMEDIATE PERIOD.
Where dates so overlap it is impossible to find, and therefore misleading to seek for, absolute divisions. Some of the writers to be treated in this chapter began to publish only a few years after those dealt with in the last, and great part of their career was strictly contemporaneous. The division only means that, on the whole, we can recognise in the earlier writers a closer relationship with the preceding period, a more direct debt to Scott and Byron. In the fourth decade of the century we begin to see the romance of the Middle Ages and of the East giving place to the humours of low life in Dickens, to satire on society in Thackeray, and to the novel of passion in the Brontës. These writers may be said to form ideals of their own, and though they do not constitute a school they are each distinguished by characteristics which we recognise as the growth of the present period.
Charles Dickens
(1812-1870).
The difference between good work and excellent work is seen when we turn from even the best of the earlier writers to Charles Dickens. The novelist’s father, John Dickens, was a clerk in the navy pay-office; and the circumstances of the lad’s early life are universally known from David Copperfield, a novel largely autobiographical. Forster’s biography proves that the picture of the miserable little drudge, David, is even painfully accurate. The sordid life, both of his home, with its mysterious ‘deeds’ leading up to his father’s imprisonment in the Marshalsea, and of the London streets and the blacking warehouse, was the best possible for the development of his talents; but the bitterness of it never faded from his memory. Neither can it be denied that certain of the faults of Dickens may with probability be explained by his early life. His many fine qualities were marred by a slight strain of vulgarity, visible both in his works and in his life, from which the surroundings of a happier home would almost certainly have preserved a nature so sensitive.
The family circumstances improved, and in 1824 Dickens was sent to a school at once poor and pretentious, where he remained for two years. He afterwards spent some time in a lawyer’s office, but left it to become a reporter. After much toil he became, in his own words, which are confirmed by the estimate of others, ‘the best and most rapid reporter ever known.’ Journalism is akin to literature, and Dickens gradually drifted into authorship. His first article, A Dinner at Poplar Walk, now entitled Mr. Minns and his Cousin, appeared in the old Monthly Magazine for December, 1833; and the collected papers were published in 1836, under the title of Sketches by Boz. They were in some respects crude, but they contained the promise of genius. The first drafts of some of Dickens’s best characters are to be found in them, and the sketches are eminently fresh and independent. Few books owe less to other books than the early works of Dickens. His book was the streets of London; and even what he read was best assimilated if it had some connexion with them. George Colman’s description of Covent Garden captivated him. ‘He remembered,’ says Forster, ‘snuffing up the flavour of the faded cabbage-leaves as if it were the very breath of comic fiction;’ and Forster adds, with justice, ‘it was reserved for himself to give a sweeter and fresher breath to it.’ For to the honour of Dickens it may be said that, despite certain lapses of taste, he seldom forgot that ‘there is as much reality in the scent of a rose as in the smell of a sewer.’
The extraordinary rapidity with which Dickens rose to popularity is indicated by the advance in the value of his copyrights. He sold the copyright of Sketches by Boz for £150, and before Pickwick was finished in the following year, he found reason to buy it back for no less than £2,000. Pickwick, scarcely equalled for broad humour in the English language, was published in monthly parts, and finished in November, 1837. It was Pickwick that led to the first meeting between Dickens and Thackeray; for on the suicide of Seymour, the original illustrator, Thackeray was one of those who offered to execute the sketches. Oliver Twist was begun before Pickwick was finished; and in the same way Nicholas Nickleby overlapped Oliver. Thus the stream flowed on for many years; and though towards the close of his life the rate of production was slower, Dickens, like Thackeray, was writing to the last.