Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 574
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.
