Delphi complete works of.., p.578
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 578
But Dickens had no eyes to see it all in its true proportion. Against the crowded canal-boats, the jolting stages, and frame hotels, the log shanties, and forest villages sunken in the swamps, he set the trim countryside of England, with its neat village commons and parish churches and winding roads lined with thorn hedges, — the whole of it a thousand years in the making. Against the cheap frame hotel he set the gabled inns of the John Willetts that had seen two hundred Christmas fires go roaring up the chimney. He suddenly discovered that, after all, the ‘old Tory gentleman’ whom he had denounced didn’t spit on the floor, or talk through his nose, or break into the conversations of strangers: that, after all, Mrs. Leo Hunter was a lady, that Mr. Minns and his cousin were gentlemen, and that Mr. Dombey was a dignified and honourable merchant who wouldn’t cheat a stranger over a swamp lot in an imaginary settlement.
So it came that Dickens’s mind turned back to the England that he knew and cast out the America which he couldn’t understand. The fault was his. It has been said, — on a foundation difficult to prove conclusively, — that Dickens had invested some of his early gains from Pickwick in a fraudulent land company of Cairo, Illinois, and went west partly to see the scene of his discomfiture. If so, this gave him added bitterness against the Far West.
In any case there is no doubt that he saw it all with crooked eyes. Could he have seen it right, what a marvellous picture, exaggerated in detail but true in the mass, he could have made of it! Just as at the ‘Boz’ Ball in New York, so here in the New Edens and Thermopylaes a host of ‘characters’ were beckoning to him, like actors waiting to ‘come on’. They were standing there in the wings waiting to catch his attention, — as merry and motley a company as those of the pages of Pickwick itself. But Dickens, fuming and raving in the foreground over international copyright, tobacco spittle and slavery, never knew they were there. And when he came back twenty-six years later, he was too old, too broken, too self-absorbed to care whether they were there or not. What a goodly company there was ready to his hand, with their queer clothes, their universal military rank, their magnified eyesight, their generosity, their crookedness! Dickens could see them but saw them only to scoff and denounce. Measured in the same way, the people in Pickwick are a pack of dunderheads and fools, Pickwick himself was an amiable idiot on a string, Sam Weller was a crook and Sam Weller’s father smelt of the stable. Dickens was in a land of enchantment and never knew it.
As an epilogue to the American tour came a brief visit to Canada, — the two Canadas, Upper and Lower, had been united into one the year before, — that lasted from May 4 to May 30, 1842. The visit, if brief, was a pleasant one. After the hustle of the ferocious West the little colony seemed quiet and restful: and Dickens had found a new meaning in the flag that floated over it. More than that, he was now in a rapture of anticipation of getting home again. In Canada he saw and was thrilled by the falls of Niagara and paused a day or two at the pleasant little town (nominally ‘city’) of Toronto, then a place of some twelve thousand people. Here he visited among other places of interest Upper Canada College, founded by Lord Seaton thirteen years before as the Rugby of Canada. The school tradition has it that Dickens spoke in the ‘prayer hall’ to the boys of the school, though no mention of it appears in the chapters of his American Notes where he describes his Canadian tour. From Toronto Dickens and his wife went by steamer — there was no railway as yet — to Montreal, where he spent eighteen days, the most enjoyable no doubt of all his American experience, except perhaps the opening days in Boston. In Montreal was the British garrison, this being still the colonial era when imperial regiments protected British North America against the rapacity of the United States. The officers of the garrison, the Governor-General (then in the city though Kingston was still the capital) and the citizens at large vied in entertaining Dickens and his wife. But the chief feature of his visit was the organization by the officers of the regiment of amateur theatricals for which Dickens became the leading actor, manager and producer. He threw himself into the congenial task with delight. Here was something better worth while than canal boats and swamp villages.
The performance duly came off on the evening of May 25, 1842, at the Queen’s Theatre. The pieces presented were A Roland for an Oliver, with Dickens and his recent shipmate Lord Mulgrave in the caste; a French scene done by Dickens and Captain Granville (Past two o’clock in the morning); and a farce in one act called Deaf as a Post, in which Mrs. Dickens, for the first and only time, took a stage part.
Dickens wrote home enthusiastically, ‘the play came off last. The audience between five and six hundred strong, were invited as to a party: a regular table with refreshments being spread in the lobby and saloon. We had the band of the Twenty-third (one of the finest in the service) in the orchestra, the theatre lighted with gas, the scenery was excellent, the properties all being brought from private homes. Sir Charles Bagot, Sir Richard Jackson and their staffs were present, and as the military portion in the audience were in uniform it was a splendid scene. We “went over” splendidly . . . But only think of Kate playing, and playing devilish well, I assure you.’
In John Forster’s account of Dickens’s visit to Montreal there occurs one of the few out-and-out errors to be found in that magnificent work. Misled no doubt by Dickens’s handwriting in the letters he received, he says that Dickens and his wife stayed at Peasco’s Hotel. This is incorrect. Recent researches personally conducted in front of the hotel (still standing in St. Paul Street) show that the name (still legible) is Rasco’s Hotel. All research workers in the history of our literature will find in this correction of a standing error a distinct contribution to our knowledge of the life and character of Dickens and an ample justification of the present volume.
But whether at Peasco’s or at Rasco’s, Dickens was in no mood to stay there. His mind was set on his departure. He concludes the letter in which he wrote of the theatricals with the words, ‘We shall soon meet, please God, and be happier and merrier than ever we were in all our lives. Oh, home — home — home — home — home — home — home.’
Dickens and his wife left Montreal, Sunday, May 29, 1842, reaching New York the Wednesday following. While waiting for the ocean steamer he paid a visit to West Point and to the Shaker village at Lebanon. Then, on June 7, left New York in the Russia homeward bound for England.
CHAPTER V. YEARS OF SUCCESS 1842-1847
HOME AGAIN — MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT — THE CHRISTMAS CAROL — FRANCE AND ITALY
It may well be that the two or three years of Dickens’s career after his return from America were the happiest in his life. He came back in a tumult of affection for England, for his familiar home, his happy work and his energetic play, and above all for the nursery of four children waiting to greet him. ‘How I look forward’, he had written, ‘across that rolling water to home and its small tenantry. How I busy myself in thinking how my books look, and where the tables are, and in what position the chairs stand relatively to the other furniture. . . . And what out pets will say and how they will look. . . . We shall soon meet, please God, and be happier and merrier than we ever were in all our lives. Oh, home — home, — home, — home, — home, — home!!!!!!!’
And home, when he found it, was happy indeed. It contained a nursery already well filled, and destined to be filled later on to something like repletion. At this time there were, as already said, four children, — Charley, aged five, Mary, Kate and Walter, the baby. Two other sons arrived during this happy period between the return from America and the family journey to Italy, — Francis (Frank) Jeffrey and Alfred Tennyson. Dickens was an ideal father, never so happy as in romping and laughing with his children, on whom fell family nicknames in an affectionate shower. Frank was Chickenstalker and Alfred was Sampson Brass or Skittles. Before the list ended the family had increased to ten.
To this family group one may now add permanently Georgina Hogarth, Mrs. Dickens’s sister, at this time a girl of sixteen who had looked after the children while their parents were in America, and who shared Dickens’s home from now till his death. In addition, there were Dickens’s father and mother snugly ensconsed in their villa at Alphington, good for years yet, while Dickens still had about him his brothers and sisters, of whom Frederick and Fanny found an especially warm place in his affections. One notes their names transferred to the pages of Little Dorrit later on, with perhaps something of the relationship of the two brothers themselves.
Nor had the shadows that were to come later as yet fallen across the threshold of his home. At this period of his life he had not yet undertaken the burden of overwork which ultimately broke him down. The endless toil of his editorial years had not yet begun. The public readings that eventually did so much to undermine his energy and to hasten his premature death were still far away. What he did now, work or play, was done with equal zest and enjoyment. The writing of his American Notes was simplicity itself, — a matter mostly of wondering what to leave out, not of searching for things to put in. His writing of Martin Chuzzlewit, apart from delays and dilemmas, was on the whole a piece of immense fun. There was nothing in it of that dreary fight against fatigue, that forcing of a jaded and overworn imagination, which is too often seen in his books of twenty years later. As for the Christmas Carol, — his great achievement of 1843, — he worked on it with a rapt absorption and intense feeling of good to be done and evil to be conquered that was its own reward.
The homecoming to his friends was celebrated by a dinner at Greenwich, the company including such well-known names as those of Sergeant Talfourd, Captain Marryat of the sea stories, Tom Hood and Barham of the Ingoldsby Legends. At this time of his life, dinners of this sort were one of the chief delights of Dickens and his circle. They dined to welcome his homecoming from America. They dined presently to celebrate Macready’s going away to America. They dined as a way of expressing their regrets at the retirement of Mr. Black from The Chronicle. They dined to express their congratulations to Dickens on completing Martin Chuzzlewit. In short they dined for anything and everything.
The dinners were at such comfortable places as the Ship Inn, or the Trafalgar, at Greenwich, or the Star and Garter at Richmond. And in those days a dinner was a dinner, a ceremony extending over a multiplicity of courses, a pharmacopœia of bottles and an endless succession of toasts. One has but to note the generous way in which Dickens lays the table for his characters in his books to know something of the quality and quantity and good fellowship of an early-Victorian dinner.
Not that Dickens himself was ever greedy of food, eager for drink, or inclined to excess. He was, by disposition and without effort, the most temperate of men. His daughter Mary, in the charming little book on her father (as a father) which she left behind her, has told us that he was ‘the most abstemious of men, that he rarely ate anything of consequence for luncheon, and that his pleasure was rather in planning and ordering a dinner than in eating it.’
It was this moderation perhaps which fitted him so well to sing the praises of good wine and a groaning table: he himself knew only the pleasures of good cheer and nothing of the penalties of excess. The last words that he ever wrote were, ‘and then falls to with an appetite.’
Some research scholar, — if one may in this place pursue the topic a little farther, — might well devote a year or two to a scholarly investigation of eating, drinking, and smoking as they appear in the works of Dickens. Even the most casual readers must have noticed the stress that seems laid upon the pleasures of the table. Here, as a sample of the material to be used in such a study, is the bill of fare as ordered, — just as a light casual meal, by Mr. Grewgious, the old lawyer, for his young friend Edwin Drood, who has ‘happened in’ at his chambers.
‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind,’ said Mr. Grewgious to his clerk, ‘stepping over to the hotel in Furnival’s and ask them to send in materials for laying the cloth. For dinner we’ll have a tureen of the hottest and strongest soup available, and we’ll have the best made-dish that can be recommended and we’ll have a joint such as a haunch of mutton, and we’ll have a goose or a turkey or any little stuffed thing of that sort that may happen to be in the bill of fare, — —’
A reader not accustomed to the period and to the writer might think that the order is a joke, a burlesque. Not at all. The dinner is brought, as ordered, and they eat it, — and eat it all.
Here is another light little collation that is served up in the pages of Bleak House. In that story Esther Summerson has been dangerously ill, is now just convalescent and able to sit up a little. To her there comes as a visitor to the sickroom the little old lady Miss Flite, — the pathetic victim of the Court of Chancery, so slight, so frail that she looks as if the wind would blow her away. Esther invites her to share what she calls ‘her early dinner’. It consisted of ‘a dish of fish, a roast fowl, a sweetbread, vegetables, pudding and Madeira.’ It would be an ill-wind that would blow Miss Flite away after that.
But as to tobacco, — the case is just the contrary. If the whole picture were in keeping we would have Mr. Grewgious saying after dinner to the ‘flying waiter’ from the inn,— ‘Now, as to a cigar, what would you suggest?’ And the waiter answering, ‘Well, sir, perhaps, a Golden Havana, or a Dry Tortuga!’ ‘Ah’, should say Mr. Grewgious, ‘excellent — half a dozen of each.’ But no, — if Edwin Drood gets a smoke the reader has to supply it to him gratis.
To the private dinner ceremonies spoken of above there began to be added now those public appearances and speeches which from this time on formed an occasional but conspicuous feature of Dickens’s life. Few men could excel him in this occasional oratory: as an ‘after dinner’ speaker he talked with an ease and grace rarely equalled. And in setting forth some great public cause, — above all the cause of the poor, — he rose above all others in the matchless appeal of his words, and the matchless power of voice and gesture. The fact that he was invited (1843), along with Cobden and Disraeli, to speak at the opening of the Manchester Athenaeum shows the place that he was beginning to take in the national life of England. The new institution aimed at promoting the education of the poor, and Dickens pictures to his hearers the lot of the untrained, untaught children of London slums, ‘condemned to tread the path of jagged flints and stones laid down by brutal ignorance.’
At this time public education in England, — as apart from the institutions misnamed the public schools, — was just struggling into, or rather, towards existence against the inertia of social prejudice. No one could help it more than the man whose Nicholas Nickleby had held up to public horror the brutalities committed in dark places under the name of education. Dickens with his voice and pen helped along the cause of the newly founded ‘Ragged Schools’. Through his influence was secured the powerful support of Miss Coutts (later the Baroness Burdett-Coutts), one of the first of the ‘inspired millionaires’ of the industrial era. Now and later she looked to Dickens as a sort of almoner for whose appeal her purse was ever open.
But to return to the private tenor of Dickens’s own life as apart from the meals he spread for others. Still more dear to his heart, during these early days, than even the jovial dinner gatherings were the weeks and months that he spent, at intervals throughout these years, at the seaside. These were passed nearly always at Broadstairs on the Kentish coast. The various houses and homes which Dickens occupied throughout his life fill a considerable list, as shown in the appendix to this book, and of course at this period of his life his chief place of abode was his commodious home in Devonshire Terrace, London. But there is no place more pleasantly connected with his memory and with his books than the little Kentish fishing village of Broadstairs. For many summers it was his favourite place of rest and recreation. It was at that time (as described by Dickens in a letter to his American friend Professor Felton) ‘a little fishing place, built on a cliff whereon, in the centre of a tiny semicircular bar, our house stands, the sea rolling and dashing under the windows. Seven miles out are the Goodwin Sands.’ Dickens first went to the village with his wife in 1837 for a seaside holiday while still busy upon Mr. Pickwick. A house in High Street bears a tablet with the record, ‘Charles Dickens lived here and wrote part of the Pickwick Papers.’ The ‘house’ as mentioned above was presently incorporated into the Albion Hotel, which therefore bears the legend, ‘Charles Dickens stayed here 1839, 1840, 1842, 1843, 1845, 1849, 1859, and wrote part of Nicholas Nickleby.’ As a matter of fact he also wrote at Broadstairs parts of his Barnaby Rudge, of the Old Curiosity Shop, the conclusion of David Copperfield, and various minor pieces. More than that, it was Broadstairs that inspired more than any other place his pictures of the sea. Dickens loved weather. He loved the wind, and the storm and the waves driving in from the open sea. He himself in his little sketch (of 1851, in Household Words), Our English Watering Place, has rung the changes of the sun and shadow, the dead flat calm and the driving storm of the fishing village. The great storm scene of David Copperfield is in reality taken from the scenery and impressions of Broadstairs, and the shipwreck on the Goodwin Sands, though the book places it, literally, off the coast of Norfolk, off Yarmouth. ‘Our House’ of Dickens’s letter sounds like ‘Bleak House’, and has often been mistaken for it, but it was not. Bleak House stood inland.
Immediately after his return from America Dickens prepared for the press his American Notes as already described. But before he settled down again he allowed himself a journey to Cornwall with his three friends, John Forster, Clarkson Stanfield, and Maclise — a journey almost Pickwickian in its uproarious merriment. He threw himself with all his characteristic energy into walking, climbing cliffs, peering into dim caves and into churches almost as dim. He wrote to his Boston friend Professor Felton, ‘I never laughed so much in my life as I did on this journey. I was choking and gasping and bursting the buckle of the back of my stock all the way. . . . There never was such a trip.’
