Delphi complete works of.., p.583
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 583
In this middle period of Dickens’s life much of his time and thought is turned towards questions of social betterment and social reform. The minor themes of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby expand into the broader aspects of the welfare of mankind. All of this appears in his new magazine Household Words, his Bleak House, his Child’s History, and, above all, in his mistaken and unsuccessful Hard Times. Later on, the shadows on his own life, the eager craving for activity, turned him to other fields.
Written as a chronology of his life, the period runs in outline thus.
The year 1850 found him in London, still living in Devonshire Terrace and embarking on his labours (March 30, 1850) as the editor of Household Words.
The next year (1851) saw a bachelor trip to Paris (February): next month the loss of his beloved father — the good old gentleman died (March 31, 1851) in his own person a few months after he ceased appearing in monthly parts as Mr. Micawber; as such he lives still: a summer at Fort House, Broadstairs (May-November 1851). In the autumn were the famous theatricals at Devonshire House, London, in the presence of royalty. In this year the Child’s History of England was running as a serial in Household Words. In this year also Dickens moved from Devonshire Terrace, where his lease had expired, to a new home, Tavistock House, in Tavistock Square. In the autumn, in his new home, he began Bleak House (November, 1851).
In the next year (1852) was born Dickens’s youngest son, Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens. The summer and the summer following were spent at Boulogne. In the year 1853 Bleak House was finished at Boulogne, and its completion celebrated by a two months’ trip to Italy, Dickens being accompanied by Wilkie Collins and Mr. Augustus Egg. A notable feature of the close of the year was the rendering of Dickens’s first public readings (December 1853), given at Birmingham on behalf of the new Municipal Institute.
The year following found Dickens busy with Hard Times, which came out as a weekly serial in Household Words (April-August 1854). The children’s theatricals in his new home at Tavistock House (after 1851) seemed to John Forster one of the pleasantest things in all his long recollection of his friend.
Of the various activities of these years, the amateur theatricals were at first the most conspicuous feature. The first of the presentations of the period, — that of Not so Bad as we Seem in London, May 16, 1851, — was unsurpassed in point of distinction and patronage by anything organised by Dickens and his associates, — or, for the matter by that, of any other amateurs. The play was put on in aid of the new Literature and Art Guild. It was specially written by Bulwer Lytton, and the Queen and the Prince Consort promised to grace it with their presence. The royal party commanded seventeen seats with a subscription of £150 towards the fund.
The Duke of Devonshire, with truly ducal munificence, handed over his town residence (Devonshire House) for the performance. He turned into it, under professional direction, a flock of carpenters to fashion a theatre and to set up the royal box. All of London, — royal, scientific, and fashionable, — clamoured for seats.
As the time drew near Dickens himself was quite washed away from his usual anchorage by the affability of the Duke. ‘The Duke has read the play,’ he wrote to Lytton:
The Duke has read the play. He asked for it a week ago, and had it. He has been at Brighton since. He called here before eleven on Saturday morning, but I was out on the play business, so I went to him at Devonshire House yesterday. He almost knows the play by heart. He is supremely delighted with it, and critically understands it. In proof of the latter part of this sentence I may mention that he had made two or three memoranda of trivial doubtful points, every one of which had attracted our attention in rehearsal, as I found when he showed them to me. He thoroughly understands and appreciates the comedy of the Duke — threw himself back in his chair and laughed, as I say of Walpole, ‘till I thought he’d have choked,’ about his first Duchess, who was a Percy. He suggested that he shouldn’t say: ‘You know how to speak to the heart of a Noble,’ because it was not likely that he would call himself a Noble.
We can imagine how delightfully Dickens, in his ordinary personality, would have satirized this scene, — the Duke actually reading the play, and actually condescending to understand it. But in the august circumstances of the moment the faculties of alert amusement were numb.
The play was ‘to commence, by Her Majesty’s command, at nine o’clock,’ therefore ‘the whole of the audience are particularly requested to be seated at least a quarter of an hour before that time.’
At the close of the play the Queen rose in her box and commanded the reappearance of the actors to receive the applause of the house. The presence of the aged Duke of Wellington gives an added touch of historic interest.
The same play, accompanied by a short farce, Mrs. Nightingale’s Diary, written by Dickens and Mark Lemon, was played in various provincial towns, the scenery and appurtenances being carried about in a ‘portable theatre.’
Of less distinction, but of a more human interest, were the Children’s Theatricals which Dickens organised after he moved into his new London home, Tavistock House (1851). Here a large room (the schoolroom) was specially converted into a theatre for such occasions and announced on the printed playbills as the ‘smallest theatre in the world.’ The evening of January 6 (Twelfth Night, which happened to be also the birthday of Charles Dickens, Junior) was set apart for these revels, which henceforth were an annual fixture for many years. Mark Lemon of Punch was Dickens’s chief collaborator, and his children were fellow-actors with the little Dickenses. There were printed playbills, with mock names and announcements in serio-comic style. Stanfield, R.A., was pressed into service to paint scenery, Wilkie Collins to write plays, and among the invited audiences were some of the highest genius and talent of literature and the law. At the famous performance of 1854 Thackeray is said to have ‘rolled off his seat with laughter.’ The grown-up people took some of the parts, — Dickens appearing on the bills as Mr. Crummies and Mr. Passé along with Mr. Wilkini Collini, and Mr. Mudperiod (Mark Lemon). But the principal feature was the acting of the children. The playbill of 1855 states that the performance is in the Theatre Royal, Tavistock House. It presents the slightly disguised names of seven little Dickenses and three little Lemons, along with their respective fathers and Wilkie Collins and Marcus Stone. The announcement draws attention also to the first appearance on any stage of Mr. Ploorniskmaroontigoonter, who has been kept out of bed at a vast expense. This was the baby of the household, the last of the ten children, Bulwer Lytton Dickens (born March 13, 1852). There were refreshments,— ‘Miss Hogarth will preside at the piano,’ — and ‘God save the Queen.’ There was everything except the name of Mrs. Dickens.
It was especially at this period of his life, — in the conduct of his magazine (as described later), in the planning of his books, and in his public appearances, — that Dickens felt himself to be a great social force towards righteousness. It became what the French would call his métier.
Such an attitude, no doubt, had led him years before to assume the misguided rôle of editor of the Daily News. It served as the inspiration for the powerful articles which he wrote in the London Times against the revolting spectacles of public executions: and it was the denunciation of social wrong, — the cruelty of the law’s delay, — that forms the background and the grandeur of Bleak House. In no other book is there such majestic treatment of a theme, such a complete fusion of the story of the book with its theme and purpose. In Oliver Twist the workhouse is left behind. In Nicholas Nickleby, Dotheboys Hall is forgotten. In Dombey the theme at best is abstract.
But in Bleak House the theme is real and actual. The issue of a long-drawn lawsuit in the Court of Chancery passing from generation to generation and leaving behind the wreck of broken lives, and wasted hopes, — there is nothing abstract or imaginary here. It dominates the story from its sombre magnificent opening in the Court of Chancery setting in the London fog, to the climax of the closing scene when the great suit of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce ends, — like the fall of an ancient building, eaten into nothingness and collapsing into dust. So ends it with the sardonic laughter of the Court, and Richard Carstone, dazed, unhearing, marked for death. The theme has all the majesty and inevitability of Greek Tragedy. Round it is gathered every thread of the narration — the bright loves, the broken lives and the beauty of renunciation stronger than love itself.
It is no wonder that for many people Bleak House is the most impressive of all Dickens’s stories. It may fall short in humour, some of its comic effects are somewhat forced, some of its comic people dirty and unlikeable, its interior plot (apart from the Chancery) runs to that impenetrable complexity that marked the work of Dickens, — but there is no doubt of where it ranks. It is a great book. As a proof of it consider the array of Bleak House characters who stand in the first rank of Dickens’s creations. Here is John Jarndyce, as lovable as Mr. Pickwick without the comicality, as kindly as the brothers Cheeryble without their proximity to amiable idiocy. Here is Mrs. Jellaby with her immortal natives of Borioboolagha: Mr. Turveydrop, arm in arm with the Prince Regent: the inscrutable Tulkinghorn and the doomed Richard and the golden Ada as real as if they stepped out of an old-world canvas. And here inevitably at the last is Dickens’s characterless ‘walking gentleman’ Allan Woodcourt right out of a shop window. Dickens could draw gentlemen like John Jarndyce and Richard Carstone because they belonged among gentlemen with oddities, peculiarities, faults and fates, — but when it came to an A1 first-class all-round gentleman, — that and nothing else, — Dickens drew a tailor’s dummy.
Many readers of the book think it disfigured by the exaggerated and preposterous lawsuit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, described as having been in Chancery for over a generation, as having sent a score of people to jail for contempt and to suicide from misery, and ending at last by the exhaustion of the estate in costs. But Dickens at the time, and all his biographers and expositors ever since, have shown that there was nothing exaggerated about Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Dickens didn’t need to exaggerate. The facts were good enough.
‘Everything set forth in these pages concerning the Court of Chancery,’ he wrote in the preface, ’is substantially true and within the truth. The case of Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actual occurrence made public by a disinterested person who was professionally acquainted with the whole of the monstrous wrong from beginning to end. At the present moment (August 1853) there is a suit before the court which was commenced nearly twenty years ago: in which from thirty to forty counsel have been known to appear at one time: in which costs have been incurred to the amount of seventy thousand pounds: which is a friendly suit; and which is (I am assured) no nearer to its termination now than when it was begun. There is another well-known suit in Chancery, not yet decided, which was commenced before the close of the last century, and in which more than double the amount of seventy thousand pounds has been swallowed up in costs. If I wanted other authorities for Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce I could rain them on these pages.’
Among such accumulated praise of the book one may without impropriety inset a word of depreciation. How its author loves complexity, and to what impossible devices does he resort to accomplish simple things. Take the case of Krook who dies of ‘spontaneous combustion’: the foul, dirty creature disintegrated into a shatter of filthy grease, of black soot and an acrid smell. Let us grant that Krook had to die. He was in possession of certain ‘papers’ which Dickens and the reader needed. But why not kill him of indigestion? No, Dickens had heard somewhere of people dying by ‘spontaneous combustion,’ and he must needs try it on one of his characters. More than that, he makes an angry refutation of the charge that no one dies of such a thing as that. He tells us that there were quite a lot of deaths of this sort in the Middle Ages, and that one of them was described by the Reverend Giuseppe Bianchini only two hundred years ago. There was also a case, — called ‘recent’ by Dickens, — of a German-American saloon-keeper of Columbus, Ohio, who ‘blew up’ in just this way, — presumably much like a rum omelette or a Christmas snap-dragon. Dickens adds as proof that the story is ‘very clearly described by a dentist.’
Dickens has forgotten his usual lack of faith in medical miracles, and forgot that, very likely, the dentist, as the French say, ‘mentait comme un arracheur de dents.’ No, no, Dickens wanted Krook to blow up, and blow he must.
Again, how characteristic of Dickens is the dark and complicated plot whereby the ‘papers’ are to be got from Krook! It is thought that some of these ‘papers’ may bear on the question of how and why Esther Summerson was born about twenty-one years before. They may give an opportunity for blackmail. So the prospective blackmailers engage the astute Mr. Chick Smallweed (who has no idea what he is to seek or to find) to change his name and go and hire a room in Krook’s house so as to keep his eye on him. Mr. Smallweed has no notion what it is all about, — and the reader was lost long ago. But in Dickens a general principle of the solution of mysteries is for people to disguise themselves, change their names and then ‘keep an eye’ on someone. If enough eyes are kept on enough people, something is bound to ‘come out.’
But all these peculiarities and shortcomings of the book only make it more truly Dickens’s. They disperse under the effulgence of his genius like the Chancery fog in the sunshine.
The book further illustrates very well Dickens’s unconscious disregard of anything in the way of rules or regularity in literary art. If he thought of such things at all he probably regarded himself as exempt, — as did Napoleon in the case of morals. He conducts the story in an in-and-out fashion partly as told impersonally and partly as related supposedly by Esther Summerson. But he doesn’t bother to limit Esther Summerson to the kind of ideas and the kind of language that Esther Summerson would, or could, have used. Her personality is maintained by a few little mincing phrases and by a sort of modest decorum of sentiment, but when she needs it she is given all the humour and power of Charles Dickens. The voice is Esther’s, but the jokes are Dickens’s! Nothing is more false in art than to make a fictitious personage speak out of his character, as if Mr. Pickwick suddenly talked cockney or Sam Weller dropped into French. But, as usual, Dickens ‘gets away with it.’ Few, if any, readers ever bother whether Esther is in character or not; many no doubt think her a mighty humorous girl, and that she ought to have written books.
In the case of Esther, also, there is another of Dickens’s peculiar licences. Just as he gave Master Humphrey a clock and took it away again, so he makes Esther go blind, — gets the full tragic value of it, — and then, finding that he needs her eyes, gives her sight back. In all Dickens there is nothing more like Dickens.
Consider how tragically the chapter (No. XXXI) comes to an end. Esther is stricken ill, with fever, — dangerously ill, — and then when the crisis comes, she speaks to her little maid at her bedside and says, —
‘And now come and sit beside me for a little while, and touch me with your hand. For I cannot see you — I am blind.’
With what a rush of feeling the reader realizes that the beautiful devoted girl has lost her sight! Blind! What a fate!
But no, not at all. Dickens leaves her blind while he himself writes three chapters. Then she gets her sight back with the simple formula,
‘But now, my sight strengthening, and the glorious light coming every day more fully,’ etc., etc.
Oddly enough, the ordinary reader has no other feeling except joy that Esther can see. If Dickens had been accused of unfair dealing in this, he would at once have righteously explained that temporary blindness is a frequent accompaniment of fever. Quite so: but he used it to get all the literary value of permanent blindness. Yet he would have believed himself. He was like that.
An item of literary interest in the book, vivid once but waning now, is the connection of the rather despicable character Mr. Horace Skimpole with Dickens’s friend Leigh Hunt. Here in the book is Skimpole, — impecunious and crooked, borrowing and never paying, and betraying his friends for a shilling: and here, quite recognisable, scarcely disguised, is Leigh Hunt. Is not such a portrayal, it was asked, as mean as meanness itself? Much ink has been shed on the point. But the name of Leigh Hunt has drifted so far back into obscurity that the controversy loses its interest. The truth probably is that Dickens meant Horace Skimpole to be a charming and lovable character, which he certainly is not. Dickens failed in his aim. Skimpole is a ‘skunk’: just as Steerforth is a cad and Wrayburn a bounder. Dickens’s father could be glad to be Micawber. No doubt Dickens expected anyone to be happy to be Horace Skimpole.
The identification of Bleak House as a ‘house’ is a disputed point with contemporary Dickensian scholars. In the story it is placed in Hertfordshire. The Lord Chancellor is officially informed of that fact by one of the counsel in the case. Indeed, Esther Summerson in her narrative says,— ‘The long night had closed in before we came to St. Albans, near which Bleak House was.’ Arguing like Edgar Poe in the Barnaby Rudge matter, we might claim that Esther was mistaken or was lying. But without such subtlety, we have to admit that, in the book, Bleak House was near St. Albans. Indeed, there is a house outside the town known as Bleak House to one school of believers, and another school holds that the wind-swept house (Fort House) at Broadstairs, where Dickens stayed in 1850, and which was sometimes called by that name, was the original. The best evidence seems to point to Bleak House being situated in Hertfordshire. The controversy about the place has already something of the nicety of Shakespearian criticism and shows that Dickens is coming on. Soon there will be enough of it to get Dickens recognised in the colleges.
Bleak House was published by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans in twenty monthly numbers from March 1852 to September 1853, with illustrations by Hablôt Browne. As a book it appeared in September 1853. It was a colossal success, the monthly instalments reaching sales of over forty thousand. As the story drew to its close Dickens was able to write of it in triumph (August 27, 1853), ‘It has retained its immense circulation from the first, beating dear old “Copperfield” by a round ten thousand. I have never had so many readers.’ But with its writing comes the first signs of the breaking of its author’s health and energy. The books, the labour of his editing, the claims of society and public service, — it was too much. ‘What with Bleak House and Household Words’, he wrote, ‘and Child’s History and Miss Coutt’s Home and the invitations to feasts and festivals, I really feel as if my head would split like a fired shell if I stayed here.’ And with it all was the wear and tear day by day of his distracted home, — soon to break up in open disaster.
