In the meanwhile, however, he had commenced author in a more creative sense by penning some sketches of contemporary London life, such as he had attempted in his school days in imitation of the sketches published in the London and other magazines of that day. The first of these appeared in the December number of the Old Monthly Magazine for 1833. By the following August, when the signature “Boz” was first given, five of these sketches had appeared. By the end of 1834 we find him settled in rooms in Furnival’s Inn, and a little later his salary on the Morning Chronicle was raised, owing to the intervention of one of its chiefs, George Hogarth, the father of (in addition to six sons) eight charming daughters, to one of whom, Catherine, Charles was engaged to be married before the year was out. Clearly as his career now seemed designated, he was at this time or a little before it coquetting very seriously with the stage: but circumstances were rapidly to determine another stage in his career. A year before Queen Victoria’s accession appeared in two volumes Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Everyday Life and Everyday People. The book came from a prentice hand, but like the little tract on the Puritan abuse of the Sabbath entitled “Sunday under three Heads” which appeared a few months later, it contains in germ all, or almost all, the future Dickens. Glance at the headings of the pages. Here we have the Beadle and all connected with him, London streets, theatres, shows, the pawnshop, Doctors’ Commons, Christmas, Newgate, coaching, the river. Here comes a satirical picture of parliament, fun made of cheap snobbery, a rap on the knuckles of sectarianism. And what could be more prophetic than the title of the opening chapter—Our Parish? With the Parish—a large one indeed—Dickens to the end concerned himself; he began with a rapid survey of his whole field, hinting at all he might accomplish, indicating the limits he was not to pass. This year was to be still more momentous to Dickens, for, on the 2nd of April 1836, he was married to George Hogarth’s eldest daughter Catherine. He seems to have fallen in love with the daughters collectively, and, judging by subsequent events, it has been suggested that perhaps he married the wrong one. His wife’s sister Mary was the romance of his early married life, and another sister, Georgina, was the dearest friend of his last ten years.
A few days before the marriage, just two months after the appearance of the Sketches, the first part of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was announced. One of the chief vogues of the day was the issue of humorous, sporting or anecdotal novels in parts, with plates, and some of the best talent of the day, represented by Ainsworth, Bulwer, Marryat, Maxwell, Egan, Hook and Surtees, had been pressed into this kind of enterprise. The publishers of the day had not been slow to perceive Dickens’s aptitude for this species of “letterpress.” A member of the firm of Chapman & Hall called upon him at Furnival’s Inn in December 1835 with a proposal that he should write about a Nimrod Club of amateur sportsmen, foredoomed to perpetual ignominies, while the comic illustrations were to be etched by Seymour, a well-known rival of Cruikshank (the illustrator of Boz). The offer was too tempting for Dickens to refuse, but he changed the idea from a club of Cockney sportsmen to that of a club of eccentric peripatetics, on the sensible grounds, first that sporting sketches were stale, and, secondly, that he knew nothing worth speaking of about sport. The first seven pictures appeared with the signature of Seymour and the letterpress of Dickens. Before the eighth picture appeared Seymour had blown his brains out. After a brief interval of Buss, Dickens obtained the services of Hablot K. Browne, known to all as “Phiz.” Author and illustrator were as well suited to one another and to the common creation of a unique thing as Gilbert and Sullivan. Having early got rid of the sporting element, Dickens found himself at once. The subject exactly suited his knowledge, his skill in arranging incidents—nay, his very limitations too. No modern book is so incalculable. We commence laughing heartily at Pickwick and his troupe. The laugh becomes kindlier. We are led on through a tangle of adventure, never dreaming what is before us. The landscape changes: Pickwick becomes the symbol of kindheartedness, simplicity and innocent levity. Suddenly in the Fleet Prison a deeper note is struck. The medley of human relationships, the loneliness, the mystery and sadness of human destinies are fathomed. The tragedy of human life is revealed to us amid its most farcical elements. The droll and laughable figure of the hero is transfigured by the kindliness of human sympathy into a beneficent and bespectacled angel in shorts and gaiters. By defying accepted rules, Dickens had transcended the limited sphere hitherto allotted to his art: he had produced a book to be enshrined henceforth in the inmost hearts of all sorts and conditions of his countrymen, and had definitely enlarged the boundaries of English humour and English fiction. As for Mr Pickwick, he is a fairy like Puck or Santa Claus, while his creator is “the last of the mythologists and perhaps the greatest.”
When The Pickwick Papers appeared in book form at the close of 1837 Dickens’s popular reputation was made. From the appearance of Sam Weller in part v. the universal hunger for the monthly parts had risen to a furore. The book was promptly translated into French and German. The author had received little assistance from press or critics, he had no influential connexions, his class of subjects was such as to “expose him at the outset to the fatal objections of vulgarity,” yet in less than six months from the appearance of the first number, as the Quarterly Review almost ruefully admits, the whole reading world was talking about the Pickwickians. The names of Winkle, Wardle, Weller, Jingle, Snodgrass, Dodson & Fogg, were as familiar as household words. Pickwick chintzes figured in the linendrapers’ windows, and Pickwick cigars in every tobacconist’s; Weller corduroys became the stock-in-trade of every breeches-maker; Boz cabs might be seen rattling through the streets, and the portrait of the author of Pelham and Crichton was scraped down to make way for that of the new popular favourite on the omnibuses. A new and original genius had suddenly sprung up, there was no denying it, even though, as the Quarterly concluded, “it required no gift of prophecy to foretell his fate—he has risen like a rocket and he will come down like the stick.” It would have needed a very emphatic gift of prophecy indeed to foretell that Dickens’s reputation would have gone on rising until at the present day (after one sharp fall, which reached an extreme about 1887) it stands higher than it has ever stood before.
Dickens’s assumption of the literary purple was as amazing as anything else about him. Accepting the homage of the luminaries of the literary, artistic and polite worlds as if it had been his natural due, he arranges for the settlement of his family, decrees, like another Edmund Kean, that his son is to go to Eton, carries on the most complicated negotiations with his publishers and editors, presides and orates with incomparable force at innumerable banquets, public and private, arranges elaborate villegiatures in the country, at the seaside, in France or in Italy, arbitrates in public on every topic, political, ethical, artistic, social or literary, entertains and legislates for an increasingly large domestic circle, both juvenile and adult, rules himself and his time-table with a rod of iron. In his letter-writing alone, Dickens did a life’s literary work. Nowadays no one thinks of writing such letters; that is to say, letters of such length and detail, for the quality is Dickens’s own. He evidently enjoyed this use of the pen. Page after page of Forster’s Life (750 pages in the Letters edited by his daughter and sister-in-law) is occupied with transcription from private correspondence, and never a line of this but is thoroughly worthy of print and preservation. If he makes a tour in any part of the British Isles, he writes a full description of all he sees, of everything that happens, and writes it with such gusto, such mirth, such strokes of fine picturing, as appear in no other private letters ever given to the public. Naturally buoyant in all circumstances, a holiday gave him the exhilaration of a schoolboy. See how he writes from Cornwall, when on a trip with two or three friends, in 1843. “Heavens! if you could have seen the necks of bottles, distracting in their immense variety of shape, peering out of the carriage pockets! If you could have witnessed the deep devotion of the post-boys, the maniac glee of the waiters! If you could have followed us into the earthy old churches we visited, and into the strange caverns on the gloomy seashore, and down into the depths of mines, and up to the tops of giddy heights, where the unspeakably green water was roaring, I don’t know how many hundred feet below.... I never laughed in my life as I did on this journey. It would have done you good to hear me. I was choking and gasping and bursting the buckles off the back of my stock, all the way. And Stanfield”—the painter—“got into such apoplectic entanglements that we were obliged to beat him on the back with portmanteaus before we could recover him.”
The animation of Dickens’s look would attract the attention of any one, anywhere. His figure was not that of an Adonis, but his brightness made him the centre and pivot of every society he was in. The keenness and vivacity of his eye combined with his inordinate appetite for life to give the unique quality to all that he wrote. His instrument is that of the direct, sinewy English of Smollett, combined with much of the humorous grace of Goldsmith (his two favourite authors), but modernized to a certain extent under the influence of Washington Irving, Sydney Smith, Jeffrey, Lamb, and other writers of the London Magazine. He taught himself to speak French and Italian, but he could have read little in any language. His ideas were those of the inchoate and insular liberalism of the ’thirties. His unique force in literature he was to owe to no supreme artistic or intellectual quality, but almost entirely to his inordinate gift of observation, his sympathy with the humble, his power over the emotions and his incomparable endowment of unalloyed human fun. To contemporaries he was not so much a man as an institution, at the very mention of whose name faces were puckered with grins or wreathed in smiles. To many his work was a revelation, the revelation of a new world and one far better than their own. And his influence went further than this in the direction of revolution or revival. It gave what were then universally referred to as “the lower orders” a new sense of self-respect, a new feeling of citizenship. Like the defiance of another Luther, or the Declaration of a new Independence, it emitted a fresh ray of hope across the firmament. He did for the whole English-speaking race what Burns had done for Scotland—he gave it a new conceit of itself. He knew what a people wanted and he told what he knew. He could do this better than anybody else because his mind was theirs. He shared many of their “great useless virtues,” among which generosity ranks before justice, and sympathy before truth, even though, true to his middle-class vein, he exalts piety, chastity and honesty in a manner somewhat alien to the mind of the low-bred man. This is what makes Dickens such a demigod and his public success such a marvel, and this also is why any exclusively literary criticism of his work is bound to be so inadequate. It should also help us to make the necessary allowances for the man. Dickens, even the Dickens of legend that we know, is far from perfect. The Dickens of reality to which Time may furnish a nearer approximation is far less perfect. But when we consider the corroding influence of adulation, and the intoxication of unbridled success, we cannot but wonder at the relatively high level of moderation and self-control that Dickens almost invariably observed. Mr G. K. Chesterton remarks suggestively that Dickens had all his life the faults of the little boy who is kept up too late at night. He is overwrought by happiness to the verge of exasperation, and yet as a matter of fact he does keep on the right side of the breaking point. The specific and curative in his case was the work in which he took such anxious pride, and such unmitigated delight. He revelled in punctual and regular work; at his desk he was often in the highest spirits. Behold how he pictured himself, one day at Broadstairs, where he was writing Chuzzlewit. “In a bay-window in a one-pair sits, from nine o’clock to one, a gentleman with rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins, as if he thought he was very funny indeed. At one he disappears, presently emerges from a bathing-machine, and may be seen, a kind of salmon-colour porpoise, splashing about in the ocean. After that, he may be viewed in another bay-window on the ground-floor eating a strong lunch; and after that, walking a dozen miles or so, or lying on his back on the sand reading a book. Nobody bothers him, unless they know he is disposed to be talked to, and I am told he is very comfortable indeed. He’s as brown as a berry, and they do say he is as good as a small fortune to the innkeeper, who sells beer and cold punch.” Here is the secret of such work as that of Dickens; it is done with delight—done (in a sense) easily, done with the mechanism of mind and body in splendid order. Even so did Scott write; though more rapidly and with less conscious care: his chapter finished before the world had got up to breakfast. Later, Dickens produced novels less excellent with much more of mental strain. The effects of age could not have shown themselves so soon, but for the unfortunate loss of energy involved in his non-literary labours.
While the public were still rejoicing in the first sprightly runnings of the “new humour,” the humorist set to work desperately on the grim scenes of Oliver Twist, the story of a parish orphan, the nucleus of which had already seen the light in his Sketches. The early scenes are of a harrowing reality, despite the germ of forced pathos which the observant reader may detect in the pitiful parting between Oliver and little Dick; but what will strike every reader at once in this book is the directness and power of the English style, so nervous and unadorned: from its unmistakable clearness and vigour Dickens was to travel far as time went on. But the full effect of the old simplicity is felt in such masterpieces of description as the drive of Oliver and Sikes to Chertsey, the condemned-cell ecstasy of Fagin, or the unforgettable first encounter between Oliver and the Artful Dodger. Before November 1837 had ended, Charles Dickens entered on an engagement to write a successor to Pickwick on similar lines of publication. Oliver Twist was then in mid-career; a Life of Grimaldi and Barnaby Rudge were already covenanted for. Dickens forged ahead with the new tale of Nicholas Nickleby and was justified by the results, for its sale far surpassed even that of Pickwick. As a conception it is one of his weakest. An unmistakably 18th-century character pervades it. Some of the vignettes are among the most piquant and besetting ever written. Large parts of it are totally unobserved conventional melodrama; but the Portsmouth Theatre and Dotheboys Hall and Mrs Nickleby (based to some extent, it is thought, upon Miss Bates in Emma, but also upon the author’s Mamma) live for ever as Dickens conceived them in the pages of Nicholas Nickleby.
Having got rid of Nicholas Nickleby and resigned his editorship of Bentley’s Miscellany, in which Oliver Twist originally appeared, Dickens conceived the idea of a weekly periodical to be issued as Master Humphrey’s Clock, to comprise short stories, essays and miscellaneous papers, after the model of Addison’s Spectator. To make the weekly numbers “go,” he introduced Mr Pickwick, Sam Weller and his father in friendly intercourse. But the public requisitioned “a story,” and in No. 4 he had to brace himself up to give them one. Thus was commenced The Old Curiosity Shop, which was continued with slight interruptions, and followed by Barnaby Rudge. For the first time we find Dickens obsessed by a highly complicated plot. The tonality achieved in The Old Curiosity Shop surpassed anything he had attempted in this difficult vein, while the rich humour of Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness, and the vivid portraiture of the wandering Bohemians, attain the very highest level of Dickensian drollery; but in the lamentable tale of Little Nell (though Landor and Jeffrey thought the character-drawing of this infant comparable with that of Cordelia), it is generally admitted that he committed an indecent assault upon the emotions by exhibiting a veritable monster of piety and long-suffering in a child of tender years. In Barnaby Rudge he was manifestly affected by the influence of Scott, whose achievements he always regarded with a touching veneration. The plot, again, is of the utmost complexity, and Edgar Allan Poe (who predicted the conclusion) must be one of the few persons who ever really mastered it. But few of Dickens’s books are written in a more admirable style.
Master Humphrey’s Clock concluded, Dickens started in 1842 on his first visit to America—an episode hitherto without parallel in English literary history, for he was received everywhere with popular acclamation as the representative of a grand triumph of the English language and imagination, without regard to distinctions of nationality. He offended the American public grievously by a few words of frank description and a few quotations of the advertisement columns of American papers illustrating the essential barbarity of the old slave system (American Notes). Dickens was soon pining for home—no English writer is more essentially and insularly English in inspiration and aspiration than he is. He still brooded over the perverseness of America on the copyright question, and in his next book he took the opportunity of uttering a few of his impressions about the objectionable sides of American democracy, the result being that “all Yankee-doodle-dom blazed up like one universal soda bottle,” as Carlyle said. Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844) is important as closing his great character period. His sève originale, as the French would say, was by this time to a considerable extent exhausted, and he had to depend more upon artistic elaboration, upon satires, upon tours de force of description, upon romantic and ingenious contrivances. But all these resources combined proved unequal to his powers as an original observer of popular types, until he reinforced himself by autobiographic reminiscence, as in David Copperfield and Great Expectations, the two great books remaining to his later career.
After these two masterpieces and the three wonderful books with which he made his début, we are inclined to rank Chuzzlewit. Nothing in Dickens is more admirably seen and presented than Todgers’s, a bit of London particular cut out with a knife. Mr Pecksniff and Mrs Gamp, Betsy Prig and “Mrs Harris” have passed into the national language and life. The coach journey, the windy autumn night, the stealthy trail of Jonas, the undertone of tragedy in the Charity and Mercy and Chuffey episodes suggest a blending of imaginative vision and physical penetration hardly seen elsewhere. Two things are specially notable about this novel—the exceptional care taken over it (as shown by the interlineations in the MS.) and the caprice or nonchalance of the purchasing public, its sales being far lower than those of any of its monthly predecessors.
At the close of 1843, to pay outstanding debts of his now lavish housekeeping, he wrote that pioneer of Christmas numbers, that national benefit as Thackeray called it, A Christmas Carol. It failed to realize his pecuniary anticipations, and Dickens resolved upon a drastic policy of retrenchment and reform. He would save expense by living abroad and would punish his publishers by withdrawing his custom from them, at least for a time. Like everything else upon which he ever determined, this resolution was carried out with the greatest possible precision and despatch. In June 1844 he set out for Marseilles with his now rapidly increasing family (the journey cost him £200). In a villa on the outskirts of Genoa he wrote The Chimes, which, during a brief excursion to London before Christmas, he read to a select circle of friends (the germ of his subsequent lecture-audiences), including Forster, Carlyle, Stanfield, Dyce, Maclise and Jerrold. He was again in London in 1845, enjoying his favourite diversion of private theatricals; and in January 1846 he experimented briefly as the editor of a London morning paper—the Daily News. By early spring he was back at Lausanne, writing his customary vivid letters to his friends, craving as usual for London streets, commencing Dombey and Son, and walking his fourteen miles daily. The success of Dombey and Son completely rehabilitated the master’s finances, enabled him to return to England, send his son to Eton and to begin to save money. Artistically it is less satisfactory; it contains some of Dickens’s prime curios, such as Cuttle, Bunsby, Toots, Blimber, Pipchin, Mrs MacStinger and young Biler; it contains also that masterpiece of sentimentality which trembles upon the borderland of the sublime and the ridiculous, the death of Paul Dombey (“that sweet Paul,” as Jeffrey, the “critic laureate,” called him), and some grievous and unquestionable blemishes. As a narrative, moreover, it tails off into a highly complicated and exacting plot. It was followed by a long rest at Broadstairs before Dickens returned to the native home of his genius, and early in 1849 “began to prepare for David Copperfield.”