Delphi complete works of.., p.571
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 571
‘He was a healthy looking boy,’ wrote one of his schoolfellows long afterward, ‘small but well built, with a more than usual flow of spirits inducing to harmless fun, seldom if never to mischief. I cannot recall then that he indicated that he would hereafter become a literary celebrity.’ ‘I do not remember,’ wrote another classmate, ‘that Dickens distinguished himself in any way or carried off any prizes. My belief is that he did not learn Latin and Greek there and you will remember that there is no allusion to the classics in any of his writings. He was a handsome, curly-headed lad, full of animation and animal spirits.’ All of those who have described the youthful Dickens from boyhood to adolescence, have spoken of the singular animation of his look, the arresting power of his eye, the impression of a ‘mesmeric’ personality. As to ‘allusions to the classics’, we have at least Dr. Blimber of Dombey to the contrary. But no doubt the writer meant ‘quotations’.
The schooling was but brief. Charles Dickens was never educated, or rather, as his father once grandiloquently phrased it, ‘he may be said to have educated himself.’ At fourteen the little boy passed on to the status of an attorney’s clerk, — not articled, but what would now be called an office-boy, — with a Mr. Edward Blackmore of Gray’s Inn. This was from May 1827 to November 1829. Here began for Dickens that profound knowledge of the forms and surroundings of the law and that profound contempt for it which never left him; here were laid the first foundations of the jurisprudence of Bardell vs. Pickwick; here begin the long series of the Dodsons and Foggs, the Vholeses, the Parkers and the Tulkinghorns who embody forever in the paper of Dickens’s book the figures and the figments of the Victorian bar and bench. Throughout his life Charles Dickens saw little but the comic side of law and government. Politics to him were humbug, the cabinet system a delirious piece of nonsense, and a political party a delightful make-believe. He saw either this or the tragic side, — the tyranny and oppression of the strong, the law’s injustices and the heartbreak of the delays of the Chancery. Living in the solid security of Victorian England, with peace and prosperity and stability, the very firmness of the ground concealed from him the basis on which it rested. Once or twice only he stood on other ground as when he depicted the Gordon Riots in Barnaby Rudge or the flames of the French revolution. But it did not occur to him that perhaps the existence of ‘Doodle and Coodle’, alternating in the cabinet with ‘Noodle and Foodie’, and of the wooden magistrates and even the solemn nincompoops of the Circumlocution Office, had something to do with the unbroken life of peace and security which he himself enjoyed. To the simplest of us now, law, politics, and government have become a life and death matter. Not so to Dickens. He saw only the joke of it. No doubt it was better so.
At this time Dickens the elder, with a characteristic change of fortune, converted himself into a reporter working for a London newspaper in the press gallery of the Commons. There is something queer and appealing about John Dickens, alternating from the desk of the pay office, and from the tears and the pewter pots of the debtors’ prison to the swift efficiency of the shorthand expert in the world’s greatest legislature.
‘Shorthand’ at that time was a rising art. Cultivated in one shape or another since ancient times it had, like so many other things, made enormous advances in England in the eighteenth century. It had learned to follow sounds, not letters. It had caught up with the ordinary pace of human speech. It had been immensely stimulated by the licensed publication of debates, the steam press, and the rapid carriage of newspapers by the ‘flying coaches’ of the days of William IV. How old Dickens learned it we do not know. But young Dickens threw himself into the study of the mystic art with ardour and passion. His inimitable description of David Copperfield (that non-existent and unconvincing personage) learning shorthand describes his own efforts and his own success. But access to the parliamentary gallery was not to be had at once, even for so expert a writer as Charles Dickens rapidly became. He got employment as a reporter in one of the offices of ‘Doctors’ Commons’. This quaint and ancient institution, which has charmed and mystified the readers of Dickens for over half a century, was from the days of Queen Elizabeth till 1857 a society of lawyers concerned with cases of Church jurisdiction, and with such matters as wills and testaments, marriage and divorce as have, or once had, a ghostly connotation. They were incorporated as the ‘College of Law Exercent in the Ecclesiastical and Admiralty Courts.’ The thirty-four ‘proctors’ of the college, — as who should say the solicitors, ground the grist in the mills of the Probate, Divorce, and Admiralty courts. Among these lived and moved the Mr. Spenlow and the ‘inexorable’ Mr. Jorkins of David Copperfield. And in the office of one of them laboured as a reporter for two years the youth Charles Dickens.
Dickens, when he reported at Doctors’ Commons, was aged eighteen, — nineteen when he left it. The law itself as a career meant nothing to him: his work was a task and nothing more, but illuminated and relieved his abiding appreciation of the comic side of anything serious. But life was opening in front of him. He lived, still with his parents, at No. 18 Bentinck Street; had many friends and acquaintances and went out and about in what was not society with a capital S, but was at any rate social company. It was not unfitting that later on Dickens should have made David Copperfield’s Dora (famous among the heroines of fiction) the daughter of Mr. Spenlow of Doctors’ Commons. For it was in his days at the Commons that he met his own Dora and fell as immediately and as hopelessly in love as David did. Of this ‘Dora’ one must speak in a later chapter. Suffice it for the moment to say that she was separated in station from young Charles by one of those nice gradations of social status familiar in England, — in the England that was, — but indistinguishable from a distance. The shabby-genteel status of the Dickens family, their lack of prospects and their want of ‘class’, put them a cut below the Beadnells. Young Maria’s family saw to it that Dickens was not encouraged; and that a little later, absence and distance should terminate the whole connection. Henceforth, for twenty years, Maria was to Dickens like the lost Annabel Lee to Edgar Allen Poe. Pity that she didn’t stay lost. The history of literature would have been spared one of its meanest episodes.
But not even a broken heart can check the ardour of a body of nineteen. Dickens after all had the sharp spur of necessity and with that plenty of other interests. The ‘self-improvement’ idea had struck him hard. He read and studied in the British Museum. And more than all, there dawned upon his impressionable mind the glittering of the stage. From youth to age everything dramatic fascinated Charles Dickens. From his boyhood he haunted the cheap and popular theatres of the London of that day. Even in his Wellington House days he took the lead in getting up amateur theatricals, a pursuit and a hobby of which he never tired. Had he not turned into a writer, he would inevitably have become an actor. His public ‘readings’, later on, were largely histrionic performances, which held his audiences gripped by the mesmeric power of the presentation. As Dickens ‘read’, the audience saw not Charles Dickens beside a desk but the crouching figure of the murderer Bill Sikes, or the glorious comicality of Mr. Weller.
The theatre (not the classic stage of Shakespeare and Racine) left a deep mark on the thought and the work of Dickens, — and not all for its good. ‘The popular drama of that time,’ writes Mr. Robert Blatchford looking back in, and over, his Eighty Years, ‘would be derided to-day as wild absurdity. . . . The audience (at the little London theatre called the Bower) had a robust taste. They demanded ghosts and pirates, smugglers and slave drivers, jack-tars and brigands: combats, abductions, love, treachery, battle, murder and blue fire, — and they got them. . . . I have witnessed,’ continues the same writer, ‘a soul-stirring combat between one seaman and sixteen smugglers. Jack always fought two-handed, but before he drew his swords he would knock down a pair of pirates with his fists, disable another with his quid, stop a fourth with his hat, and then, putting the muslin-clad damsel in distress behind him, he would get to the business of the evening.
This is the stage which Dickens has portrayed in Nicholas Nickleby, the stage of the inimitable but actual Mr. Vincent Crummels, and the stage from which Dickens drew the melodramatic language of his characters, and delirious coincidence of his plots. ‘Open the door of some place’, says the murderer Sikes to his associates, ‘where I can lock this Screeching Hell Babe’. Just so: right out of the Bower theatre.
Throughout his Doctors’ Commons days Dickens’s mind was constantly on the stage. ‘He went to the theatre almost every night for a long time’, wrote John Forster, his biographer, ‘he studied and practised himself in parts and finally resolved to make his first plunge’. It was just at the beginning of the year 1831 when he wrote to a Covent Garden manager, received an encouraging reply and an appointment, and then, by one of his own vital coincidences, had a severe earache and could not go. And when his ear was well, and the next chance came, other gates had opened for him on wider prospects and Charles Dickens the actor that might have been was converted into ‘Boz’ the writer that actually was. The penury, the servitude, and the apprenticeship were over. Charles Dickens was coming into his own.
CHAPTER II. MR. PICKWICK TAKES THE WORLD BY STORM
DICKENS AS A REPORTER — SKETCHES BY BOZ — THE PICKWICK PAPERS
Charles Dickens was admitted to the gallery of the old House of Commons, — the unreformed and unburned House of 1831, — at the age of nineteen years. He had made himself, even in the merely mechanical sense, a marvellous reporter. He had conquered the systems of shorthand as then dispensed at ten and sixpence by a Mr. Gurney. He could write it with singular speed and accuracy, and write it, apparently, sitting or standing, moving or at rest, and, — what is the really harder thing to do with shorthand, — read it again and transcribe it without a missing word. Thirty years later Dickens once told an admiring company of what reporting meant in the days when the stage coach was, and the telegraph was not. ‘I have often,’ he said, ‘transcribed for the printer from my shorthand 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 postchaise and four, galloping through a wild country, through the dead of night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour. . . . I have worn my knees by writing on them in 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 like so many sheep. . . . I have been in my time belated on miry byroads towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a rickety carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken postboys and got back in time for publication.’
From such memories as these Dickens was to draw later on those wonderful scenes of coaching days and coaching nights that adorn so many pages of his books; the flight of Mr. Jingle and the maiden aunt; the moonlight journey of Tom Pinch, and the mail coach on the Dover Road on a heavy November night in the scene that opens the immortal Tale of Two Cities.
But meantime Dickens, while still reporting, had begun to ‘write’. It seems that from his childhood he had always made up in his head imaginary tales and sketched imaginary characters. He had even written them down. At school he had improvised dramas and made up a sort of mimic language for himself and his schoolfellows. Now he began in earnest, writing stories, and at length, greatly daring, he sent one by post to a magazine. Every book on Dickens has quoted the passage in which he has himself described his sensations at his first literary success. He had dropped his first manuscript into a letter-box, posting it after dark with stealth and fear. Then in due course he saw himself in all the majesty of print. ‘On which occasion,’ he says, ‘I walked down to Westminster Hall and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride that they could not bear the street and were not fit to be seen there.’ The magazine to which he sent the story was the Old Monthly Magazine, published by a Captain Holland, and the story was entitled A Dinner at Poplar Walk, afterwards published under the name of Mr. Minns and his Cousin. It appeared in December of 1833 and was followed by nine other sketches in the same magazine. The sketch of August 1834 was the first to be signed with the pen-name ‘Boz’. This was the nickname of Dickens’s youngest brother, Augustus, and was a sort of nursery adaptation of Moses.
The young author received no pay, the editor of the struggling publication being utterly unable to give him any. So the contributions came to an end. But by good luck a new opening appeared just at the right moment. The Morning Chronicle, for which young Dickens worked as a reporter at a salary of five guineas a week, was about to add an evening edition of a special nature. Dickens proposed to the organizing editor, a Mr. Hogarth, that he should contribute sketches to the evening paper and receive an award of extra pay. The arrangement was made. Indeed every one on the Chronicle, and most of all John Black the editor, seems to have been immensely impressed with Dickens from start to finish. The extra two guineas a week added to his salary was a further proof of it. Henceforth the sketches flowed in a stream from Dickens’s easy pen. The name ‘Boz’ became well known, not to the world at large but at least to the newspaper world of London. When the sketches had sufficiently accumulated, a publisher (John Macrone) was found who offered a hundred and fifty pounds for the copyright. In due time the Sketches by Boz (2 volumes, 1836) appeared as Dickens’s first work. The volumes were illustrated by the well-known George Cruikshank. Thenceforth and for many years Dickens was ‘Boz’ to those who read him. The Pickwick Papers in their first dress bore the legend, ‘Edited by Boz’. Oliver Twist as a serial was signed by ‘Boz’, and it was ‘Boz’ who edited the Memoirs of Grimaldi in 1838. But Pickwick as a book (1837) and Oliver Twist as a book (1838) were signed by Charles Dickens. After that the name disappeared, but the public both in England and America went on using the name at least as an affectionate term for Dickens for many years. It was never, however, a question of hiding a real name behind an anonymity. At first people knew who Boz was, and were no wiser if told that his real name was Dickens. In time the name wore out, fortunately enough, for it lacked dignity and seriousness, being after all more fit for a dog or a clown or a patent medicine than for a writer. The wonder is that it clung so long. The Americans of the ‘forties all welcomed Dickens as ‘Boz’: old-fashioned people kept it up for a long time. Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, writing his book on Dickens in 1905, ‘bozzes’ him perpetually and apologises for it, as a reminiscence not shaken off in old age. ‘Time was’, he says, ‘when it was in everybody’s mouth, and it conveyed a great deal more than it does now, . . . a pleasant tone of affectionate interest.’
It is difficult at this date to estimate the literary value of the Sketches by Boz. On the one hand, they belong to a bygone time. The passage of a hundred years (it is, one notes, exactly a hundred years since they were written) has greatly changed the form of our thought, the fashion of our literature and the character and cast of our humour. Since they were written a million writers, great and small, have chronicled their impression of ‘everyday life and everyday people’. In this, as in all else, we stand on the shoulders of those who went before us; albeit that in imaginary literature the position is different from the rising steps of science and the footing is infinitely harder to keep. It would be silly to say that all writers now are better than any writers then. But at least all now share in the legacy they left then.
On the other hand, and working in the other direction, is the fact that the Sketches by Boz were written by Charles Dickens, and that when we read them we know who wrote them. This gives them something of the sacred quality which surrounds the quaint incompetence of a primitive artist and opens the way to much the same conventional admiration.
The Sketches made no pretence of being in a lofty plane, or opening a tragic depth. They are just light pictures of ordinary people and ordinary happenings. The aim is to interest and amuse. The humour is distinctly in advance of most that had preceded it. Humour in its expression in literature has passed through various stages. There is the humour of primitive literature, reproduced in the nursery as Jack the Giant Killer and such; there is the gargantuan and grotesque humour of the Middle Ages; the eighteenth century humour of horseplay and the practical joke; and this we see here passing into the humour of discomfiture and comic misadventure. This became par excellence the humour of the early Victorian England and is only now passing to its rest. From the volumes of Dickens it is never quite absent, and it was at least intended as the primary inspiration of Pickwick. This mode of humour appears as the main current of Dickens’s first story, Mr. Minns and his Cousin. Mr. Minns, a precise trim little old bachelor, is visited by a loud-voiced vulgarian cousin who eats a lion’s share at his breakfast, cuts his ham the wrong way, and whose dog chaws up Mr. Minns’ curtains. Invited to dinner by the cousin, Mr. Minns is delayed by the coach, choked by the dinner, bored by the company, kicked in the shin by the cousin’s awful child (his godson), and brought to a collapse by having to make a speech, misses the home coach, walks till three in the morning, — and as a result cuts the awful child out of his will.
But there is much more in the sketches than the mere humour of misadventure. That alone could never have floated them so long and so high. There is a power of description, or rather of observation, quite out of the common; and that easy and extraordinary command of language to match the observation which came to Dickens as a birthright. But the quite moderate success of the Sketches by Boz was soon to be entirely absorbed by the colossal, the phenomenal success that was so rapidly to follow.
Before, however, the sunrise of Mr. Pickwick appeared over the horizon, an even greater illumination, in the personal sense, was breaking upon Dickens’s life. He was rushing headlong towards marriage. The Mr. Hogarth who had come down from Scotland to work on the Morning Chronicle was a man of cultivation and culture, possessed of a comfortable home, adorned with a bevy of three charming daughters, each as beautiful as the other. Young Dickens, talented and brilliant, was taken into the bosom of the family, and took the girls, all of them, to his heart. No doubt it was a wonderful experience for him, after his nondescript upbringing, to find himself the welcome guest of a normal and comfortable home, the idol of an admiring circle of pretty sisters. Charles ended by marrying one, and one only, of the Hogarth girls, inasmuch as the law of the land would not allow him more than one. But he fell in love with them collectively, and those who know the sequel may still wonder where his final preference lay. All were young. Catherine the eldest, when Charles Dickens became engaged to her, was only twenty years old. Below her was Mary Hogarth, a beautiful girl of sixteen, the joy of the household, beside whose chair there stood already the unseen figure of Death. The youngest was Georgina, whose later fate it was to share his home for nearly thirty years.
