A happy accident having released the David Copperfield of actual life from his unworthy bondage, he was put in the way of an education such as at that time was the lot of most boys of the class to which he belonged. “The world has done much better since in that way, and will do far better yet,” he writes at the close of his description of Our School, the “Wellington House Academy,” situate near that point in the Hampstead Road where modest gentility and commercial enterprise touch hands. Other testimony confirms his sketch of the ignorant and brutal head-master; and doubtless this worthy and his usher, “considered to know everything as opposed to the chief who was considered to know nothing,” furnished some of the features in the portraits of Mr. Creakle and Mr. Mell. But it has been very justly doubted by an old school-fellow whether the statement “We were First Boy” is to be regarded as strictly historical. If Charles Dickens, when he entered the school, was “put into Virgil,” he was not put there to much purpose. On the other hand, with the return of happier days had come the resumption of the old amusements which were to grow into the occupations of his life. A club was founded among the boys at Wellington House for the express purpose of circulating short tales written by him, and he was the manager of the private theatricals which they contrived to set on foot.
After two or three years of such work and play it became necessary for Charles Dickens once more to think of earning his bread. His father, who had probably lost his official post at the time when, in Mr. Micawber’s phrase, “hope sunk beneath the horizon,” was now seeking employment as a parliamentary reporter, and must have rejoiced when a Gray’s Inn solicitor of his acquaintance, attracted by the bright, clever looks of his son, took the lad into his office as a clerk at a modest weekly salary. His office associates here were perhaps a grade or two above those of the blacking warehouse; but his danger now lay rather in the direction of the vulgarity which he afterwards depicted in such samples of the profession as Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling. He is said to have frequented, in company with a fellow-clerk, one of the minor theatres, and even occasionally to have acted there; and assuredly it must have been personal knowledge which suggested the curiously savage description of Private Theatres in the Sketches by Boz, the all but solitary unkindly reference to theatrical amusements in his works. But whatever his experiences of this kind may have been, he passed unscathed through them; and during the year and a half of his clerkship picked up sufficient knowledge of the technicalities of the law to be able to assail its enormities without falling into rudimentary errors about it, and sufficient knowledge of lawyers and lawyers’ men to fill a whole chamber in his gallery of characters.
Oddly enough, it was, after all, the example of the father that led the son into the line of life from which he was easily to pass into the career where success and fame awaited him. The elder Dickens having obtained employment as a parliamentary reporter for the Morning Herald, his son, who was living with him in Bentinck Street, Manchester Square, resolved to essay the same laborious craft. He was by this time nearly seventeen years of age, and already we notice in him what were to remain, through life, two of his most marked characteristics—strength of will, and a determination, if he did a thing at all, to do it thoroughly. The art of short-hand, which he now resolutely set himself to master, was in those days no easy study, though, possibly, in looking back upon his first efforts, David Copperfield overestimated the difficulties which he had conquered with the help of love and Traddles. But Dickens, whose education no Dr. Strong had completed, perceived that in order to succeed as a reporter of the highest class he needed something besides the knowledge of short-hand. In a word, he lacked reading; and this deficiency he set himself to supply as best he could by a constant attendance at the British Museum. Those critics who have dwelt on the fact that the reading of Dickens was neither very great nor very extensive, have insisted on what is not less true than obvious; but he had this one quality of the true lover of reading, that he never professed a familiarity with that of which he knew little or nothing. He continued his visits to the Museum, even when in 1828 he had become a reporter in Doctors’ Commons. With this occupation he had to remain as content as he could for nearly two years. Once more David Copperfield, the double of Charles Dickens in his youth, will rise to the memory of every one of his readers. For not only was his soul seized with a weariness of Consistory, Arches, Delegates, and the rest of it, to which he afterwards gave elaborate expression in his story, but his heart was full of its first love. In later days he was not of opinion that he had loved particularly wisely; but how well he had loved is known to every one who after him has lost his heart to Dora. Nothing came of the fancy, and in course of time he had composure enough to visit the lady who had been its object in the company of his wife. He found that Jip was stuffed as well as dead, and that Dora had faded into Flora; for it was as such that, not very chivalrously, he could bring himself to describe her, for the second time, in Little Dorrit.
Before at last he was engaged as a reporter on a newspaper, he had, and not for a moment only, thought of turning aside to another profession. It was the profession to which—uncommercially—he was attached during so great a part of his life, that when he afterwards created for himself a stage of his own, he seemed to be but following an irresistible fascination. His best friend described him to me as “a born actor;” and who needs to be told that the world falls into two divisions only—those whose place is before the foot-lights, and those whose place is behind them? His love of acting was stronger than himself; and I doubt whether he ever saw a play successfully performed without longing to be in and of it. “Assumption,” he wrote in after days to Lord Lytton, “has charms for me—I hardly know for how many wild reasons—so delightful that I feel a loss of, oh! I can’t say what exquisite foolery, when I lose a chance of being some one in voice, etc., not at all like myself.” He loved the theatre and everything which savoured of histrionics with an intensity not even to be imagined by those who have never felt a touch of the same passion. He had that “belief in a play” which he so pleasantly described as one of the characteristics of his life-long friend, the great painter, Clarkson Stanfield. And he had that unextinguishable interest in both actors and acting which makes a little separate world of the “quality.” One of the staunchest friendships of his life was that with the foremost English tragedian of his age, Macready; one of the delights of his last years was his intimacy with another well-known actor, the late Mr. Fechter. No performer, however, was so obscure or so feeble as to be outside the pale of his sympathy. His books teem with kindly likenesses of all manner of entertainers and entertainments—from Mr. Vincent Crummles and the more or less legitimate drama, down to Mr. Sleary’s horse-riding and Mrs. Jarley’s wax-work. He has a friendly feeling for Chops the dwarf, and for Pickleson the giant; and in his own quiet Broadstairs he cannot help tumultuously applauding a young lady “who goes into the den of ferocious lions, tigers, leopards, etc., and pretends to go to sleep upon the principal lion, upon which a rustic keeper, who speaks through his nose, exclaims, ‘Behold the abazid power of woobad!’” He was unable to sit through a forlorn performance at a wretched country theatre without longing to add a sovereign to the four-and-ninepence which he had made out in the house when he entered, and which “had warmed up in the course of the evening to twelve shillings;” and in Bow Street, near his office, he was beset by appeals such as that of an aged and greasy suitor for an engagement as Pantaloon: “Mr. Dickens, you know our profession, sir—no one knows it better, sir—there is no right feeling in it. I was Harlequin on your own circuit, sir, for five-and-thirty years, and was displaced by a boy, sir!—a boy!” Nor did his disposition change when he crossed the seas; the streets he first sees in the United States remind him irresistibly of the set-scene in a London pantomime; and at Verona his interest is divided between Romeo and Juliet and the vestiges of an equestrian troupe in the amphitheatre.
What success Dickens might have achieved as an actor it is hardly to the present purpose to inquire. A word will be said below of the success he achieved as an amateur actor and manager, and in his more than half-dramatic readings. But, the influence of early associations and personal feelings apart, it would seem that the artists of the stage whom he most admired were not those of the highest type. He was subdued by the genius of Frédéric Lemaître, but blind and deaf to that of Ristori. “Sound melodrama and farce” were the dramatic species which he affected, and in which as a professional actor he might have excelled. His intensity might have gone for much in the one, and his versatility and volubility for more in the other; and in both, as indeed in any kind of play or part, his thoroughness, which extended itself to every detail of performance or make-up, must have stood him in excellent stead. As it was, he was preserved for literature. But he had carefully prepared himself for his intended venture, and when he sought an engagement at Covent Garden, a preliminary interview with the manager was postponed only on account of the illness of the applicant.
Before the next theatrical season opened he had at last—in the year 1831—obtained employment as a parliamentary reporter, and after some earlier engagements he became, in 1834, one of the reporting staff of the famous Whig Morning Chronicle, then in its best days under the editorship of Mr. John Black. Now, for the first time in his life, he had an opportunity of putting forth the energy that was in him. He shrunk from none of the difficulties which in those days attended the exercise of his craft. They were thus depicted by himself, when a few years before his death he “held a brief for his brothers” at the dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund: “I have often transcribed for the printer from my short-hand notes important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been to a young man severely compromising; writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post-chaise and four, galloping through a wild country, and through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour.... I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back row of the old gallery of the old House of Commons; and I have worn my feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords, where we used to be huddled together like so many sheep kept in waiting, say, until the woolsack might want restuffing. Returning home from excited political meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country. I have been in my time belated on miry by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and have got back in time for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr. Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from the broadest of hearts I ever knew.” Thus early had Dickens learnt the secret of throwing himself into any pursuit once taken up by him, and of half achieving his task by the very heartiness with which he set about it. When at the close of the parliamentary session of the year 1836 his labours as a reporter came to an end, he was held to have no equal in the gallery. During this period his naturally keen powers of observation must have been sharpened and strengthened, and that quickness of decision acquired which constitutes, perhaps, the most valuable lesson that journalistic practice of any kind can teach to a young man of letters. To Dickens’s experience as a reporter may likewise be traced no small part of his political creed, in which there was a good deal of infidelity; or, at all events, his determined contempt for the parliamentary style proper, whether in the mouth of “Thisman” or of “Thatman,” and his rooted dislike of the “cheap-jacks” and “national dustmen” whom he discerned among our orators and legislators. There is probably no very great number of Members of Parliament who are heroes to those who wait attendance on their words. Moreover, the period of Dickens’s most active labours as a reporter was one that succeeded a time of great political excitement; and when men wish thankfully to rest after deeds, words are in season.
Meanwhile, very tentatively and with a very imperfect consciousness of the significance for himself of his first steps on a slippery path, Dickens had begun the real career of his life. It has been seen how he had been a writer as a “baby,” as a school-boy, and as a lawyer’s clerk, and the time had come when, like all writers, he wished to see himself in print. In December, 1833, the Monthly Magazine published a paper which he had dropped into its letter-box, and with eyes “dimmed with joy and pride” the young author beheld his first-born in print. The paper, called A Dinner at Poplar Walk, was afterwards reprinted in the Sketches by Boz under the title of Mr. Minns and his Cousin, and is laughable enough. His success emboldened him to send further papers of a similar character to the same magazine, which published ten contributions of his by February, 1835. That which appeared in August, 1834, was the first signed “Boz,” a nickname given by him in his boyhood to a favourite brother. Since Dickens used this signature not only as the author of the Sketches and a few other minor productions, but also as “editor” of the Pickwick Papers, it is not surprising that, especially among his admirers on the Continent and in America, the name should have clung to him so tenaciously. It was on a steamboat near Niagara that he heard from his state-room a gentleman complaining to his wife: “Boz keeps himself very close.”
But the Monthly Magazine, though warmly welcoming its young contributor’s lively sketches, could not afford to pay for them. He was therefore glad to conclude an arrangement with Mr. George Hogarth, the conductor of the Evening Chronicle, a paper in connexion with the great morning journal on the reporting staff of which he was engaged. He had gratuitously contributed a sketch to the evening paper as a personal favour to Mr. Hogarth, and the latter readily proposed to the proprietors of the Morning Chronicle that Dickens should be duly remunerated for this addition to his regular labours. With a salary of seven instead of, as heretofore, five guineas a week, and settled in chambers in Furnival’s Inn—one of those old legal inns which he loved so well—he might already in this year, 1835, consider himself on the high-road to prosperity. By the beginning of 1836 the Sketches by Boz printed in the Evening Chronicle were already numerous enough, and their success was sufficiently established to allow of his arranging for their republication. They appeared in two volumes, with etchings by Cruikshank, and the sum of a hundred and fifty pounds was paid to him for the copyright. The stepping-stones had been found and passed, and on the last day of March, which saw the publication of the first number of the Pickwick Papers, he stood in the field of fame and fortune. Three days afterwards Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, the eldest daughter of the friend who had so efficiently aided him in his early literary ventures. Mr. George Hogarth’s name thus links together the names of two masters of English fiction; for Lockhart speaks of him when a writer to the signet in Edinburgh as one of the intimate friends of Scott. Dickens’s apprenticeship as an author was over almost as soon as it was begun; and he had found the way short from obscurity to the dazzling light of popularity. As for the Sketches by Boz, their author soon repurchased the copyright for more than thirteen times the sum which had been paid to him for it.
In their collected form these Sketches modestly described themselves as “illustrative of every-day life and every-day people.” Herein they only prefigured the more famous creations of their writer, whose genius was never so happy as when lighting up, now the humorous, now what he chose to term the romantic, side of familiar things. The curious will find little difficulty in tracing in these outlines, often rough and at times coarse, the groundwork of more than one finished picture of later date. Not a few of the most peculiar features of Dickens’s humour are already here, together with not a little of his most characteristic pathos. It is true that in these early Sketches the latter is at times strained, but its power is occasionally beyond denial, as, for instance, in the brief narrative of the death of the hospital patient. On the other hand, the humour—more especially that of the Tales—is not of the most refined sort, and often degenerates in the direction of boisterous farce. The style, too, though in general devoid of the pretentiousness which is the bane of “light” journalistic writing, has a taint of vulgarity about it, very pardonable under the circumstances, but generally absent from Dickens’s later works. Weak puns are not unfrequent; and the diction but rarely reaches that exquisite felicity of comic phrase in which Pickwick and its successors excel. For the rest, Dickens’s favourite passions and favourite aversions alike reflect themselves here in small. In the description of the election for beadle he ridicules the tricks and the manners of political party-life, and his love of things theatrical has its full freshness upon it—however he may pretend at Astley’s that his “histrionic taste is gone,” and that it is the audience which chiefly delights him. But of course the gift which these Sketches pre-eminently revealed in their author was a descriptive power that seemed to lose sight of nothing characteristic in the object described, and of nothing humorous in an association suggested by it. Whether his theme was street or river, a Christmas dinner or the extensive groves of the illustrious dead (the old clothes shops in Monmouth Street), he reproduced it in all its shades and colours, and under a hundred aspects, fanciful as well as real. How inimitable, for instance, is the sketch of “the last cab-driver, and the first omnibus cad,” whose earlier vehicle, the omnipresent “red cab,” was not the gondola, but the very fire-ship of the London streets.
Dickens himself entertained no high opinion of these youthful efforts; and in this he showed the consciousness of the true artist, that masterpieces are rarely thrown off at hazard. But though much of the popularity of the Sketches may be accounted for by the fact that commonplace people love to read about commonplace people and things, the greater part of it is due to genuine literary merit. The days of half-price in theatres have followed the days of coaching; “Honest Tom” no more paces the lobby in a black coat with velvet facings and cuffs, and a D’Orsay hat; the Hickses of the present time no longer quote “Don Juan” over boarding-house dinner-tables; and the young ladies in Camberwell no longer compare young men in attitudes to Lord Byron, or to “Satan” Montgomery. But the Sketches by Boz have survived their birth-time; and they deserve to be remembered among the rare instances in which a young author has no sooner begun to write than he has shown a knowledge of his real strength. As yet, however, this sudden favourite of the public was unaware of the range to which his powers were to extend, and of the height to which they were to mount.