Читать книгу Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World - Simon Callow - Страница 12

The New Year began dramatically with the birth, nine months almost to the minute after the wedding, of Charles Dickens’s son and heir, Charles Culliford Boz, dutifully named after an ancestor, triumphantly named after a Phenomenon. The precise date of birth was 6 January, Twelfth Night (or rather, to be pedantic, Twelfth Day), a date that would forever thereafter be sacred to Dickens. But the birth was not without its complications: the confinement had been far from easy, and Catherine was unable to breastfeed the child. ‘Poor Kate! It has been a dreadful trial for her,’ wrote Mary Hogarth to her cousin. ‘Every time she sees her baby she has a fit of crying and keeps saying that he will not love her now that she is not able to nurse him.’ Catherine, it seems, was in the grip of post-natal depression. ‘I think time will be the only effectual cure for her,’ continued Mary, wisely, for so it proved, and would prove after each of her many subsequent confinements. ‘Could she but forget this, she has everything in the world to make her comfortable and happy.’ Dickens, says Mary, ‘is kindness itself to her and is constantly studying her comfort in every thing’; both her mother and Charles’s were in bustling attendance.

By the end of the month, he was responsible for producing another new child: an orphan, this time. The first episode of Oliver Twist (which also had a very difficult birth, one with which he had to cope all on his own) appeared in Bentley’s Miscellany: Dickens had decided that the article the contract committed him to write every month should be a short serial, then he realized that it should be a novel. He was still writing, for an ever-expanding readership, the monthly instalments of Pickwick Papers. That was 12,000 words a month; Twist meant another 12,000. A nightmarishly demanding form for most writers, the novel in monthly instalments suited the journalist in him: the rush of adrenalin, the need to focus the mind with absolute clarity, the sense of sending out a dispatch to unknown but eagerly awaiting readers, provided almost ideal conditions for his creativity. There were, too, occasional pieces to be penned for the newspapers, and en passant he managed to toss off a quick farce with songs for the St James’s Theatre called Is She His Wife?, which is really quite seriously silly. Nonetheless it took some thinking about; even the process of sending the pen across the page was time-consuming. But in the case of the novels – two of the most famous novels ever written, their every sentence pored over and analysed by scholars from that day to this – he was functioning at the highest level of imagination and invention of which the human brain is capable. For one mind to have created the radically different worlds of Pickwick and Twist within it at the same time is a staggering and indeed barely comprehensible phenomenon. Add to it that he was also editing a magazine, a demanding job he had never done before – correcting, re-shaping, advising, consenting – while at the same time helping to look after a new-born baby and an unhappy, perhaps depressed, wife, and that he was just twenty-five years old – well, one might say that he earned the month’s holiday he now took. It was a working holiday, needless to say, but at least they were out of town.

When they came back from holiday, they moved into a new house, No. 48 Doughty Street, just off Mecklenburgh Square. It represented a very large step up the social ladder from his digs in Furnival’s Inn. There were gates at either end of the street and a uniformed porter on duty. It was, as it happens, less than ten minutes’ walk from the office of the solicitor Charles Molloy, where, a semi-educated lad, he had gone to work straight out of school just ten years before. The new house had twelve rooms, on three floors with a basement; Dickens’s study was at the back of the house, looking into the garden. But all the action was in the front room next to it: here the family – Dickens’s wife Kate, her sister Mary, little Charley, along with Dickens’s younger brother Fred – would gather, surrounded by friends and mothers and brothers and sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law; his sister Fanny and her rather intense husband Henry, both musicians, would come round and sing and play. And as often as not, Dickens himself, drawn by the lively sounds, would come through and bring his writing with him, encouraging them to carry on with their chat and their games, sometimes breaking off from his work – as Mozart and Puccini were wont to do – to share with them what he was working on, reading out loud anything he thought particularly funny or moving. Dickens adored parties, and he and Kate threw a number of notably ebullient ones here; he sang comic songs, accompanying himself at the little upright piano, and hurling himself like a madman into dancing – a thing almost impossible to imagine in the modest confines of that little front room, but a well-attested fact.

Just a month after they all moved in, young Mary went to spend the day with her mother in Brompton; when she came back, she, Catherine and Charles went to the St James’s Theatre to see Is She His Wife? They had a delightfully jolly time, as Dickens always did when Mary was around, and they went home. Catherine retired to bed, and Dickens and Mary chatted until one o’clock. She then went to her bedroom. The moment she entered the room, she uttered a sharp cry. She was all of a sudden very ill. Doctors were sent for; every remedy applied. Dickens held her throughout, comforting her, waiting for the fever to break. And then, without warning, after many hours, suddenly, but calmly, she was dead. Dickens was shattered; when he realized what had happened, he slipped a ring off her finger, and wore it for the rest of his life.

At first, the letters he wrote under the shock of the event were controlled: ‘She had accompanied us to the theatre the night before apparently in the best health; was taken ill in the night, and lies here a corpse,’ he wrote to Harrison Ainsworth. ‘She has been our constant companion since our marriage; the grace and life of our home. Judge how deeply we feel this fearfully sudden deprivation.’ To Mary’s grandfather, he wrote:

You cannot conceive the misery in which this dreadful event has plunged us. Since our marriage she has been the peace and life of our home – the admired of all for her beauty and excellence – I could have better supplied a much nearer relation or an older friend, for she has been to us what we can never replace, and has left a blank which no one who ever knew her can have the faintest hope of seeing supplied.

He was deeply fond of the girl, and he was understandably shocked by her sudden death. But there is something intemperate, disproportionate, in his reaction to her death. His suggestion that he would rather have sacrificed someone else in his immediate circle – who, precisely? – is alarming, and the conviction that she was the peace and the life of their home reflects most unhappily on Catherine. His words are the words of a bereaved parent; but he felt no such emotions about his own children when they died. ‘Thank God she died in my arms,’ he wrote to Thomas Beard, on black-edged mourning paper, ‘and that the very last words she whispered were of me … I solemnly believe that so perfect a creature never breathed. I knew her inmost heart, and her real worth and value. She had not a fault.’

Mary, for Dickens, was the angel he had so long sought for. And now she was gone. He composed her epitaph:

YOUNG, BEAUTIFUL, AND GOOD

GOD IN HIS MERCY

NUMBERED HER AMONG HIS ANGELS

AT THE EARLY AGE OF

SEVENTEEN

He was, remember, just twenty-five. Mary had, of course, been absolutely and unnegotiably unavailable to him as wife or lover, but she was a perfect supplement to the imperfect relationship he had settled for; she made his existence possible. When she died it was as if her death had happened to him personally; as if something terrible had been done to him. He had, he felt, been unimaginably blessed by the presence in his life of this paragon, this faultless creature, this shining antidote to a bad, faithless, unreliable world – and now, for no reason, she had been snatched away from him. It was a blow from which he never entirely recovered.

The extent of his shock can be gauged by the fact that, for the first and only time in his life, he stopped working. He and Kate withdrew to a little farm at the North End of Hampstead Heath for a fortnight; no new numbers of either Pickwick or Oliver Twist appeared. Rumours abounded as to why Pickwick had been suspended: the author was an eighteen-year-old who had run out of material; or had been in prison for years; or was a committee that had broken up. In attempting to console her mother, who, Dickens said, had been ‘insensible’ with grief, Catherine seems to have rallied herself, but at Collins’s Farm, she broke down completely; shortly after she lost the child she was carrying. The air was heavy with hysterical mourning. Mary ceased to be a real young woman and became the abstract of all virtues: of her relationship with her sister, which as far as we know was perfectly ordinary, Dickens wrote that ‘not one cross word or angry look on either side even as children rests in judgement against her …’ It is a commonplace that this fetishization of the departed pervades a great deal of his work; when he resumed work on Oliver Twist, he found that he couldn’t, as he had planned, kill off Rose Maylie, the character fashioned after Mary: ‘so mild and gentle; so pure and beautiful; that earth seemed not her element, nor its rough creatures, her fit companions’. Rose was duly spared. Mary is to be found in novel after novel of Dickens’s. She had died at exactly the age at which for him a woman was at her most perfect: she never grew fat, dull, tired, tedious. To his inexpressible joy, he was sent a lock of her hair by Mrs Hogarth; that, too, he kept by him always. She fixed for ever for him the ideal of what a woman should be – that is, a girl. It is hard to avoid a sense of arrested development in Dickens. To survive inside, he had had to keep alive in a secret place the twelve-year-old boy that he had been; and Mary was that twelve-year-old boy’s salvation.

It was while Charles and Catherine were staying in Hampstead, trying to come to terms with what had happened, that John Forster, whom Dickens had first met at Ainsworth’s on Christmas Day of 1836, finally spent some time with him over a meal. They both came away from that dinner feeling as if they had known each other all their lives. Forster, Dickens’s exact contemporary, was from Newcastle-on-Tyne; his father had been a cattle-dealer and butcher. He went up to Cambridge, but transferred to London University. The plan was for him to become a lawyer; in the fullness of time he did, but his true bent was for literature, and he became a critic. A big, thickset man, he was, even as a young man, pompous, blunt and assertive, something of an intellectual bully, in fact; in literary circles, his insensitivity was legendary. The reverse side of this coin was his acute awareness of artistic excellence, and his reverence for it in others, which no doubt explains the strong friendships he formed with some of the most interesting and difficult men of his time: Carlyle, Landor, Tennyson, Lamb. He was a prolific writer, but he never attempted fiction or poetry; as a biographer, he was both acute and adoring. Dickens instantly took to him, forming with him one of those intense nineteenth-century male friendships which, though not remotely sexual, achieve intense tenderness; despite being constantly threatened by jealousy and temperament, it endured solidly till Dickens’s death. But in May of 1837, and for a long time afterwards, they could scarcely get enough of each other.

Shortly after that dinner – a matter of weeks – Dickens was writing to Forster: ‘I look back with unmingled pleasure to every link which each ensuing week has added to the chain of our attachment. It shall go hard, I hope, ere anything but death impairs the toughness of a bond now so firmly riveted.’ Forster, for his part, was overwhelmed by his handsome new friend’s charisma: he found his face to be uncommonly compelling, ‘the eyes wonderfully beaming with intellect and running over with humour and cheerfulness’. But there was something beyond mere animation: ‘the quickness, keenness, 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 and business in the world. Light and motion flashed from every part of it.’ Dickens cemented his friendship with Forster. He wanted him by him at all times. After a hard morning of writing and editing, he needed the relief of physical exercise, walking, or, even better, riding, ideally all over Hampstead Heath with his best friend and then a good supper and a few flagons of wine at Jack Straw’s Castle. The summons would arrive; how could Forster refuse? ‘Is it possible that you can’t, oughtn’t, shouldn’t, mustn’t, won’t, be tempted, this gorgeous day!’ or ‘I start precisely – precisely, mind – at half-past one. Come, come, come, and walk in the green lanes. You will work the better for it all week. COME! I shall expect you.’ Or ‘where shall it be? Oh where? – Hampstead? Greenwich? Windsor? WHERE?????? While the day is bright, not when it has dwindled away to nothing! For who can be of any use whatsomdever such a day as this, excepting out of doors?’ Or it would just be: ‘A hard trot of three hours?’ and then, without waiting for a reply: ‘So engage the osses.’

Many people were struck by what Forster calls Dickens’s ‘practical power’: his appearance of being a man of action. Jane Carlyle, always, like her husband the great philosopher Thomas, pitiless in judgement, said of his face: ‘It was as if it was made of steel.’ Carlyle himself wrote to her, rather more comprehensively: ‘He is a fine little fellow – Boz, I think,’ noting the ‘clear, blue, intelligent eyes that he arches amazingly, large, protrusive, rather loose mouth, a face of the most extreme mobility, which he shuttles about – eyebrows, eyes, mouth and all – in a very singular manner while speaking. Surmount them with a loose coil of common coloured hair, and set it on a small compact figure very small and dressed à la d’Orsay [a noted dandy of the time, whom Dickens knew and indeed imitated] rather than well – this is Pickwick. For the rest, a quite-shrewd-looking little fellow, who seems to guess pretty well what he is and what others are.’ This was not the mask polite society expected: ‘What a face to meet in a drawing room!’ said Leigh Hunt: ‘It has the life and soul in it of fifty human beings!’

Forster’s arrival so close to Dickens’s heart was not a cause for rejoicing among the rest of his circle, the Ainsworths and the Cruikshanks. They did not take at all well to his brusqueness, his discourtesy, his assertiveness. Quirky, combative, aggressive, he made a point of correcting everyone (even quarrelling with William Macready, the greatest actor of his day, on points of dramatic interpretation). Richard Bentley, who had invited him to a party at Dickens’s behest, found that he had insulted many of his guests. But Dickens had a strong instinct that the very faults that sometimes made Forster a social liability could be of great use to him in the sphere of business: his forcefulness, doggedness, the thickness of his skin, to say nothing of his knowledge of the law, made him a very useful negotiator, and Dickens increasingly asked him to take on the role of his unofficial business manager; as far as we know he was never paid for these services. And Dickens made use of them, almost immediately, in his battles with publishers. He currently had three: Macrone for Sketches by Boz, Bentley for Oliver Twist, and Chapman and Hall for Pickwick; each of them at one time or another had to be put in their place. Macrone was simply and rather brutally bought off; Chapman and Hall were behaving impeccably for the time being, throwing a party to celebrate the anniversary of the first number of Pickwick, giving Dickens an ex gratia payment of £500 and striking a dozen apostle spoons with characters from the novel in place of the saints; but Bentley, with his oppressive contract, had to be punished. And Forster was the man to do it.

The truth is that, despite his unparalleled success – and there had been nothing like it, since, after the publication of Childe Harold, Bryon had woken up one morning to find himself famous – Dickens was by no means well-off. When Mary Hogarth died, he had paid for the funeral, and he needed to borrow money to do so. His publishers, by contrast, were becoming very rich on his back, and this disparity deeply rankled with him: it was an injustice and a humiliation, and he had had enough of both in his life. Forster acted brilliantly and cannily for Dickens. But his contribution did not end there. He had considerable critical heft in his own right. He was, after all, the literary editor of The Examiner, one of the most valuable and influential of the bewildering plethora of magazines of the period, and Dickens invited him, to an altogether surprising degree, to give his opinion on work in progress; what is more, he often took it. Dickens was notably lacking in preciousness about his work, but no one had a greater influence on it – often for better, occasionally for worse – than John Forster, who was the first reader of everything he wrote from now on, advising and arbitrating; in time he even did Dickens’s proof-reading for him, making small changes as he saw fit, almost without exception endorsed by Dickens. And Forster introduced him to his own friends, who, as we have seen, were a formidable bunch.

For Dickens, the prize of all these introductions was not a painter, nor a philosopher, it was Macready, the great tragedian, in the mid-1830s at the very height of his powers as a performer, and widely acknowledged as the man who had restored dignity to the British stage. Dickens had seen everything he had done in the last decade and idolized him, making a determined and ultimately successful effort to bind the actor to him with hoops of steel, at first somewhat to the alarm of the famously formal and reserved Macready. Long after abandoning his dreams of becoming an actor, Dickens remained slavishly devoted to the theatre in all its forms, even putting the somewhat spurious Memoirs of Grimaldi into shape, and providing a loving introduction to them out of nostalgia for the sublime clown whom he had twice seen as a little boy; to his amazement, the book proved a bestseller (not that he saw any of the profit from that, either). The fascination with the stage was not all one way: the stage was very interested in Dickens, too. A mere six months after the first number of Pickwick appeared, the first pirate adaptation was up and running under the title of The Peregrinations of Pickwick; more followed. William Moncrieff’s Sam Weller, cashing in on the accession of young Princess Victoria to the throne, featured a loyal chorus, during the singing of which a procession of ‘Heralds, Beefeaters, Guards etc’ are seen passing through Temple Bar to acclaim her. Dickens despaired at the violence done to his work before he had even finished it; but his affection for the theatre stopped him from preventing his friends the actors from trying to earn a decent crust at his expense; in the absence of copyright laws, it was virtually impossible to stop them, anyway. The Pickwick Papers had come to a conclusion, and Oliver Twist was in its sensational stride, exposing the criminal underbelly of London which he had studied so closely in his endless wanderings in the city. Twist was immediately, and wretchedly, adapted to the stage, too. Within the pages of the novel, he had written, more or less en passant, an artistic manifesto that frankly acknowledged his dues to the theatre: ‘It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon.’ The streaky bacon method was to serve Dickens exceptionally well, right to the end. The readers of Twist were much more conscious of the tragic scenes, which presented almost unacceptably horrifying images of contemporary life. They were particularly shocking as the next characters to come from the pen of the dashing young author who had just enchanted the world with the great comedians that comprise the cast of The Pickwick Papers; his sudden descent into the underworld seemed like a betrayal of his affirmation in the closing pages of Pickwick already quoted:

There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light. We, who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at the visionary companions of many solitary hours, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them.

Night came very suddenly. Dickens’s readers needed to fasten their safety belts: it proved to be a bumpy trip. He was intent on deromanticizing the criminal world of which he had such vivid first-hand experience. The all-important thing for Dickens in writing the book was that IT IS TRUE, as he wrote (his capitals) in the Preface. He was describing ‘the very scum and refuse of the land’, determined to show that there was nothing glamorous about a criminal life: ‘What charms has it for the young and ill-disposed, what allurements for the most jolter-headed of juveniles? Here are no canterings on moonlit heaths, no merry-makings in the snuggest of all possible caverns.’ This was the life of the urban underbelly: ‘the cold, wet, shelterless midnight streets of London; the foul and frowzy dens, where vice is closely packed and lacks the room to turn; the haunts of hunger and disease, the shabby rags that scarcely hold together.’ He had been perilously close to immersion in that underworld. Oliver’s experience was for Dickens an all-too-probable vision of the horror that his own life might have sunk into. ‘But for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.’ He put all his understanding of the danger of the world into his lowlife characters, explicitly identifying them in his Preface: ‘Sikes is a thief, and Fagin a receiver of stolen goods; the boys are pickpockets, and the girl is a prostitute.’ The blunt use of the last word stopped Dickens’s readers dead in their tracks – no wonder Lord Melbourne tried to dissuade the young Queen Victoria (who ascended the throne the year the book started to appear) from reading a book about ‘Workhouses and Coffinmakers and pickpockets … I don’t like that low debasing style.’

Meanwhile, even as he was exposing the brutality both of so-called charity and of organized child crime in Twist to the astounded fascination of the nation, he determined to expose the iniquities of the Yorkshire boarding schools. He had been deeply moved by stories he had read of children abandoned to the untender mercies of these primitive educationalists, so he and Phiz travelled to the North under pseudonyms – how Dickens must have loved that masquerade – and did hair-raising field research. The following month, the first instalment of Nicholas Nickleby appeared, fuelled by the furious energy of Dickens’s rage at what he had seen; it was read by an astonishing 50,000 readers, and confirmed Dickens as the most compelling literary voice of his time. But the novel did not confine itself to social criticism; like Pickwick, its form was loose enough to embrace many aspects of British life on which Dickens wished to comment. En route, for no particular reason, he takes a sizeable detour into the world of the theatre, an astonished Nicholas finding himself recruited into a company of moth-eaten thespians under the titanic leadership of Vincent Crummles (a fate that would have been something of a dream come true for Dickens himself). These sections of the book are Dickens’s love letter to the profession, and it is entirely fitting that the novel, when it appeared in hard covers, was dedicated to Macready, a very different actor indeed from Mr Crummles.

It is worth stopping for a moment to consider what the theatre meant to Dickens, since it occupied such a central role in his imagination. Nicholas finds a kindness, a warmth and an inclusiveness in the theatre that contrasts favourably with almost every other stratum of society he encounters. It has room for dwarves and giants and women with beards, for those with one tiny skill and for the preternaturally gifted. It is, as he rightly calls it, ‘a little world’, but his stress is on the noun, not the adjective: he sees the theatre as an entire world, consistent within itself. Every transaction within its boundaries, on or off stage, is somehow theatrical (even the pony’s mother was ‘in the business’): it is life lived as a series of plays-within-plays. Nicholas finds it irresistibly charming, the whole gaudy enterprise essentially affirmative. ‘Are they very theatrical people here?’ he asks Crummles of the folk of Portsmouth. ‘Far from it,’ reports Crummles, moodily. ‘I pity them,’ says Mrs Crummles. ‘So do I,’ Nicholas concurs, ‘if they have no relish for theatrical entertainment, properly conducted.’

As an actor, Nicholas responds vividly, as Dickens did, to the heroic act of performance, to rising above your situation, getting on stage and giving it your all, which was essentially, of course, Dickens’s own approach to life. It is generous and dangerous and not like normal life. The artificiality of the theatrical environment makes it, paradoxically, more real: it is actually happening before your eyes, people are making it happen for you. The moment of performance, the coming together of the elements, the power of impersonation, are all practical mysteries that heighten experience and charge life with an electrical current of excitement. To enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination. ‘Is this a theatre?’ doubts Smike one morning when Nicholas slips him onto the stage where Crummles and co. will be playing that night. ‘I thought it was a blaze of light and finery,’ to which Nicholas gives the superb reply, revealing the measure of Dickens’s understanding of the essential nature of the theatre: ‘Why, so it is … but not by day, Smike, not by day.’ Dickens is not so stage-struck, though, as to be unaware of the practical realities of the business, drily noting the ‘remarkable fact in theatrical history, but one long since established beyond dispute, that it is a hopeless endeavour to attract people to a theatre unless they can be first brought to believe that they will never get into it.’

His view of the stage is not unsatirical, but his affection for its denizens and their activities is deep. Crummles’s theatre, bordering as it does on vaudeville, and with more than a nod in the direction of the end of the pier, is not exactly, as Paul Schlicke remarks, the Royal Shakespeare Company, but it is – like most theatre companies – a broad church, able to encompass not only the tumblers, the dancers, and Miss Ninetta Crummles, the Infant Phenomenon herself, but also the ‘First Tragedy Man’ who, when he played Othello, ‘used to black himself all over’. Vincent Crummles is rather in awe of this pioneering Method actor: ‘that’s feeling a part and going into it as if you meant it. It isn’t usual – more’s the pity,’ he adds, mournfully echoing the general view, frequently expressed in the novel’s theatre sections, of the sad decline of the English stage. Everyone in Crummles’s group is a readily identifiable theatre type and has his or her counterpart in any modern company. Perhaps the most startling portrait is that of Folair, who dances the part of The Savage. Dickens paints him unmistakably as a bitchy theatre queen, spreading poison wherever he goes; the spirit of Folair, alas, lives still. The theatre is, as has perhaps been too often observed, a family, and all families, as Dickens more than most had cause to know, have their problem children (and problem parents). But a feeling of family was central to the Eden from which he had once been exiled, and for a return of which he ardently hoped, and the theatre supplied it.

Beyond his sense of the theatre-as-world was his sense of the world-as-theatre, of the charivari, the endless parade, each man in his time playing many parts, absurd, grotesque, battered, damaged, ridiculous, briefly glorious. It is a carnival view of life, in which we are all, like members of a theatre company, dependent on each other, all limbs of one body, all human, and therefore all flawed, all beautiful. There are, too, as part of this more or less medieval view of the great theatre of the world, devils and angels, playing havoc with the endless parade, creating a pressing and permanent tension between Nicholas Nickleby’s carnival spirit and its morbid sentimentality, a tension highly characteristic of the nascent Victorian era in which it was written, and one which was central to Dickens himself; he never quite resolved it to the end. But for the most part the book is a kind of corybantic frieze of all-too-human mankind, its characters parading unforgettably past us, insinuating themselves permanently into our imaginations, populating our mental landscapes. Its spirit seems to hark back, past Shakespeare to Chaucer, enabling Dickens to embody something quintessentially and irrepressibly English.

Nickleby was of course, adapted for the stage, too, long before the final instalment was written, notably by the prolific William Moncrieff. Dickens struck back in the later pages of the novel itself, speaking of ‘a literary gentleman who had dramatised in his time 247 novels as fast as they had come out – some of them faster than they had come out’. Taking this as a personal taunt, Moncrieff (still before Nickleby’s serialization was finished) issued an aggrieved statement challenging Dickens to end the book ‘better than I have done’ after which he promised to ‘sink into the primitive mire from which I have for a moment attempted to emerge by catching at the hem of his garment’. Punching below the belt, Moncrieff, alluding to the plays the very young Dickens had written, adds:

having himself unsuccessfully tried the drama, there is some excuse for his petulance towards its professors; but it is somewhat illiberal and ungrateful that, being indebted to the stage for so many of his best characters – Sam Weller from Beasley’s Boarding House, for instance – he should deny it a few in return.

Beasley and his boarding house have disappeared from view, so it is impossible to know what debt the immortal Sam owed them for his existence, but in general terms Moncrieff was not wrong: Dickens owed a great deal to current theatrical conceptions in his creation of character. But he transformed those prototypes out of all recognition, giving them – as in the case of Sam Weller – immortality in exchange for the shallow, cardboard lives they had known before. In any event, despite Moncrieff’s hope that Dickens would indulge ‘in a little more generosity of feeling towards his humbler brethren of the quill’, there was no reply. Pirate adaptation was, after all, a very minor corner of his ever-expanding kingdom of art.

He was increasingly stepping outside of the parameters of his art. Not content with fearlessly addressing, in his novels, the injustices of the day – especially those perpetrated against the young – he was starting to speak on the burning issues of his time in his own person. More and more, he sought the most direct possible contact with his readers, whom he took to be no less than the entire population of the British Isles; to them were soon added the rest of the English-speaking peoples. Not much later, his readership would encompass all of Europe, and beyond. Translation into German and French started in 1838: the same year some episodes of Pickwick were rendered into Russian. He was immediately embraced by that huge constituency as a uniquely vivid spokesman for the disadvantaged. His first public speech, to the Literary Fund Anniversary Dinner, did not concern itself with the woes of suffering mankind, however, but with the inequities of his own profession, on whose behalf he now publicly took up cudgels. Throughout his life as a writer, he strove to increase both the financial rewards and the status of his fellow professionals: self-respect was one of the cornerstones of his view of life, and he felt keenly the factors that militated against it. He campaigned tirelessly against the disadvantages under which writers laboured; he also felt deep compassion for those who, like Walter Scott, had fallen on hard times. His speech to the Fund was gracious and modest (‘the flattering encouragement he had received from his literary brethren had nerved him to future exertions, smoothed his path to the station he had gained, and animated his endeavour not to do other than justice to their kind praise’).

Like every speech he ever made in his life, it was extempore, with no reference to notes. He very soon acquired the reputation of being the best public speaker of his time. He had taken pains to master the art, approaching it with scientific precision. On the morning of a day on which he was giving a speech, he once told Wilkie Collins, he would take a long walk during which he would establish the various headings to be dealt with. Then, in his mind’s eye, he would arrange them as on a cart wheel, with himself as the hub and each heading a spoke. As he dealt with a subject, the relevant imaginary spoke would drop out. When there were no more spokes, the speech was at an end. Close observers of Dickens noticed that while he was speaking he would make a quick action of the finger at the end of each topic, as if he were knocking the spoke away. When he listened to the speakers that preceded him, he could be seen following their words with an almost imperceptible action, as if he were taking them down in shorthand.