My father wrote always with a quill pen and blue ink, and never, I think, used a lead pencil. His handwriting was considered extremely difficult to read by many people, but I never found it so. In his manuscripts there were so many erasures, and such frequent interlineations that a special staff of compositors was used for his work, but this was not on account of any illegibility in his handwriting. The manuscripts are most of them, exhibited at
the South Kensington Museum in “the Forster Collection,” and they all show I think, the extreme care and fastidiousness of the writer, and his ever-constant desire to improve upon and simplify his original sentence. His objection to the use of a lead pencil was so great that even his personal memoranda, such as his lists of guests for dinner parties, the arrangement of tables and menus, were always written in ink. For his personal correspondence he used blue note paper, and signed his name in the left-hand corner of the envelope. After a morning’s close work he was sometimes quite pre-occupied when he came into luncheon. Often, when we were only our home party at “Gad’s Hill,” he would come in, take something to eat in a mechanical way—he never ate but a small luncheon—and would return to his study to finish the work he had left, scarcely having spoken a word in all this time. Again, he would come in, having finished his work,
but looking very tired and worn. Our talking at these times did not seem to disturb him, though any sudden sound, as the dropping of a spoon, or the clinking of a glass, would send a spasm of pain across his face.
The sudden, almost instantaneous, popularity of “Pickwick” was known to the world long before it was realized by its anxious young author. All the business transactions concerning its publication were modest to a degree, and the preparations for such a success as came to it were none. As to its popularity, Mr. Forster writes: “Judges on the bench, and boys in the streets, gravity and folly, the young and the old, those who were entering life, and those who were quitting it, alike found it irresistible.” Carlyle wrote: “An archdeacon repeated to me, with his own venerable lips, the other evening, a strange, profane story of a solemn clergyman who had been summoned to administer consolation
to a very ill man. As he left the room he heard the sick man ejaculate: “Well thank God, Pickwick will be out in ten days, anyway!” No young author ever sprang into more sudden and brilliant fame than “Boz,” and none could have remained more thoroughly unspoiled, or so devoid of egotism under success. His own opinion of his fame, and his estimate of its value, may be quoted here: “To be numbered amongst the household gods of one’s distant countrymen, and associated with their homes and quiet pleasures; to be told that in each nook and corner of the world’s great mass there lives one well-wisher who holds communion with one in the spirit, is a worthy fame, indeed. That I may be happy enough to cheer some of your leisure hours for a long time to come, and to hold a place in your pleasant thoughts, is the earnest wish of ‘Boz.’”
On the Christmas Eve of 1863 my
father was greatly shocked and distressed to hear of the sudden death of Mr. Thackeray. Our guests, naturally, were full of the sad news, and there was a gloom cast over everything. We all thought of the sorrow of his two daughters, who were so devoted to him, and whom his sudden taking away would leave so desolate. In “The Cornhill Magazine” of the February following, my father wrote: “I saw Mr. Thackeray for the first time nearly twenty-eight years ago, when he proposed to become the illustrator of my earliest book. I saw him last shortly before Christmas, at the Athenæum Club, when he told me he had been in bed three days, and that he had it in his mind to try a new remedy, which he laughingly described. He was cheerful, and looked very bright. In the night of that day week he died. * * * * No one can be surer than I of the greatness and goodness of his heart. In no place should I take it upon myself
at this time to discourse of his books, of his refined knowledge of character, of his subtle acquaintance with the weakness of human nature, of his delightful playfulness as an essayist, of his quaint and touching ballads, of his mastery over the English language. But before me lies all that he had written of his latest story, and the pain I have felt in perusing it has not been deeper than the conviction that he was in the healthiest region of his powers when he worked on this last labor. The last words he corrected in print were ‘and my heart throbbed with an exquisite bliss.’ God grant that on that Christmas Eve, when he laid his head back on his pillow and threw up his arms as he had been wont to do when very weary, some consciousness of duty done, and of Christian hope throughout life humbly cherished, may have caused his own heart so to throb when he passed away to his rest.”
CHAPTER IV.
Fondness for Athletic Sports.—His love of bathing.—His study of the raven.—Calling the doctor in.—My father with our dogs.—The cats of “Gad’s Hill.”—“Bumble” and “Mrs. Bouncer.”—A strange friendship.