Life of Charles Dickens

by Sir Frank T. Marzials

But to this medal there was a terrible reverse. Travelling from New York to Boston just before Christmas, he took a most disastrous cold, which never left him so long as he remained in the country. He was constantly faint. He ate scarcely anything. He slept very little. Latterly he was so lame, as scarcely to be able to walk. Again and again it seemed impossible that he should fulfil his night's engagement. He was constantly so exhausted at the conclusion of the reading, that he had to lie down for twenty minutes or half an hour, "before he could undergo the fatigue even of dressing." Mr. Dolby lived in daily fear lest he should break down altogether. "I used to steal into his room," he says, "at all hours of the night and early morning, to see if he were awake, or in want of anything; always though to find him wide awake, and as cheerful and jovial as circumstances would admit—never in the least complaining, and only reproaching me for not taking my night's rest." "Only a man of iron will could have accomplished what he did," says Mr. Fields, who knew him well, and saw him often during the tour.

In the first week of May, 1868, Dickens was back in England, and soon again in the thick of his work and play. Mr. Wills, the sub-editor of All the Year Round, had met with an accident. Dickens supplied his place. Chauncy Hare Townshend had asked him to edit a chaotic mass of religious lucubrations. He toilfully edited them. Then, with the autumn, the readings began again;—for it marks the indomitable energy of the man that, even amid the terrible physical trials incident to his tour in America, he had agreed with Messrs. Chappell, for a sum of £8,000, to give one hundred more readings after his return. So in October the old work began again, and he was here, there, and everywhere, now reading at Manchester and Liverpool, now at Edinburgh and Glasgow, anon coming back to read fitfully in London, then off again to Ireland, or the West of England. Nor is it necessary to say that he spared himself not one whit. In order to give novelty to these readings, which were to be positively the last, he had laboriously got up the scene of Nancy's murder, in "Oliver Twist," and persisted in giving it night after night, though of all his readings it was the one that exhausted him most terribly.[34] But of course this could not last. The pain in his foot "was always recurring at inconvenient and unexpected moments," says Mr. Dolby, and occasionally the American cold came back too. In February, in London, the foot was worse than it had ever been, so bad that Sir Henry Thompson, and Mr. Beard, his medical adviser, compelled him to postpone a reading. At Edinburgh, a few days afterwards, Mr. Syme, the eminent surgeon, strongly recommended perfect rest. Still he battled on, but "with great personal suffering such as few men could have endured." Sleeplessness was on him too. And still he fought on, determined, if it were physically possible, to fulfil his engagement with Messrs. Chappell, and complete the hundred nights. But it was not to be. Symptoms set in that pointed alarmingly towards paralysis of the left side. At Preston, on the 22nd of April, Mr. Beard, who had come post-haste from London, put a stop to the readings, and afterwards decided, in consultation with Sir Thomas Watson, that they ought to be suspended entirely for the time, and never resumed in connection with any railway travelling.

Even this, however, was not quite the end; for a summer of comparative rest, or what Dickens considered rest, seemed so far to have set him up that he gave a final series of twelve readings in London between the 11th of January and 15th of March, 1870, thus bringing to its real conclusion an enterprise by which, at whatever cost to himself, he had made a sum of about £45,000.

Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1869, he had gone back to the old work, and was writing a novel, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." It is a good novel unquestionably. Without going so far as Longfellow, who had doubts whether it was not "the most beautiful of all" Dickens' works, one may admit that there is about it a singular freshness, and no sign at all of mental decay. As for the "mystery," I do not think that need baffle us altogether. But then I see no particular reason to believe that Dickens had wished to baffle us, or specially to rival Edgar Allan Poe or Mr. Wilkie Collins in the construction of criminal puzzles. Even though only half the case is presented to us, and the book remains for ever unfinished, we need have, I think, no difficulty in working out its conclusion. The course pursued by Mr. Jasper, Lay Precentor of the Cathedral at Cloisterham, is really too suspicious. No intelligent British jury, seeing the facts as they are presented to us, the readers, could for a moment think of acquitting him of the murder of his nephew, Edwin Drood. Take those facts seriatim. First, we have the motive: he is passionately in love with the girl to whom his nephew is engaged. Then we have a terrible coil of compromising circumstances: his extravagant profession of devotion to his nephew, his attempts to establish a hidden influence over the girl's mind to his nephew's detriment and his own advantage, his gropings amid the dark recesses of the Cathedral and inquiries into the action of quicklime, his endeavours to foment a quarrel between Edwin Drood and a fiery young gentleman from Ceylon, on the night of the murder, and his undoubted doctoring of the latter's drink. Then, after the murder, how damaging is his conduct. He falls into a kind of fit on discovering that his nephew's engagement had been broken off, which he might well do if his crime turned out to be not only a crime but also a blunder. And his conduct to the girl is, to say the least of it, strange. Nor will his character help him. He frequents the opium dens of the East-end of London. Guilty, guilty, most certainly guilty. There is nothing to be said in arrest of judgment. Let the judge put on the black cap, and Jasper be devoted to his merited doom.

Such was the story that Dickens was unravelling in the spring and early summer of 1870. And fortune smiled upon it. He had sold the copyright for the large sum of £7,500, and a half share of the profits after a sale of twenty-five thousand copies, plus £1,000 for the advance sheets sent to America; and the sale was more than answering his expectations. Nor did prosperity look favourably on the book alone. It also, in one sense, showered benefits on the author. He was worth, as the evidence of the Probate Court was to show only too soon, a sum of over £80,000. He was happy in his children. He was universally loved, honoured, courted. "Troops of friends," though, alas! death had made havoc among the oldest, were still his. Never had man exhibited less inclination to pay fawning court to greatness and social rank. Yet when the Queen expressed a desire to see him, as she did in March, 1870, he felt not only pride, but a gentleman's pleasure in acceding to her wish, and came away charmed from a long chatting interview. But, while prosperity was smiling thus, the shadows of his day of life were lengthening, lengthening, and the night was at hand.

On Wednesday, June 8th, he seemed in excellent spirits; worked all the morning in the Châlet[35] as was his wont, returned to the house for lunch and a cigar, and then, being anxious to get on with "Edwin Drood," went back to his desk once more. The weather was superb. All round the landscape lay in fullest beauty of leafage and flower, and the air rang musically with the song of birds. What were his thoughts that summer day as he sat there at his work? Writing many years before, he had asked whether the "subtle liquor of the blood" may not "perceive, by properties within itself," when danger is imminent, and so "run cold and dull"? Did any such monitor within, one wonders, warn him at all that the hand of death was uplifted to strike, and that its shadow lay upon him? Judging from the words that fell from his pen that day we might almost think that it was so—we might almost go further, and guess with what hopes and fears he looked into the darkness beyond. Never at any time does he appear to have been greatly troubled by speculative doubt. There is no evidence in his life, no evidence in his letters, no evidence in his books, that he had ever seen any cause to question the truth of the reply which Christianity gives to the world-old problems of man's origin and destiny. For abstract speculation he had not the slightest turn or taste. In no single one of his characters does he exhibit any fierce mental struggle as between truth and error. All that side of human experience, with its anguish of battle, its despairs, and its triumphs, seems to have been unknown to him. Perhaps he had the stronger grasp of other matters in consequence—who knows? But the fact remains. With a trust quite simple and untroubled, he held through life to the faith of Christ. When his children were little, he had written prayers for them, had put the Bible into simpler language for their use. In his will, dated May 12, 1869, he had said, "I commit my soul to the mercy of God through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and I exhort my dear children humbly to try to guide themselves by the broad teaching of the New Testament in its broad spirit, and to put no faith in any man's narrow construction of its letter here or there." And now, on this last day of his life, in probably the last letter that left his pen, he wrote to one who had objected to some passage in "Edwin Drood" as irreverent: "I have always striven in my writings to express veneration for the life and lessons of our Saviour—because I feel it." And with a significance, of which, as I have said, he may himself have been dimly half-conscious, among the last words of his unfinished story, written that very afternoon, are words that tell of glorious summer sunshine transfiguring the city of his imagination, and of the changing lights, and the song of birds, and the incense from garden and meadow that "penetrate into the cathedral" of Cloisterham, "subdue its earthy odour, and preach the Resurrection and the Life."

For now the end had come. When he went in to dinner Miss Hogarth noticed that he looked very ill, and wished at once to send for a doctor. But he refused, struggled for a short space against the impending fit, and tried to talk, at last very incoherently. Then, when urged to go up to his bed, he rose, and, almost immediately, slid from her supporting arm, and fell on the floor. Nor did consciousness return. He passed from the unrest of life into the peace of eternity on the following day, June 9, 1870, at ten minutes past six in the evening.

And now he lies in Westminster Abbey, among the men who have most helped, by deed or thought, to make this England of ours what it is. Dean Stanley only gave effect to the national voice when he assigned to him that place of sepulture. The most popular, and in most respects the greatest novelist of his time; the lord over the laughter and tears of a whole generation; the writer, in his own field of fiction, whose like we shall probably not see again for many a long, long year, if ever; where could he be laid more fittingly for his last long sleep than in the hallowed resting-place which the country sets apart for the most honoured of her children?

So he lies there among his peers in the Southern Transept. Close beside him sleep Dr. Johnson, the puissant literary autocrat of his own time; and Garrick, who was that time's greatest actor; and Handel, who may fittingly claim to have been one of the mightiest musicians of all time. There sleeps, too, after the fitful fever of his troubled life, the witty, the eloquent Sheridan. In close proximity rests Macaulay, the artist-historian and essayist. Within the radius of a few yards lies all that will ever die of Chaucer, who five hundred years ago sounded the spring note of English literature, and gave to all after-time the best, brightest glimpse into mediæval England; and all that is mortal also of Spenser of the honey'd verse; and of Beaumont, who had caught an echo of Shakespeare's sweetness if not his power; and of sturdy Ben Jonson, held in his own day a not unworthy rival of Shakespeare's self; and of "glorious" and most masculine John Dryden. From his monument Shakespeare looks upon the place with his kindly eyes, and Addison too, and Goldsmith; and one can almost imagine a smile of fellowship upon the marble faces of those later dead—Burns, Coleridge, Southey, and Thackeray.