’em), and thirty-seven clocks (keeping, as I conceive, Australian time).”
In September of the same year (1853) he writes to Walter Savage Landor:—“I may now write to thank you for the happiness you have given me by honouring my name with such generous mention on (? in) such a noble place, in your great book. . . . Believe me, I receive the dedication like a great dignity, the worth of which I hope I thoroughly know.”
In this year, too, he gave his first public readings, which took place at Birmingham, and well would it have been for him had he never embarked on this exhausting occupation. He describes his reading:—“A vast intelligent assemblage, and the success was most wonderful and prodigious—perfectly overwhelming and astounding altogether.” No wonder that he was tempted to continue such a triumph! A passage in a letter to Cerjat shows how celebrated he already was:—“He embarked at Calais for Dover, and the ‘Fact of distinguished Author’s being abroad, was telegraphed to Dover; thereupon authorities of Dover Railway detained train to London for distinguished author’s arrival, rather to the exasperation of British public.’”
In November 1854 he speaks of being “used up” after writing Hard Times. He had intended to take a long rest, “when the idea [of that book] laid hold of me by the throat, in a very violent manner, and because the compression and close condensation necessary for that disjointed form of publication gave me perpetual trouble. But I really was tired, which is a result so very incomprehensible that I can’t forget it.”
Dickens took pains with his style even in his letters, and it gives one a shock to find him writing that Adelaide Proctor “don’t live at the place to which her letters are addressed,” where I should write “doesn’t.”
In 1855 he began Little Dorrit in Paris, a book he originally christened Nobody’s Fault, and the change was certainly a wise one.
In this year we find him assisting at the birth of an admirable book:—“Sydney Smith’s daughter [219] has privately printed the life of her father with selections from his letters, which has great merit and often presents him exactly as he used to be. I have strongly urged her to publish it” (i., p. 390).
In planning his public readings about this time, he writes (29th January 1855, in regard to David Copperfield):—“I never can approach the book with perfect composure (it had such perfect possession of me when I wrote it).”
One of the many instances of his scrupulous honesty is his refusal of an invitation to a Lord Mayor’s dinner. “I do not think it consistent with my respect for myself, or for the art I profess, to blow hot and cold in the same breath; and to laugh at an institution in print, and accept the hospitality of its representative while the ink is staring us all in the face.”
In returning from reading at Sheffield, “a tremendous success,” he describes his experiences: “At two or three o’clock in the morning I stopped at Peterboro’ again, and thought of you all disconsolately. The lady in the refreshment-room was very hard upon me, harder even than those fair enslavers usually are.