“I must now tell you about the beautiful little New Testament which he wrote for his children. I am sorry to say it is never to be published. It happens that he expressed that decided determination only last autumn to me, so we have no alternative. He wrote it years ago when his elder children were quite little. It is about sixteen short chapters, chiefly adapted from St. Luke’s Gospel, most beautiful, most touching, most simple, as such a narrative should be. He never would have it printed and I used to read it to the little boys in MS. before they were old enough to read writing themselves. When Charley’s children became old enough to have this kind of teaching, I promised Bessy (his wife) that I would make her a copy of this History, and I determined to do it as a Christmas Gift for her last year, but before I began my copy I asked Charles if he did not think it would be well for him to have it printed, at all events for private circulation, if he would not publish it (though I think it is a pity he would never do that!). He said he would look over the MS. and take a week or two to consider. At the end of the time he gave it back to me and said he had decided never to publish it—or even have it privately printed. He said I might make a copy for Bessy, or for any one of his children, but for no one else, and that he also begged that we would never even lend the MS., or a copy of it, to any one to take out of the house; so there is no doubt about his strong feeling on the subject, and we must obey it. I made my copy for Bessy and gave it to her last Christmas. After his death the original MS. became mine. As it was never published, of course it did not count as one of Mr. Forster’s MSS., and therefore it was one of his private papers, which were left to me. So I gave it at once to Mamie, who was, I thought, the most natural and proper possessor of it, as being his eldest daughter. You must come to England and read it, dear Friend! as we must not send it to you! We should be glad to see you and to show it to you and Mr. Fields in our own house.”

Miss Hogarth must have known full well that, if this manuscript Gospel according to Charles Dickens was to be shown to anybody outside his immediate circle, he himself would have chosen the Charles Street friends from what he called—to them—his “native Boston.”

VI
STAGE FOLK AND OTHERS

Had anyone crossed the Charles Street threshold of the Fieldses with the expectation of encountering within none but the New England Augustans, he would soon have found himself happily disillusioned, even at a time when there was no Dickens in Boston. As it was in reality, so must it be in these pages, if they are to fulfill their purpose of restoring a vanished scene, the variety of which must indeed be counted among its most distinctive characteristics. The pages that follow will accordingly serve to illustrate the familiar fact that the pudding of a “family party” is often rendered the more acceptable by the introduction of a few plums not plucked from the domestic tree.

Mrs. Fields once noted in her diary the circumstance that, when her husband came to Boston from Portsmouth at the age of fourteen, and began to work as a “boy” in the bookshop of Carter & Hendee, the second of these employers had a box at the theatre and, to keep his young employees happy, used constantly to ask one or more of them to see a play in his company. Thus enabled in his youth to see such actors as the elder Booth, Fanny Kemble and her father, and many others of the best players to be seen in America at the time, Fields acquired a love of the theatre and of stage folk which stood him in good stead throughout his life. A certain exuberance in his own nature must have sought a response in social contacts other than those of the straiter sect of his local contemporaries. In men and women of the stage, in authors from beyond the compass of the local horizon, writers with whom he formed relations in his double capacity of editor and publisher, in artists and public men outside the immediate “literary” circle of Boston, Fields took an unceasing delight, shared by his wife, and still communicable through her journals.

JAMES T. FIELDS AT FIFTEEN