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It was, as seen, in the year 1836 that Charles Dickens, newly married and busily engaged on the Pickwick Papers, settled down with his young bride in their chambers in Furnival’s Inn. Within the next four years not only in London and in England, but in all the English-speaking world, he rose to a towering literary eminence as ‘Boz’. The success of Pickwick once assured, book followed book, the new ones beginning while the old ones still ran their course. The busy pen rushed over the paper. Work, to Dickens, was but as play, and his play was as energetic as his work. All this time and throughout his life he was, if there can be such a thing, a ‘passionate walker’. To him a tramp of ten miles was only a start: a real walk meant about twenty. To fatigue he was impervious. Weariness of mind or body in those golden days he never knew. Boredom had no meaning for him and the ‘blues’ was only the name for other people’s states of mind.

If literary genius is built on melancholy indigestion and cynicism, Dickens never had any. He was blessed by nature with a happy moderation of appetite. He sang the glory of the flowing bowl, but he sang it from the rim only, not from the bottom. Tobacco meant so little to him that the characters in his books, through his negligence, never get a fair share of it, let alone an excess, or they get it only in the form of a ‘foul pipe’ as one of the adjuncts of villainy.

His home was at this time a happy one. He widened the sides of it till it took in fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, immediate, in law,—any one a relative to him. For his own father and mother he presently,—as early as 1839,—bought a house, where ‘Mr. Micawber’ lived out his life in comfort on the generosity of his son. When he and his wife took a little cottage at Twickenham for the summer of 1838 it fairly overflowed with the family and the guests. And the family itself increased: for among the many blessings of life enjoyed by Dickens was that of a full cradle. His son and heir, Charles Dickens, Junior, was born in January 1837; a daughter, Mary (Mamie), followed in March 1838; and a third child, the daughter Kate, in October of 1839. A boy, christened Walter Landor, arrived in February 1841, and completed the babbling nursery of four which Dickens left behind when he sailed for America. After that even Dickens himself more or less lost count: certain it is that he refers in a letter of a few years later to the latest baby as ‘it’: when a father does this he is pretty far along.

Round the family circle was added a ring of friendships of men rising like himself in life, or risen, and like himself moving on the flood tide of activity, energy, and success.

Of these there was—first, last, and always—John Forster, who made his acquaintance in the Pickwick days, and who became his devoted adherent, his satellite, his proof-reader, his rock of refuge, his executor, his biographer. The friendship was so one-sided that nothing could break it. Then there was his legal friend Sergeant Talfourd—the Tommy Traddles of David Copperfield; there was Maclise of the Royal Academy, Landseer and other artists; there was Harrison Ainsworth, the novelist of Old Saint Paul’s, and such; and in a lesser degree Thackeray, his only real rival in the contemporary fiction of his day.

One may read in Forster’s biography of the endless walks and rides, visits, dinners and celebrations that marked his friendships: dinners for the happy ending of Pickwick, for the beginning of this, or the end of that, or for nothing or anything. And with it all never a hint of excess. Dickens’s pleasure did not impede, it animated all his work.

Charles Dickens never moved in society with a large S, or appeared in it except at times as a captured star. Nor did he have any contact with public life or politics. The old gallery days had cured him of that. For him public life, like Einstein’s space, had a twist in it. It seemed always either comic, or crooked, never real. To him members of parliament and justices of the peace were funny people. His queer, imperfect judgments on democracy in America are based on his equally imperfect judgments of aristocracy in England. His public functions were limited to taking the chair at public benevolent meetings and such things as that. It never occurred to him to take part in politics. It was not a matter of time; if it had suited him he would easily have found time for it. He found time for much more piffling things than that. Throughout his life he was endlessly editing and correcting all sorts of manuscripts of people not worth editing or correcting; carrying on a mass of needless correspondence, explaining, fuming, fussing over trifles. So much so that he never found time to read the great works and the great thoughts of the world he lived in. He visited France and never saw it: only a comic-romantic effect of vineyards, peasants and bright colours; of people called Monsieur and Madame whose queer speech made for literary effect. But no doubt all this was just as well. Charles Dickens had to lead his life in his own way or not lead it at all. People in America who still dimly resent his picture of their country must remember that France and Italy ‘got their’s’ too.

Thus moved Dickens in a roseate cloud of gathering celebrity. This period of which we are speaking was the real morning of his life. It was the childhood that he had never had before.

Looking back at these years one can realize how full and ample and eager had become the life of Dickens. It seemed as if everything was coming to him at once. Within the space of a few months he seemed to be, indeed he was, passing from poverty to affluence. He had married on the strength of having received £150 for the copyright of the Sketches by Boz, together with two instalments (thirty guineas) advanced on the Pickwick Papers before they came out. But the whole situation changed like a transformation scene. The fifteen guineas per number promised by Messrs. Chapman and Hall proved to be but a small part of the gains from Pickwick. After the sixth number the circulation rose every month till it went well beyond forty thousand copies per number. The publishers found themselves making net profit that would run to £20,000 with the book still to come. Generosity and self-interest alike led them, as already seen, to give a share of this to the young author whose name was already a byword and whose talent a gold-mine. Dickens rose from the ranks of the poor to the ranks of what plain people call rich in a single bound. If he ever needed money again or wanted still more of it, it was only because of the many claims upon his income, the generosity of his disposition, and because he took over with his riches in some measure the sorrows of the rich. The rich are always more concerned over money than the poor.

Meantime the writing of Pickwick itself had become only a part of his labours. With fame came abundant offers of further literary work, and Dickens, making hay while the sun shone, accepted it eagerly. Indeed far too eagerly; for he took on more work than he could do, and for sums which would have seemed fabulous two years before but which presently appeared inadequate. While Pickwick was only just well started he undertook (Aug. 1836) to edit for the publisher, Richard Bentley, a new monthly magazine to be called Bentley’s Miscellany. For the next two years a good part of his time was devoted to this work. The contract included the writing of a serial story which presently began to appear as Oliver Twist. The publication of Oliver began in January 1837 and the story was therefore actually running at the same time when the Pickwick Papers were coming out each month. Dickens finished the story in September of 1838, and Oliver Twist appeared as a book in a three-volume edition, illustrated by George Cruikshank, three or four months before it ended as a serial.

Strangely enough, the talented illustrator made the same kind of claim and accusation against Dickens as was made by the widow, and later by the son, of Seymour. He claimed, in the press and in a pamphlet written in his old age (1872), after Dickens was dead, that he was the real originator of the character of Fagin the Jew, the outstanding personage, next to little Oliver himself, of the book Oliver Twist. Cruikshank was of a different rank from Seymour. He was, and is still, in memory and by reputation, one of the world’s greatest ‘caricaturists’ or ‘comic artists’. (There is no true name for what he was, but everybody knows what is meant.) He was twenty years older than Charles Dickens and was at this time at the height of his success. Apart from his political caricatures, he had made a name by his depiction of city types of humble and low life. If he didn’t invent Fagin he at least could have. His claim was that he told Dickens about a certain Jew, a receiver of stolen goods, and had not only described him but given a sort of pantomime depiction of him. Dickens’s faithful and admiring biographer, as touchy on such a point as Dickens himself, dismisses all this as a ‘marvellous fable’. But it may well be quite true, and it would make no difference if it were. When books are written, as Dickens’s early books were, in parts and sections, with discussions of plans of illustrations, with no clear idea of the future course or end of the story, such an infiltration of other people’s ideas must be inevitable. Even the lion in the fable had its assistant mouse. A man does not ‘originate’ Oliver Twist by suggesting that a thieves’ den would be an interesting spot for a story. General Sherman did not ‘originate’ from Dante’s Inferno by saying that ‘war is hell’. Too much is made in literary post-mortem discussion of this ‘suggestion’ business. The point is not who can suggest a story but who can write it.

The story of Oliver Twist,—or at least the idea of Oliver Twist,—has become a part of the literary heritage of England and America. No one needs to be told who Oliver Twist was. Every one has at least a half-idea of the pathetic little orphan boy, tiny and frail, cast into the care of the workhouse; beaten and ill-treated; half-starved, along with other little famished creatures who shared his lot; and daring, for himself and his fellows, to ‘ask for more’,—like a child martyr walking first to his fate.

This, one would say, is a story for tears, for anger, for hands clenched in righteous indignation. But Dickens saw fit to write this poignant story, and especially the opening scenes of it, in a way peculiarly his own. The manner of relation carries with it a sort of running amusement, as if the whole retrospect of Oliver’s fate had in it something almost laughable. At the famous scene where Oliver Twist ‘asks for more’, the fun gets almost hilarious. Take the following skeleton quotations to indicate the current of the story:

Oliver Twist’s ninth birth-day found him a pale thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature, and decidedly small in circumference.... It was his ninth birth-day; and he was keeping it in the coal-cellar with a select party of two other young gentlemen, who, after participating with him in a sound thrashing, had been locked up for atrociously presuming to be hungry....

Oliver, having had by this time as much of the outer coat of dirt which encrusted his face and hands, removed, as could be scrubbed off in one washing, was led into the room by his benevolent protectress....

Oliver was then led away by Mr. Bumble from the wretched home where one kind word or look had never lighted the gloom of his infant years. And yet he burst into an agony of childish grief, as the cottage gate closed after him....

He had no time to think about the matter, however; for Mr. Bumble gave him a tap on the head, with his cane, to wake him up: and another on the back to make him lively....

Oliver was frightened at the sight of so many gentlemen, which made him tremble: and the beadle gave him another tap behind which made him cry....

Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger and reckless with misery. He rose from the table: and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity:

‘Please, sir, I want some more.’

The master was a fat healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and then clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralyzed with wonder, the boys with fear.

‘What!’ said the master at length, in a faint voice.

‘Please, sir,’ replied Oliver, ‘I want some more.’

The master aimed a blow at Oliver’s head with the ladle; pinioned him in his arms; and shrieked aloud for the beadle.

One may comment upon this style of narration without undertaking to approve or to condemn. There are some of us perhaps to whom the suffering of little Oliver Twist is too poignant, too harrowing for amusement; who might think perhaps that in this method of narration, even from the voice and hand of an inspired genius, the tone in such passages is false, the touch is hard.

But perhaps if Dickens had written it up in a different way the emotion would have broken with its own weight. Compare such a passage as what follows, in which the sentiment becomes overwhelming and its expression beyond all boundaries of truth. Little Dick, a pauper child, Oliver’s fellow sufferer, is dying. His face is ‘earnest’ and ‘wan’ and he wants to send a message. ‘I should like to leave my dear love to Oliver Twist, and to let him know how often I have sat by myself and cried to think of his wandering about in the dark nights with nobody to help him. And I should like to tell him,’ said the child, pressing his small hands together and speaking with great fervour, ‘that I was glad to die when I was very young; for, perhaps, if I had lived to be a man, and had grown old, my little sister who is in Heaven, might forget me, or be unlike me; and it would be so much happier if we were both children there together.’

But let the reader note how the narrative goes on. The tone changes at once again to the comic.

Mr. Bumble surveyed the little speaker, from head to foot, with indescribable astonishment; and, turning to his companion, said, ‘They’re all in one story, Mrs. Mann. That out-dacious Oliver has demogalized them all!’

‘I couldn’t have believed it, sir!’ said Mrs. Mann, holding up her hands, and looking malignantly at Dick. ‘I never see such a hardened little wretch!’

‘Take him away, ma’am!’ said Mr. Bumble imperiously. ‘This must be stated to the board, Mrs. Mann.’

In other words, the peculiar tone of Oliver Twist, the distinctive style of narration, is something like the ‘comic relief’ of the melodrama, with which Dickens was only too well acquainted. Here the audience were saved from the humiliation of tears by the reappearance of the comic character of the play. In melodrama the hysteria of tears heightens the hysteria of laughter, each sentiment reacts upon the other. But every one knows that the effect is inartistic and unworthy. It is a nice point to decide up to what point such a method of narrative may be carried.

But in any case Dickens found plenty of readers to like the story. Such criticisms as were offered against it turned rather upon the fact that it dealt with ‘low life’, a subject of which people of the better classes preferred to know nothing. That it was, in part at least, over-sentimental, was an objection not raised in an over-sentimental age. Readers of the period, grown-up readers, even such hardened people as lawyers, were not ashamed to read a book in a flood of tears. Looking back now on what we think of as Victorian sentimentality, we are apt to see only its feebler aspects, its maudlin exaggeration, its joy in tears, its lack of restraint and reserve. But in its day the tears were as much needed to break down the cruelty and hardness of a preceding age, as the soft rains of April to break the ice of winter. These were the days of the unreformed factories, of the ‘cry of the children’, of the little lives worn out unheeded; the days of the grim shelter of the Union and the starvation of the ‘hungry forties’, the darkest hour of English industrial history.

And here Dickens ‘finds himself’ again. It is no longer the genial satire of the Boz of the Sketches, no longer the uproarious fun, the blazing fires and the wide humanity of the Pickwick Papers. Here begins Charles Dickens the social reformer, driving home with fierce invective and with sardonic humour his protest against the evils of the day,—against the cruelty to children, the oppression of the poor, the law’s delay, the insolence of office and the brutality of class indifference which were the besetting sins of the England of a hundred years ago. Tears for imaginary children were to save the lives of real ones.

In these Pickwick-Oliver Twist days the activity of Dickens was so eager and so multifarious that it is difficult to chronicle all that he did without sinking to the level of a publisher’s catalogue. Among other things he was now able to give expression to his love of the theatre. While still engaged on Pickwick he seems to have put together no less than four little plays, of which three were put upon the stage. The Villages Coquettes was acted at St. James’ Theatre, Dec. 3, 1836. It was described on the bills as a ‘Burletta’ of which the dialogue and the words of the songs were written by Boz. It was followed early in the next year at the same theatre by Is She His Wife? or Something Singular (presumably by Dickens), by a musical recitation by a local comedian Mr. Harley in the character of Pickwick,—words by ‘his biographer Boz’,—and a little play called ‘The Strange Gentleman’. The manuscripts of these dramatic efforts were not preserved, a fact for which Dickens afterwards expressed his profound gratitude.

To acting was added editing. Dickens undertook for Bentley to edit the ‘memoirs’ of Joseph Grimaldi, a once-famous clown who had recently gone where all clowns go. Dickens had never seen Grimaldi, but he sorted out the ‘twaddle,’ as he called the autobiographical notes given to him, and wrote a preface for the book.

Over and above Grimaldi, Dickens did for Bentley various short sketches gathered later together as the ‘Mudfog Papers,’ and are found as such in his complete works as published to-day. Here belong also the ‘Sketches of Young Couples,’ a series of papers which Dickens scratched off with no particular inspiration, to be published without his name. It is no wonder that the Quarterly Magazine of October 27, in reviewing the completed Pickwick Papers, said, ‘Mr. Dickens writes too often and too fast; on the principle, we presume, of making hay whilst the sun shines, he seems to have accepted at once all engagements that were offered to him, and the consequence is, that in too many instances he has been compelled to

‘forestall the blighted harvest of the brain’,

and put forth, in their crude, unfinished, undigested state, thoughts, feelings, observations, and plans which it required time and study to mature—or supply the allotted number of pages with original matter of the most common-place description, or hints caught from others and diluted to make them pass for his own. If he persists much longer in this course, it requires no gift of prophecy to foretell his fate—he has risen like a rocket, and he will come down like the stick.’

Three generations of students of our literature have laughed at this prophecy. But in a sense it is true. Dickens did write too fast. It was all very well when he had the superabundant energy of youth as the driving power of the high speed. It was not so well in later years when he still drove his pen ahead with a tired brain and an exhausted imagination that substituted mechanism for inspiration. In this sense the ‘rocket’ is Mr. Pickwick of 1836 and the ‘stick’ fell in 1865 as Our Mutual Friend.

Dickens was amazed and mystified to find that Bentley the publisher sold 1700 copies of Grimaldi within a week. We can thus understand the point when the ‘old gentleman’ says to Oliver Twist, ‘What! You wouldn’t like to be a book writer?’ and Oliver answered ‘That he should think it would be a much better thing to be a book-seller.’

Indeed Dickens at this period was becoming somewhat obsessed with the idea that the booksellers were making too good a thing out of him. Thus he writes to Forster (in Jan. 1839) to speak of ‘the immense profit which Oliver had realised to its publisher and is still realising, the paltry wretched miserable sum it brought to me ... and the consciousness that I have still the slavery and drudgery of another book on the same journeyman terms; the consciousness that my books are enriching everybody connected with them but myself, and that I, with such a popularity as I have acquired, am struggling in old toils, and wasting my energies in the very height and freshness of my fame and the best part of my life to fill the pockets of others while for those who are nearest and dearest to me I can realise little more than a genteel subsistence.’

All this is hardly fair. Indeed it is a foretaste of the impatient and imperious temper into which Charles Dickens was presently to be ground by hard work. It was not the fault of the publishers if the copyrights turned into gold in their hands. When Macrone paid £150 for the full copyright of the Sketches by Boz, he paid a fair enough market price for a book of moderate merit by an unknown young man. He could not see that the unknown young man would turn out to be Charles Dickens. When he sold back the copyright to Chapman and Hall and Dickens for ten times as much, Dickens thought him a rogue. But if Macrone had lost on the bargain, would Dickens have considered that he owed a debt? Not very likely.

In any case the ‘genteel subsistence’ is certainly drawing a long bow. When Dickens wrote this his income was rolling in so fast that he could hardly count it; he and his wife moved this same year into a beautiful big house with a garden on Devonshire Terrace; he made the purchase of a charming little country house (at Alphington, near Exeter) for his father and mother; and was living, apart from industry, like a lord.

Part of the trouble arose no doubt from the vagueness with which Dickens seems to have made his arrangements with his publishers. He promised to Bentley more than he could possibly write, and at prices which soon looked unfair. Pickwick was published by Chapman and Hall on a sort of ‘gentleman’s agreement’, and Chapman and Hall acted like gentlemen. But as they expected a new book as part of the understanding, Dickens had to hold off Bentley as best he could. Thus his energy seemed to force him into a sort of race with himself, which gave the impression of slavery and drudgery to a task in reality congenial beyond words. So it came about that the ‘slavery and drudgery’ for the publishers’ next took the form of a third book (not counting the sketches) that appeared, or rather began to appear, as it ran in serial numbers, in April 1838 as the Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. It opened up with a sale of fifty thousand copies. Dickens had arrived indeed. Nickleby was a great success. Here again was the Dickens atmosphere, the Dickens characters, the inimitable Mrs. Nickleby,—a delight in fiction, a trial in real life. And here again Dickens is the social reformer with the immortal creation of Mr. Wackford Squeers, whose imaginary personality did more to reform the gross incompetence and brutality of English people’s schools than volumes of inspectors’ reports. For this, Dickens worked up deliberately the local colour: made a trip to Yorkshire before he began the book to see on the spot whether the schools were as evil as painted; and took with him Hablôt Browne, who was thenceforth, with the signature of ‘Phiz’, the illustrator of a series of his books.

But even such wide and constant activities as those described left Dickens, like Oliver Twist, still ‘asking for more’. He began to plan something more comprehensive than a single story, some sort of general repository, or store-house, out of which might come not one story but a dozen. Dickens at this day had a sort of liking for ‘wheels within wheels’, for stories told inside other stories,—as witness the interpolated tales in Pickwick.

This design presently took shape in Master Humphrey’s Clock, a publication which Chapman and Hall issued in weekly numbers, eighty-eight in all, in 1840 and 1841. The design is in reality a ‘mess’. Old Master Humphrey is supposed to be one of those quaint characters, odd and recluse, dear to Dickens’s heart. He possesses an old clock case that is filled up with manuscripts, which he hauls out at intervals and reads to his friends and visitors. Thus Master Humphrey becomes a sort of magazine with a connecting thread of interest or supposed interest, in the way in which the stories come to light. Here, for example, as listening visitors, dragged back from immortality, are Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller! It seems awful that Dickens could have done it; that to supply interest for lesser things he could take another round out of Mr. Pickwick. But youth adventures all things. And in any case the unhappy Mr. Pickwick had been so plagiarized and plundered by other hands,—dragged on a European tour by the unspeakable literary villain G. W. M. Reynolds (Mr. Pickwick Abroad), forced on to the stage by another, that Dickens may have felt that he too had the right to set Pickwick to work overtime. But all true lovers of Pickwick insist on believing that he did not really visit Master Humphrey. It couldn’t be. Dickens must have mistaken someone else for him.

In any case the ‘Clock’ business broke down. When the reader found that the publication was not a single story, the sales fell with a flop. Dickens at once divined the trouble. He decided to give the readers what they wanted. One of the stories started in the clock was called The Old Curiosity Shop. Consequently, at the end of such and such a number, Master Humphrey with heartless indifference was kicked out of his own clock, and gave place to the serial, The Old Curiosity Shop. When that story finished the old man reappears for a moment to breathe a sigh over it and introduce the next story called Barnaby Rudge. His part in other words is only that of the Greek chorus or the compère and the commère of a French revue of to-day.

The Old Curiosity Shop, if not one of Dickens’s best works (many of us would think it very far from that), is at least one of his most celebrated. No readers remember the story or the plot as such. But none forget the character and the pathos of little Nell. It is said that this is preeminently the book which conquered America for Dickens. Pickwick and Oliver, it is true, had been widely read and greeted with enthusiasm. But it is after the Old Curiosity Shop, it seems, and in the name of Little Nell that Charles Dickens gained with the reading public of America the place that he never lost. The controversies and the angers of later days could never remove the memory of it. All the world recalls how Bret Harte, when Dickens died, centred his poetic tribute round the memory of the imagined child. His word-picture of the Western mining camp listening to the story of Little Nell is one of the treasures of literature.

‘Above the pines the moon was slowly drifting,

The river sang below;

The dim Sierras, far beyond, uplifting

Their minarets of snow.

. . . . . . . .

And then, while round them shadows gathered faster

And as the firelight fell,

He read aloud the book wherein the Master

Had wrote of Little Nell.

. . . . . . . .

The fir-trees gathering closer to the shadows

Listened in every spray,

While the whole camp with Nell on English meadows

Wandered and lost their way.’

Master Humphrey had no sooner hatched out The Old Curiosity Shop from his clock than he incubated the new story Barnaby Rudge. In its original presentation Master Humphrey introduces it, and reappears to the extent of a few pages at the end to bid it god-speed, and to arrange,—with the approval of all concerned,—his own approaching demise. But in the usual editions of Dickens’s works, Barnaby Rudge is printed, like the Old Curiosity Shop, as a story by itself.

It is customary to talk of Barnaby Rudge as a historical novel, and to say that this book and Dickens’s other historical novel The Tale of Two Cities form an exception among his works. But the exception is much more apparent than real. If by a historical novel we mean a book in which appear the actual characters of history,—the Queen Elizabeths and the Louis Onzes and such,—these books are not so. Apart from a fleeting vision in Barnaby of Lord George Gordon, there are no actual characters. All are imaginary. They are perhaps more ‘real’ than the ‘actual’ personages of other writers. But they are not historical in the stricter sense. Neither is the period. We are apt to forget that in Dickens’s youth the French Revolution was a vivid memory of yesterday to all people of middle age. When Dickens first visited France, in the pre-railroad days, the routine of life around him was not particularly different from that of the days of Voltaire. With the one exception of the paddle-wheel steamer the journey to France was much like those of Mr. Jarvis Lorry of Telson’s Bank. Nor was the London of Lord George Gordon very remote or very different in appearance from the London of the Prince Regent. The Maypole Inn was still standing (in hundreds) along the coach roads of England. One would hardly say to-day that a man is writing a ‘historical’ novel if the plot is laid in the days of Grover Cleveland or Lord Rosebery.

But there is perhaps something less of Dickens, personally, in the narration of these two stories. He does not, as much as in the others, invite the reader to step in and out of the book by calling attention in his own person to its applications. Yet consider the opening of Chapter Nine (Barnaby). ‘Chroniclers are privileged to enter where they list and to come and go through keyholes, to ride upon the wind, to overcome, in their soarings up and down, all obstacles of time and space. Thrice blessed be this last consideration since it enables us to follow the disdainful Miggs even into the sanctity of her chamber ...’ etc. There they go! Dickens and the reader, stepping in and out of the book. If that is the method of a ‘historical’ novel it is a ‘rum one’. Even in the Tale of Two Cities, Dickens himself takes a hand in the French Revolution.

In these days when ‘detective’ fiction and the solution of ‘insoluble’ mysteries cover such a large field, a certain interest attaches to a peculiar incident connected with the story of Barnaby Rudge and with its interpretation by Edgar Allan Poe. The narrative has a ‘mystery’ plot with a murder in it. At the very beginning of the novel, sitting in Mr. Willett’s immortal Maypole Inn, we are told,—with all the proper environment of storm and mystery,—the story of the murder of Barnaby Rudge’s father,—the steward of Mr. Haredale. The mutilated body is found, just as it ought to be—in a pond, and the recollection of it carries through the story a trail of horror, a legacy of crime. But what we are not clever enough to notice is that it is not Charles Dickens who tells us that Rudge was murdered. It is one of his characters, Mr. Solomon Daisy. Seated beside the blazing fire in the Maypole Inn, with the storm of wind and rain outside to give character to the terror of the tale, he recounts the story of the murder and tells us,—‘far enough they might have looked for poor Mr. Rudge the steward, whose body, scarcely to be recognised by his clothes and the watch and the ring he wore,—was found months afterwards at the bottom of a piece of water in the grounds.’ It never occurs to any (ordinary) reader to doubt this statement of apparent fact. In reality Rudge himself is the murderer, a double murderer, for he had killed an innocent man to cover up his other crime.

Dickens, therefore, has contrived to get the living Rudge as dead as he wants, a feat of art that is the despair of the contemporary novelist. He has got him dead with a licence for his resurrection usable at any time. He has only to invite the reader to take another look at Chapter One. He has contrived by the power and interest of the setting, the old inn, the queer people, the blazing fire and the storm outside, to lull our critical sense to sleep. In a cheap detective world to-day there would be nothing but the story as told by Solomon Daisy, bald, crude, just able to stand on its legs and no more, and inviting criticism of every joint of its unhappy ill-contrivance. But as it is, we never doubt; the sheer truth of the setting lends an air of truth to the story; the phrase ‘poor Mr. Rudge’ clinches the conviction. People are not murdered by ‘poor Mr. Anybody’. Incidentally one notices how fond Dickens was of these ‘forward references’,—the insertion of such items of assertion or reflection, only to be understood later. As a literary device the thing is interesting. In its cheapest form it serves as a means of trying to arouse interest and excitement in a dull story by such a remark as,—‘Had our hero only known it, this simple occurrence was destined,’ etc., etc. But this form of reference carries its own signpost. Dickens only uses that kind of thing when the signpost itself is a cryptogram. Compare in Edwin Drood the famous remark about Edwin’s ring: ‘Among the mighty store of wonderful chains that are ever forging, day and night, in the vast iron-works of time and circumstances, there was one chain forged in the moment of that small conclusion, riveted to the foundations of heaven and earth, and gifted with irresistible force to hold and drag,’—an ominous forewarning of which the ultimate meaning passed with Dickens to the grave. But what Dickens loved were forward allusions that could have, at the moment, no possible meaning to a reader not yet acquainted with the book. The reader is supposed to get the benefit of them either by carrying the whole book in his memory, and enjoying the excellence of them at the close, or by reading it over again. The result is that most readers of Dickens are not aware that they are there. The ordinary reader, therefore, we repeat, might easily fail to note the difference between a statement made by one of Dickens’s characters and a statement made in the book by the author himself.

But Edgar Allan Poe was not an ordinary reader. He himself dealt in crime and mysteries and had the quick sense of a professional, who doubts every murder in fiction. In his Essay on Charles Dickens, he tells us that he deduced the fact that Rudge was the real murderer. ‘The secret was distinctly understood,’ he writes, ‘immediately on the perusal of the story of Solomon Daisy which occurs at the seventh page of the volume.’ In the number of the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post for May 1, 1841 (the tale having then only begun), will be found a prospective notice of some length in which we make use (that is, Poe makes use) of the following words:

‘That Barnaby is the son of the murderer may not appear evident to our readers,—but we will explain. It is not the author himself who asserts that the steward was found: he has put the words in the mouth of one of his characters. His design is to make it appear, in the denouement, that the steward, Rudge, first murdered the gardener, then went to his master’s chamber, murdered him, was interrupted by his, Rudge’s, wife, whom he seized and held by the wrist to prevent her giving the alarm,—that he then, after possessing himself of the booty desired, returned to the gardener’s room, exchanged clothes with him, put upon the corpse his own watch and ring, and secreted it where it was afterwards discovered at so late a period that the features could not be identified.’

Now this is indeed a capital piece of deduction, worthy of Poe’s own Mr. Dupin or of Sherlock Holmes plus Watson. The error in it only enhances its interest. Rudge, as told in his final confession, did not seize his wife’s wrist. She seized his. But as a way of putting a birth-mark of a bloody smear on the wrist of the unborn Barnaby, Poe’s method was better than that of Dickens. Dickens didn’t make Rudge grasp his wife’s wrist: but he should have.

One of the most able of the modern commentators and critics of Dickens’s work has derided Poe’s whole claim as a characteristic humbug. Even if Poe did write this on May 1, 1841, says the critic, after seeing the mere opening of the story as an American serial, he could easily have read plenty more of it already, since Barnaby Rudge began to appear in England in weekly instalments on February 13, 1841, and no doubt had come to America by post. Poe, therefore, it is argued, was merely pretending to be very smart about guessing the outcome of the story from its opening, when in reality he had already seen the English copy. But this argument will not stand. Poe, one admits, was fond of a literary hoax, and loved nothing better than the solemn and dignified make-believe of mock logic or mock scholarship. But because a man is fooling some of the time, it does not follow that he is fooling all of the time. Even if Poe had seen all of the numbers that appeared in England up to May 1, 1841, he would have been no nearer the solution. The story did not end in England till November 27, 1841; and up to the middle of the tale there were no particular clues beyond those given at the start. It is true that Poe may never have written an article on Barnaby in the Post of May 1. He may have been lying about that. But what is beyond search now, when the files of the Post are no longer in existence, was a simple and easy matter to corroborate or to refute when Poe wrote on Dickens in 1842. What an ass he would have been to stake his reputation on a deceit so easily exposed.

Of course Poe had seen more than the actual story of Solomon Daisy on page 7. That claim is a mere looseness of expression. He must have, since there is no mention of Barnaby’s existence till Chapter Five. Poe had seen five chapters of the book,—truly described as a mere beginning of a book of eighty-two chapters. Even Poe could never have claimed that his intelligence was such that having heard of Rudge, and guessed him the murderer, he also guessed that Rudge had a son called Barnaby, born the day after the murder with a birth-mark on his wrist. Sherlock Holmes might, but he came forty years later.

In other words Poe’s guess is a brilliant piece of literary deduction, and it is a pity to rob his battered reputation of the benefit of it. Poe did more than that. He showed that Charles Dickens broke the rules of literary honesty, as applied to murders and mysteries, when he speaks in his own voice of Mrs. Rudge as ‘the widow’. He might have called her the ‘Widow Rudge’ in the mouths of the other characters and then used it as a name of repute, but not on his own authority. He knows and Mrs. Rudge knows that she is not a widow. The thing is grossly unfair: it is not cricket: not even on the hearth.

Nor does Poe’s ingenuity stop there. He shows that in spite of Dickens’s preface to the book—when Barnaby appeared in book form—that the Gordon Riots only came into the book as an afterthought. All readers of the book have noticed that the story comes to a full stop for five years; and this for no particularly obvious reasons. All the characters are held suspended for five years. Dickens announces quite suddenly at the end of Chapter Thirty-two, ‘and the world went on turning round, as usual, for five years during which this narrative is silent.’ No one but Charles Dickens could ‘get away’ with that.

The reason was that he had thought of the Gordon Riots and decided to put them into the story. Now the opening at the Maypole Inn was explicitly dated 1775 and the Riots did not happen till 1780. So the story had to stand still, the characters all marking time: John Willett stirring the fire at the Inn: Gabriel Varden clicking away at his anvil: Barnaby skipping around in his feathers, and the Raven, to whom five years meant nothing, croaking away as usual. To the raven, we repeat, it made no difference. But for the heroine it was cruel. Emma Haredale, as Poe says, would have been called an old maid in America when the story started again. Even the pert Dolly Varden must have had a lot of the bloom dusted off her. If Dickens had known sooner about the riots coming in he would have started Dolly at sixteen. But he had no more idea of the riots coming in than he had of Martin Chuzzlewit going to America. And when the riots did come in there was such a terrific outburst of fire, massacre, crime, and hanging, that this humble little garden murder committed by ‘poor Mr. Rudge’ twenty-seven years before, is hopelessly lost and forgotten in the ensuing horrors. Even John Forster admits that ‘the story had been laid aside and the form it ultimately took had been compressed only partially within its first design.’

It is marvellous that Dickens could do these things. It is high tribute to his genius that such disregard of common sense, fatal to anyone else, made no particular difference, and still makes none. It is equally characteristic of Dickens that he could solemnly write in the preface ‘No account of the Gordon Riots having been to my knowledge introduced into any work of fiction, I was led to project this tale.’ What he meant is, ‘I was led to project them into this tale.’ Dickens was truth itself. But when it came to talking of his own work he could be as sophistical as any one.

After finishing Barnaby Rudge, Dickens enjoyed something as nearly to a rest from his labours as he ever allowed himself. It was a period of widening friendships and of rising honours. To the circle of his friends in his Devonshire Terrace home are added such well-known names as Macready the actor, Maclise of the Royal Academy, Lord Jeffrey, and Lytton Bulwer. His reputation has long since surpassed the limited fame of an ‘amusing’ or ‘comic’ writer. He has become one of England’s great literary men. He did not enjoy, and never enjoyed, the peculiar sanctity of a Tennyson or the majesty of a Carlyle. He dealt with ‘low and middle life’ and he made people laugh. But even these defects could not blind the people whom we now call ‘high-brow’ to the fact that Charles Dickens was a great writer.

It was as this that the nation now began to honour him. When he made, with his wife, in the summer of 1841, a short tour of recreation to Scotland, there was a great public dinner for him at Edinburgh with Christopher North in the chair and all the lamps of Scottish letters and learning illuminating the board. He was given the treasured ‘freedom of the city’, and was made the recipient of a great popular ovation in a leading theatre. Glasgow threatened him with like honours, but he escaped to the wilds of the Highlands, sated and delighted with Lowland hospitality. The Highlanders, it is said, were not to be outdone. We are told they offered him a ‘free’ seat in Parliament. If they did, the offer of a seat only duplicated a proposal already made: for he had already received an offer to represent the borough of Reading.

Dickens wrote to the electors of Reading, ‘My principles and inclinations would lead me to aspire to the distinction you invite me to seek ... but I am bound to add that I cannot afford the expense of a contested election.’ But he wrote with his tongue in his cheek. He had sat too long above the House of Commons to want to sit in it. In any case he had other and wider fields in mind. His star was rising in the West. Dickens was going to America.