Grotesque characters proper are numerous enough in this book, but all the others pale before the immortal presence of Mrs. Gamp. She had been traced to an original in real life, but her literary right to stand on her own legs has been most properly vindicated against any supposition of likeness to the different type, the subject of Leigh Hunt’s Monthly Nurse—a paper, by-the-way, distinguished by shrewdness as well as feeling. Imagination has never taken bolder flights than those requisite for the development of Mrs. Gamp’s mental processes:
“‘And which of all them smoking monsters is the Ankworks boat, I wonder? Goodness me!’ cried Mrs. Gamp.
“‘What boat did you want?’ asked Ruth.
“‘The Ankworks package,’ Mrs. Gamp replied. ‘I will not deceive you, my sweet. Why should I?’
“‘That is the Antwerp packet in the middle,’ said Ruth.
“‘And I wish it was in Jonadge’s belly, I do!’ cried Mrs. Gamp, appearing to confound the prophet with the whale in this miraculous aspiration.”
A hardly inferior exertion of creative power was needed in order to fix in distinct forms the peculiarities of her diction, nay, to sustain the unique rhythm of her speech:
“‘I says to Mrs. Harris,’ Mrs. Gamp continued, ‘only t’ other day, the last Monday fortnight as ever dawned upon this Piljian’s Projiss of a mortal wale; I says to Mrs. Harris, when she says to me, “Years and our trials, Mrs. Gamp, sets marks upon us all”—“Say not the words, Mrs. Harris, if you and me is to be continual friends, for sech is not the case.”’”
Yet the reality of Mrs. Gamp has been acknowledged to be such that she has been the death of her sisterhood in a great part (to say the least) of our hospital wards and sick-rooms; and as for her oddities of tongue, they are, with the exception of her boldest figures, but the glorified type of all the utterances heard to this day from charwomen, laundresses, and single gentlemen’s house-keepers. Compared with her, even her friend and patron, Mr. Mould, and her admirer, Mr. Bailey, and in other parts of the book the low company at Todgers’s and the fine company at Mr. Tigg Montague’s sink into insignificance. The aged Chuffey is a grotesque study of a very different kind, of which the pathos never loses itself in exaggeration. As for Pecksniff, he is as far out of the range of grotesque as, except when moralising over the banisters at Todgers’s, he is out of that of genial characters. He is the richest comic type, while at the same time one of the truest, among the innumerable reproductions in English imaginative literature of our favourite national vice—hypocrisy. His friendliness is the very quintessence of falsehood: “Mr. Pinch,” he cries to poor Tom over the currant-wine and captain’s biscuits, “if you spare the bottle, we shall quarrel!” His understanding with his daughters is the very perfection of guile, for they confide in him, even when ignorant of his intentions, because of their certainty “that in all he does he has his purpose straight and full before him.” And he is a man who understands the times as well as the land in which he lives; for, as M. Taine has admirably pointed out, where Tartuffe would have been full of religious phrases, Pecksniff presents himself as a humanitarian philosopher. Comic art has never more successfully fulfilled its highest task after its truest fashion than in this picture of the rise and fall of a creature who never ceases to be laughable, and yet never ceases to be loathsome. Nothing is wanting in this wonderful book to attest the exuberance of its author’s genius. The kindly poetic spirit of the Christmas books breathes in sweet Ruth Pinch; and the tragic power of the closing chapters of Oliver Twist is recalled by the picture of Jonas before and after his deed of blood. I say nothing of merely descriptive passages, though in none of his previous stories had Dickens so completely mastered the secret of describing scenery and weather in their relation to his action or his characters.
Martin Chuzzlewit ran its course of twenty monthly numbers; but already a week or two before the appearance of the first of these, Dickens had bestowed upon the public, young and old, the earliest of his delightful Christmas Books. Among all his productions perhaps none connected him so closely, and as it were personally, with his readers. Nor could it well have been otherwise; since nowhere was he so directly intent upon promoting kindliness of feeling among men—more especially good-will, founded upon respect, towards the poor. Cheerfulness was, from his point of view, twin-sister to charity; and sulkiness, like selfishness, belonged, as an appropriate ort, to the dust-heap of “Tom Tiddler’s Ground.” What more fit than that he should mingle such sentiments as these with the holly and the mistletoe of the only English holiday in which remains a vestige of religious and poetic feeling? Beyond all doubt there is much that is tedious in the cultus of Father Christmas, and there was yet more in the days when the lower classes in England had not yet come to look upon a sufficiency of periodical holidays as part of their democratic inheritance. But that Dickens should constitute himself its chief minister and interpreter was nothing but fit. Already one of the Sketches had commended a Christmas-dinner at which a seat is not denied even to “poor Aunt Margaret;” and Mr. Pickwick had never been more himself than in the Christmas game of Blind-man’s-buff at Dingley Dell, in which “the poor relations caught the people who they thought would like it,” and, when the game flagged, “got caught themselves.” But he now sought to reach the heart of the subject; and the freshness of his fancy enabled him delightfully to vary his illustrations of a text of which it can do no man harm to be reminded in as well as out of season.