Читать книгу Charles Dickens - Sidney Dark - Страница 5

Charles Dickens was born at Landport, outside Portsmouth, on the 7th of February 1812. He was the eldest son and the second child of John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office and the original of Mr. Micawber, his mother appearing in his novels as Mrs. Nickleby. The family a year or two after his birth moved to London, and when Dickens was between four and five years old his father was given an appointment in Chatham Dockyard, and he and his family lived at Chatham until the novelist was nine. In after years he recalled himself as " a very small and not over particularly taken care of boy." He was too sickly to be much good at games, and long before he was in his teens he was a prodigious reader. John Forster says that the account of the early reading of David Copperfield is literally auto-biographical, and that Charles Dickens' boy's imagination was quickened by Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Bias, Robinson Crusoe, and The Arabian Nights. His reading enthused him with a desire to write, and when he was about eight he composed a tragedy called Miznar, the Sultan of India, which was acted by his brothers and sisters. Dickens always loved the theatre and he always had a tendency to " show off," and it is not surprising to know that as a small child he used to sing comic songs at all the family parties.

When he was nine his father was moved to Somerset House, and the family went to live in a small mean house with a small mean back-garden in Bay ham Street, Camden Town. John Dickens had become involved in his Micawberesque money entanglements, and there was a great contrast between the comparative comfort of the life at Chatham and the unqualified poverty in Camden Town. The elder Dickens was kindly, affectionate, and conscientious, but he was essentially what is called " easy-going," and, as his son wrote, " he appeared to have utterly lost at this time the idea of educating me at all, and to have utterly put from him the notion that I had any claim upon him in that regard whatever. So I degenerated into cleaning his boots of a morning and my own; and making myself useful in the work of the little house; and looking after my younger brothers and sisters (we were now six in all); and going on such poor errands as arose out of our poor way of living." As a matter of fact it was at Bay ham Street, Camden Town, with a washerwoman next door and a Bow Street officer opposite, that Charles Dickens began his essential education. He began to learn the humour and the dignity that belong to the lives of the simple and the poor. He began the journey that was to end in Charles Dickens, the author of The Pickwick Papers, of David Copperfield, and of Bleak House. The circumstances of the family grew worse and worse. " I know," wrote Dickens, " we got on very badly with the butcher and baker, that very often we had not too much for dinner, and that at last my father was arrested." John Dickens declared that the sun had set for him forever, and was carried off to the Marshalsea — perhaps the most providential arrest in the whole history of the world, for his son's boyish experiences of the horrors and the stupidity of the debtors' prison brought fruit years afterwards in Pickwick and Little Dorrit, and directly led to the abolition of the whole cruel absurd system of imprisonment for debt.

Frequent visits to the pawnbroker, and the gradual selling up of the home until there was nothing left " except a few chairs, a kitchen table, and some beds," led to Charles Dickens beginning life as a money earner. He was just ten years old, and the good offices of a relative secured him an engagement at Warren's Blacking Manufactory in Hungerford Market at a salary of six shillings a week. The horror of this part of his life never left him, and it is fully described in David Copperfield. No grown man ever remembered the tragedies of his childhood so vividly and so naturally as Dickens remembered them. No grown man ever sympathised with a child's sorrow so entirely, and this splendid power was a heritage from the blacking factory. In a fragment of autobiography quoted by Forster and largely used in David Copperfield, Dickens said:

" It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me that even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion on me — a. child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily and mentally — to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied; they could hardly have been more so if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a Grammar School and going to Cambridge. . . .

" The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless, of the shame I felt in my position, of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that day after day what I had learned and thought and delighted in and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me never to be brought back any more, cannot be written."

Soon after he went to the blacking factory the whole family moved into the Marshalsea, and Dickens was sent to lodge in Little College Street, Camden Town, with " a reduced old lady," the original of Mrs. Pipkin in Dombey and Son. His father paid his lodging, but otherwise he was left entirely on his own resources — " no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support from anyone that I can call to mind, so help me God! " And the boy was just ten. It is wonderful indeed that he should have grown into the supreme laughter-maker of the after years; and yet, perhaps, as I shall try to show, it was not so wonderful, for miracles do happen and miracles always happen according to natural law — a fact of importance of which both scientists and theologians often appear strangely ignorant.

A legacy of some hundred pounds was left to the elder Dickens. He took his release from the Marshalsea, and soon afterwards he quarrelled with his blacking-manufacturer relative, and Charles was happily discharged. He was sent to a school in the Hampstead Road called the Wellington House Academy, and there he stayed until he was fourteen. Some of the characteristics of the school were used afterwards in the description of Salem House in David Copperfield. On leaving school his father obtained for him an engagement in the office of Mr. Edward Blackmore, a solicitor in Gray's Inn, and there he acquired that intimate knowledge of the futility and chicanery of the law which he was to use with such splendid effect in The Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, and Great Expectations.

John Dickens — he was a man of ability and at times of resource — had become a parliamentary reporter on the staff of The Morning Herald, and his son decided to learn shorthand as the first step in his real career. He worked almost viciously. " Whatever I have tried to do in life," he once said, " I have tried with all my heart to do well." To teach oneself shorthand from a text-book is not an easy task. " The changes that were rung upon dots which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from mastlike flies' legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in the wrong place, not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep."

He worked as a shorthand writer for two years in an office in Doctors' Commons, and when he was nineteen he entered the House of Commons gallery as one of the representatives of a paper called The True Sun. It is one of the characteristics of Charles Dickens' career that despite the hardships of his youth, and his almost entire lack of influential friends, success came to him quickly and easily. He had a story published in The Old Monthly Magazine when he was twenty-one. He had constant newspaper work from the time he was nineteen, and this work gave him all kinds of useful knowledge and experience. He does not appear to have had any trouble in getting his writings accepted and published, and in February 1835 the signature " Boz " — the nickname of one of his brothers — first appeared in The Monthly Magazine, and his career as a novelist may be said to have begun.

In the latter part of this book I have dealt with each of his novels in their order, and here it is only necessary briefly to summarise the facts of their publication. In 1836 he collected the Sketches by Boz, and sold the copyright for £150, and on the 31st of March of the same year Messrs. Chapman & Hall began the publication in shilling numbers of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. The same year saw the end of his career as a parliamentary reporter and the production at the St. James's Theatre of a farce of his called Strange Gentlemen and an opera Village Coquettes, for which he wrote the dialogue and the words of the songs.

Charles Dickens married Miss Catherine Hogarth in the Pickwick year, and he must have been an extremely attractive and impressive-looking young man. Forster when he first saw him was struck by " the quickness, keenness, and practical power, the eager, restless, energetic outlook on each several feature that seemed to tell so little of a student or writer of books and so much of a man of action." Mrs. Carlyle said of his face " that it was as if made of steel," and Leigh Hunt wrote, " It has the life and soul in it of fifty human beings."

No man could possibly have anticipated the enormous popularity achieved by Dickens by his very first book, and unfortunately for him, before that popularity was assured he had entered into agreements which overloaded him with work. While the early numbers of Pickwick were appearing, and before Sam Weller had been created, Dickens had agreed with Mr. Bentley to edit a monthly magazine and to write three stories, on terms good enough for a beginner, but altogether inadequate for the author of Pickwick. In the latter part of 1836 he was writing at the same time the first half of Oliver Twist and the last half of Pickwick. In the years 1837 and 1838 he edited a life of the famous clown Grimaldi, finished Oliver Twist, and began Nicholas Nickleby, which kept him busy almost to the end of 1839.

He had lived since his marriage in Doughty Street, and although he was still only twenty-seven years old he had become a prominent figure in a literary and artistic society which included Thackeray, Macready, Talfourd, Maclise, Landseer, and Douglas Jerrold. In 1840 he began the publication of Master Humphrey's Clock, the idea of which was a weekly three-penny publication based on the Tatler and Spectator, only far more popular, and in which one of his stories should appear in regular instalments. This story was The Old Curiosity Shop, and its success was even greater than that of Pickwick. Quite early in his writing life Dickens began his frequent visits to Broadstairs, and in 1840 he moved from Doughty Street to Devonshire Terrace. This year was the year of Barnaby Rudge, which he had begun during the progress of Oliver Twist, but had put aside for some months.

In January 1842, Dickens made his first visit to America. I have dealt at some length with his impressions in the chapter on Martin Chuzzlewit. It is very difficult, I think, to label him with any political tag, but he was certainly essentially and emphatically an anti-Tory, and he was without question prepared to like America and the Americans. And despite the fact that he detested some of the individuals he met when he landed, particularly " one man in very dirty gaiters and with very protruding upper teeth, who said to all comers after him, ' So you've been introduced to our friend Dickens,' " he was extremely touched by his reception. Dickens loved popularity, but his popularity in the United States was a little too insistent:

" If I turn into the street I am followed by a multitude. If I stay at home the house becomes with callers like a fair. If I visit a public institution with only one friend, the directors come down incontinently, waylay me in the yard, and address me in a long speech. I go to a party in the evening, and am so enclosed and hemmed about by people, stand where 1 will, that I am exhausted for want of air. I dine out, and have to talk about everything to everybody. I go to church for quiet, and there is a violent rush to the neighbourhood of the pew I sit in, and a clergyman preaches at me. I take my seat in a railroad car, and the very conductor won't leave me alone. I get out at a station, and can't drink a glass of water without having a hundred people looking down my throat when I open my mouth to swallow."

He was home again in 1842, and in the months after his return he wrote his American Notes, any detailed description of which has been omitted from this book for want of space and because its " line " is almost exactly similar to that of Martin Chuzzlewit, the first number of which appeared in January 1843. Martin Chuzzlewit was a comparative failure, and the highest sale of any of the numbers was 23,000 as compared with the 50,000 numbers of Pickwick and the 60,000 of The Old Curiosity Shop; but since Dickens' death it has become the third most popular of all his novels, following Pickwick and David Copperfield. The Christmas Carol appeared a few days before the Christmas of this year, and was an immediate and tremendous success. A few months later Dickens went for a long holiday in Italy, not returning to England until June 1845, when he at once began working on his scheme for a daily newspaper — he was wedded to the idea of fathering periodicals — and the first number of The Daily News appeared under his editorship on the 21st of January 1846. The work was altogether too much for him, and he resigned the position a fortnight afterwards, ceasing to have any connection with the paper after four months, and starting for the Continent again to forget a mistake and to get back again into the vein for writing another novel. His stay in Lausanne and Geneva was followed by three months in Paris. In 1847 he lived a great deal at Brighton and Broadstairs, writing Dombey and Son. The Haunted Man was written in 1848, The Chimes having been completed in Italy three years before. Dickens spent much of 1849 and 1850 in Broadstairs and Bonchurch, Isle of Wight, with David Copperfield. He loathed Bonchurch, and it made him dull and ill. In one of his letters to Forster he says: " Naples is hot and dirty, New York feverish, Washington bilious, Genoa exciting, Paris rainy, but Bonchurch smashing. I am quite convinced that I should die here in a year."

In 1850 he started Household Words. The original idea was fantastic and poetical — a weekly journal dominated by a certain Shadow, " a cheerful, useful, and always welcome Shadow," who should express his opinion of all manner of things week after week. But the practical Forster vetoed the Shadow, and Household Words with more conventional ambitions first appeared on the 30th of March. The assistant editor was W. G. Wills, and its first serial was written by Mrs. Gaskell.

Dickens left the house in Devonshire Terrace in 1851. Whilst living there his fame had become worldwide, and he had gathered round him a small but desirable circle of genuine friends. Among them were the Macreadys, Mark Lemon, Tenniel, Milner Gibson, Lord Lovelace, John Delane, the Landseers, the Carlyles, Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, Douglas Jerrold, Tennyson, Tom Taylor, the Kembles, Frith, Mazzini, Sims Reeves, Mrs. Keeley, George Henry Lewes, and some others. At this time he was very busy as an amateur actor, playing in his own house and in halls in various parts of the country on behalf of the funds of the Guild of Literature or for some other worthy cause. There is no question that he had very great stage ability, used to the full years afterwards when he gave his public readings. In 1853 he went again to Switzerland and Italy. Although Dickens travelled on the Continent a great deal, as Mr. Chesterton suggests, he always remained entirely uncosmopolitan, and entirely an Englishman, and it is a highly suggestive and important fact that he should have written so thoroughly an English book as The Chimes in Genoa. Dickens had no vulgar racial prejudices. He had none of the detestable John Bull arrogance that has made the Englishman abroad so generally disliked. He simply lacked the faculty to perceive the essentials of any people but his own. He liked Italy and he loved the poor Frenchman, but like the hero of Sir William Gilbert's song he always remained an Englishman.

Bleak House was begun in 1851 and finished at Boulogne in 1853. Hard Times was begun in 1853 and finished also at Boulogne in 1854. Dickens was very seriously overworking at this time editing Household Words, writing Bleak House and the quite unnecessary Child's History of England simultaneously. He was living in a turmoil, working to save his soul, trying to put out of his mind the family unhappiness which was beginning to be insupportable. He began Little Dorrit in 1855, and he finished the story during his stay in Paris in 1856 to 1857. In 1856 he was in Doncaster at the time of the St. Leger, and it is not without interest that this great anti-Puritanic Englishman should have found horse-racing entirely detestable. " I vow to God," he wrote, " that I can see nothing in it but cruelty, covetousness, calculation, insensibility, and low wickedness." In 1856 he bought the house at Gadshill, outside Chatham, which was his home during the rest of his life and where he eventually died.

Dickens' marriage with Catherine Hogarth was never, I imagine, entirely satisfactory, and it eventually became impossible. He was a man who, because he was so English, was intensely domestic, earnestly yearning for all that home means to an Englishman. But he was a man who, because he was an artist to whom success and unbounded popularity had come when he was very young, was nervous, jumpy, sensitive, capricious, just the sort of man impossible as a husband to any woman who lacked the genius for loving and for understanding. John Forster bluntly regards Dickens' parting from his wife as a serious blot on his career. Mr. Chesterton, who is also nothing if not domestic, also rates him severely, and evidently regards the parting as largely his fault; but surely, with the very full knowledge that we have of Dickens and the partial and fairly definite knowledge that we have of Mrs. Dickens, their hopeless incompatibility is obvious, and it is evident that if they had gone on living together the man's life would have petered out in utter heart-break and premature sterility. Dickens wrote to Forster in 1856:

" If I were sick or disabled to-morrow, I know how sorry she would be and how deeply grieved myself to think how we had lost each other. But exactly the same incompatibility would arise the moment I was well again; and nothing on earth could make her understand me or suit us to each other. Her temperament will not go with mine. . . . The years have not made it easier to bear for either of us; and for her sake as well as mine the wish will force itself upon me that something must be done. ... I claim no immunity from blame, there is plenty of fault on my side I daresay in the way of a thousand uncertainties, caprices, and difficulties of disposition; but only one thing will alter all that, and that is the end which alters everything."

Dickens and his wife parted forever in May 1857. His eldest son went with his mother, the other children stayed with him. The whole thing was lamentable but absolutely inevitable.

Dickens began his public readings in 1858. He gave altogether four series, one in 1858-59, another in 1861-63, another in 1866-67, and the last in 1868 and 1870. All his instinctive histrionic power came out in these platform experiences. He read with inimitable art, and he moved his audiences exactly as he had moved his readers. He was given royal receptions in every town he visited, and his success in England was repeated when he returned to America in 1867 for a reading tour. Dickens liked America better than he had done on his first visit, and America forgave him Martin Chuzzlewit and treated him magnificently. He made £20,000 from the American readings and something like £23,000 from the English series; but the work was too much for him, and the strain was largely responsible for his comparatively early death. In 1859 Household Words became All the Year Round, and A Tale of Two Cities began its serial publication in the first number. In 1860 he wrote The Uncommercial Traveller, and in 1860 and 1861 Great Expectations, which also appeared serially in All the Year Round. In 1864 and 1865, amid failing health and much family sorrow, he wrote Our Mutual Friend, quite the gayest of his later books. He was taken ill during his readings on the 23rd of April 1869, and although he worked on he was never really well again. He died at Gadshill on the 9th of June 1870.

No writer had ever attracted the love of his readers as Dickens attracted it. No professional writer was ever so deeply and genuinely mourned. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on the 14th of June, and for three days, Dean Stanley wrote, " there was a constant pressure on the spot, many flowers were strewn upon it by unknown hands, many tears shed from unknown eyes." Horace Greeley, writing of the grief in America, says: " The loss of no single man during the present generation, if we except Abraham Lincoln alone, has carried mourning into so many families." Carlyle has perhaps written his epitaph better than any other of his contemporaries: " A most cordial, sincere, clear-sighted, quietly decisive, just, and loving man. . . . The good, the gentle, high-gifted, ever friendly, noble Dickens, every inch of him an honest man."

The characters he created are so real to us because they were real to him. " He laughed and wept with them, was as much elated by their fun as cast down by their grief, and brought to the consideration of them a belief in their reality as well as in the influences they were meant to exercise which in every circumstance sustained him."

He was an affectionate father. " I hope," he wrote to one of his sons, " you will always be able to say in after life that you had a kind father." He was the most considerate and kindly of editors. He was the friend of his poorer neighbours, and never insulted them with patronage. He preached a gospel of brotherly love. He loved ghost stories and he loved children. He was a great dreamer and a great humorist.