Delphi complete works of.., p.579
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 579
The fact that the travellers made a part of their journey ‘by rail’ marks the coming of a great change.
The next serious task to be carried out was the writing of Martin Chuzzlewit, planned for serial publication in twenty numbers. The terms agreed to by Messrs. Chapman and Hall showed how far Dickens had travelled since the ‘tempting emolument’ of fifteen guineas a month, — which was in reality only a few years before. For the new book he was to receive £200 for each number and, — over and above it, — three-quarters of the profit made on each number, after deducting his £200 as one of the expenses. For the twelve months between the making of the agreement and the issue of the first number he was to receive £150 a month as an ‘advance’ against future profits. Princely terms for 1842. Yet to-day, — with picture rights, drama, broadcast rights, world rights, and copyrights, reaching to the grave and beyond it, — Dickens would have received not hundreds but millions. ‘Stars’ at Hollywood have made more in a few seasons than Dickens in all his life.
Martin Chuzzlewit duly appeared, beginning its first number in January 1843. It was produced under the title The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, with a long straggling extension intended to be facetious and reading,— ‘his relatives, friends and enemies, comprising all his wills and his ways with a historical record of what he did and what he didn’t, showing, moreover, who inherited the family plate, who came in for the silver spoons, and who for the wooden ladles. The whole forming a complete key to the House of Chuzzlewit.’ This clumsy tail-piece was afterwards dropped in the book editions. The monthly numbers were declared to be ‘edited by Boz’ and the illustrations were again those of Hablôt Browne (Phiz).
For whatever reason it may have been, the new story was not an immediate success. It was published on the Pickwick plan in monthly numbers, and the fact that the stories preceding it had come out and reached a large circulation in weekly issues (Master Humphrey’s Clock) is thought by Forster to have injured the sale. But there seems no reason for this. In any case the sales only amounted to about 20,000 per number as contrasted with sales of 40,000, 50,000 and even more. Nor did the circulation increase more than two or three thousand when Martin Chuzzlewit was shipped off to America to lend variety to the story.
There seems no valid reason why the sales of the story should have fallen off midway. Many people have liked it best of Dickens’s books, and all readers have found it one of the books they liked best. Two at least of its characters, Mr. Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp, have become household names to millions of people, — one might almost say common nouns in the English language. The book, moreover, shares with all Dickens’s best work that strange alchemy of transformation whereby even sin and wickedness are softened as things seen far off in retrospect, and horror is replaced by a smile: it is as if one mingled smiles and tears over the half-forgotten pains and sorrows of childhood.
This quality of Dickens, this divine retrospect, this atmosphere in which his characters are made to move, remains the mainstay of his genius.
The book Martin Chuzzlewit has, on the contrary, all the characteristic faults of Dickens: it opens with a perfectly inconsequent piece of burlesque, excellent as a contribution to a comic paper but of no bearing or use in the story. The plot, as usual, becomes unfathomable, and the motives of old Martin Chuzzlewit in upsetting his whole life to enforce a moral lesson, go beyond human comprehension. Most characteristic of all is the sudden transportation of young Martin to America, a pure afterthought of construction. But, after all, what do these faults matter? The real readers of Dickens never notice them. They exult in Martin’s journey to America without caring a rush whether it is artistic, or natural or anything else. As to the plot, no Dickens-lover ever tries to follow it.
When the book reached America it called forth the loud outcries at the ‘ingratitude ‘of Dickens. The copyright quarrel that had embittered his visit was bad enough: the American Notes were worse: but Martin Chuzzlewit was an open parody, a vilification, a denunciation of the civilization of the United States. As a matter of fact, it was just exactly that, and it was meant to be that. With the amenities of good-will and the lapse of time, anger fades away and quarrels sink below the horizon. A kind of haze of retrospect colours the enmities of the past. At the present time, stress is laid on the fact that many leading Americans, such as Longfellow, read all of Dickens’s criticism of America with tolerant amusement.
But in reality these were the few. Nor does it avail to say that Dickens also satirizes and vilifies countrymen of his own. If Pecksniff is in the book, so is Tom Pinch; the hideous Jonas Chuzzlewit is to be set against the manly John Westlock; and against the damp, oleaginous form of Mrs. Gamp the humble, noble outline of old Chuffey. But the American characters! With the exception of one or two commendable wooden figures such as Mr. Bevan, put in to stand for Professor Felton, what a pack they are! Noisy, boastful, mannerless, spitting tobacco juice, defrauding the helpless and the weak, and fawning upon birth and station!
It speaks wonders for the ultimate good temper of life on the American continent that it was all so soon forgiven and forgotten: especially as the picture, — even with a dot of truth in the foreground, — was hopelessly untrue in its incompleteness, in its background. Dickens in England had no eye to see the dignity and greatness of English government: it was all comic to him; it was all Coodle and Doodle talking platitudes against Foodle and Yoodle; it was all circumlocution, wind and humbug. In the same way Dickens had no eye to see the nobility of pioneer life in America: no sense of the great epic of the American frontier. To him it was all swamp, ague, and mosquitoes. Others could have looked further and seen in New Eden just what it said, New Eden. The banks and theatres and churches of the maps of Major Pawkins are all there now. But Dickens saw only humbug in England and only ague in America.
While Dickens was still busy on the writing of Nickleby, there had come to him a sort of inspiration, the idea of a Christmas story. In the late autumn of 1843 he worked at it, — in between the Nickleby numbers, — with increasing absorption and in something like a frenzy of composition. We are told that as he wrote he wept and laughed at his work, and in the pauses of it walked the London streets at nights, for miles and miles, still absorbed in his idea. It was well worth it: for the idea and the tale was the Christmas Carol, one of the famous masterpieces of English literature. In its own form and as converted into plays and dialogues, recitations and, later, moving pictures, the Christmas Carol has quite literally gone around the world. All the world knows at first or second hand of the marvellous transformations of the miser Scrooge, and all the world has rejoiced in the sheer beautiful idealism of it. Literature has no finer picture than the redeemed Scrooge at his window in the frosty Christmas morning, waking to the ringing bells of a new world. It is a new world that is open to each of us at any moment, — for that is the point of the story, — at the mere cost of opening the windows of the soul. It is of no consequence whether the Christmas Carol is true to life. It is better than life.
No story written by Dickens ever met a more sympathetic reception than the carol. The great critics like Jeffrey were not ashamed to shed tears over it.
It is true that now, many readers, most readers perhaps, would find the mechanism of the story a little melodramatic, the spirits rather too prolix. The reader of to-day would want it ‘put over faster’. But then the people of today are a generation greatly improved, — or is it, badly damaged? — by the rapid technique of the moving pictures and the hurried emotions of the modern screen. The Christmas Carol filled a distinct place in the progress, or the course, of contemporary letters. Dickens did not create the ‘Christmas Story,’ but he gave to it an enormous impulse. The Carol and the companion pieces that followed year by year, — the Chimes, etc. — set the pace for the development of that Christmas fiction which has since become a part of our annual round.
In the financial sense the Carol was a disappointment. Dickens had ‘set his heart’ upon receiving a thousand pounds for the sales that season, but his royalties only reached something over seven hundred. The Christmas Carol, selling at a shilling, only ran (in its initial season) to a sale of about 15,000 copies. Later on Dickens was able to sell more than a quarter of a million copies of a Christmas number of his Household Words.
It was the disappointment over the circulation of Martin Chuzzlewit and over the financial returns from the Carol which in part induced Dickens to leave England for a prolonged sojourn on the continent. This was not the sole reason for his doing so. He had begun to feel that new scenes, a new environment was necessary for the gathering of new material for his work. The idea was more or less fallacious. It turned out that in Genoa Dickens thought and wrote of London. His foreign travel, in the end, only gave him as direct material those ‘pictures from Italy’, which form one of the most ephemeral parts of his work. From it he got also a little of the setting of scenes in Little Dorrit, and a part of the background of the Tale of Two Cities. But no doubt the timely recreation and the homesickness of exile regilded the inspiration of his own country and his own London.
In any case he had made up his mind that a foreign residence would aid his declining budget. ‘My year’s bills’, he wrote, ‘unpaid, are so terrific, that all the energy and determination I can exert will be required to clear me before I go abroad: which, if next June come and find me alive, I shall do’. As has been said above, Dickens had left poverty or stringency for ever behind. But the change of circumstance has brought a change of outlook. He thought now in terms of an expensive and elaborate home, and a wilderness of incidental expense. Even the ‘economising’ of foreign travels was to mean coaches and couriers and what would have seemed utter luxury but a few years before.
So it came about that Dickens and his family, — including his wife and her sister, — and all the family down to the baby, went rolling southward through France in the sunshine of the years of universal peace 1844.
Travelling in France and Italy in those days was a very different thing from travel now. The traveller of to-day ‘sees France’ by tearing through it in a closed car over a straight cement highway at the rate of sixty miles an hour; by stopping in ‘international’ hotels run in imitation of American methods, where all the waiters talk English; and, as a diversion, playing bridge with other English-speaking tourists and looking at American moving pictures and English newspapers.
Very different was the world of the early ‘forties of last century. Charles Dickens and his family rolled through France in a coach of vast dimensions (it cost Dickens £45) brought over from England, a coach with four horses and a postillion, and with a courier on the box to facilitate the journey. They moved in a leisurely way, stopped at inns, paused at villages and strolled and picknicked on the roadside. All about them was the burble of a foreign language, the charm and colour of foreign dress, the oddity of foreign customs. Under such circumstances people saw more of France in a day than the motor-tourist in a month.
The case of Dickens was peculiar. It is amazing in one way how much he saw, and in another way how much he didn’t. He brought to bear upon the scenes around him the eye and the ear of an artist and the mind of a novelist. He was fascinated with the picturesque costumes, the civility of foreign speech, the light and colour that contrasted everywhere with the drab outlines, the dullness and the mist so frequent in his own country. Dickens was fascinated with the scene, but took but little interest in the meaning. This was the France that still carried everywhere the vestiges of the Napoleonic empire: Dickens scarcely saw them. Thus in the journey south he talks of seeing by the way, ‘a silly old meek-faced garlic-eating immeasurably polite chevalier with a dirty scrap of red ribbon hanging at his button-hole as if he had tied it there to remind himself of something.’ But other eyes might see in the dirty scrap of red ribbon the Napoleonic legion of honour, and looked with something like reverence on the ‘silly old meek-faced man’ who once saw, perhaps the sunrise at Austerlitz, or the Grand Army struggling in the snow. Later on when Dickens wrote his Tale of Two Cities, his ready reflection and his recollection of remembered scenes enable him to put together a picture of marvellous sympathetic interpretation — far better than that of most professional historians. But that was later. His mind was set to another tune.
In his Pictures from Italy, he himself indeed disclaims in the little preface of the book (called The Reader’s Passport), any intentions of writing on the history of the country or of the ‘innumerable associations entwined about it,’ or ‘discussing the government or misgovernment of any portion of it.’ He wrote the book, as he said, as a ‘series of faint reflections, mere shadows on the water.’ This was the Europe of the middle forties, just passing from the older era to the new industrialism, and stirring already with the mighty forces that were to sweep it from end to end four years later with revolution and war. But if Dickens thought of such things he did not write of them. One cannot have all types of mind at once. Dickens’s pen-pictures run along in a vein of interested amusement of the surface of things. He gives to everything French the same half-comic interpretation which he applies to the House of Commons, and the law and government of England.
Take as a typical picture of his foreign travels his account of a ‘diligence’ of the period:
‘Then, there is the Diligence, twice or thrice a-day; with the dusty outsides in blue frocks, like butchers; and the insides in white nightcaps; and its cabriolet head on the roof, nodding and shaking, like an idiot’s head; and its Young-France passengers staring out of window, with beards down to their waists, and blue spectacles awfully shading their war-like eyes, and very big sticks clenched in their National grasp.’
At times his tone is almost as openly comic as that of the famous Innocents Abroad of twenty-three years later. Witness, for example, the following description of the arrival of the coach-party at a French inn.
The landlady of the Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or is here; and the landlord of the Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or is here; and the femme de chambre of the Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or is here; and a gentleman in a glazed cap, with a red beard like a bosom friend, who is staying at the Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or, is here; and Monsieur le Curé is walking up and down in a corner of the yard by himself, with a shovel hat upon his head, and a black gown on his back, and a book in one hand, and an umbrella in the other; and everybody, except Monsieur le Curé, is open-mouthed and open-eyed, for the opening of the carriage-door. The landlord of the Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or dotes to that extent upon the Courier that he can hardly wait for his coming down from the box, but embraces his very legs and boot-heels as he descends. ‘My Courier! My brave Courier! My friend! My brother!’ The landlady loves him, the femme de chambre blesses him, the garçon worships him. The Courier asks if his letter has been received? It has, it has. Are the rooms prepared? They are, they are.
The Dickens family rolled in their coach from Calais to Paris, then southward to Avalon, to Chalons, to Lyons, the Rhone, Avignon and Marseilles. The opening pages of Little Dorrit were to be illuminated thirteen years later with the brilliant sunshine of that southern coast. Then from France they passed to Italy.
The family settled down in Genoa, which became their headquarters during the year spent in Italy. For the summer months they had a country villa in the suburbs of the town, and for winter quarters they had chambers in the city. Foreign visitors, consuls, officials, and the governor of Genoa himself vied in doing honour to Dickens. But for a long time, and indeed more or less throughout his Italian residence, Dickens had a feeling of being transplanted. His heart was always in London. He longed for the familiar sights and sounds, and above all for his vigorous walks at night through the London streets. To Forster he wrote these first impressions of his homesickness. ‘I seem,’ he said, ‘as if I had plucked myself out of my proper soil when I left Devonshire Terrace. If the fountains here played nectar they wouldn’t please me half as well as the Middlesex waterworks at Devonshire Terrace. Put me down on Waterloo Bridge at eight o’clock in the evening, with leave to roam about as long as I like, and I would come home, as you know, panting to go on.’
But as the summer changed into autumn he found himself hard at work again, and happy in his work. It was not the Italian scenes about him that inspired his pen but the recollections of his beloved London. The work was planned as a second Christmas story, — the setting which most appealed to his nature, — and the theme was the vindication of the claims of the poor, — the topic that lay nearest to his heart. The story that resulted was The Chimes, which owed to Genoa nothing but its title, suggested in a happy moment by the clanging church bells of the Italian city. The work was finished before the end of 1844. Dickens took a brief holiday on his own, leaving his wife and sister behind him, while he visited the great Italian centres of the north. As he travelled the beauty and the glory of the old cities, especially of Venice, more and more reached his heart. His letters to England in brief description of what he saw have nothing of the tone of easy levity described above. ‘Nothing in the world,’ he wrote to Forster, ‘that you have ever heard of Venice is equal to the magnificent and stupendous reality. . . . The gorgeous and wonderful reality of Venice is beyond the fancy of the wildest dreamer. Opium couldn’t build such a place and enchantment couldn’t shadow it forth in a vision.’
He hurried back for a brief visit to London to make arrangements about the publication of the new story and still more to taste the luxury of reading it aloud to his select circle. He had for weeks looked forward to this pleasure. He had written ahead to get Forster to arrange the time and place, and in due course the reading took place at Forster’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields on Dec. 2, 1844. Forster was there, and among the others Thomas Carlyle, grave and attentive, Douglas Jerrold and the artist Maclise, who has left a little drawing of this scene, often reproduced.
