Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 580
The reading was such a success that it was repeated, with some new auditors present, among them Thomas Ingoldsby of the Ingoldsby Legends (by his true name the Rev. Mr. Barham). Forster afterwards said that the success of these readings, and what Barham called their ‘remarkable effect’ on the hearers, gave Dickens his first promptings towards those public appearances which added so greatly to his fame and diminished so cruelly his vital strength.
Back in Italy again Dickens left Genoa for a trip to the south, including Rome, which entranced him still more than Venice, — not so much perhaps from the appeal of its history, as from the majesty of its appearance and for the loneliness and grandeur of its ruins. Nothing, he said, had ever moved and overcome him as did the sight of the Coliseum.
The journey home was made in June (1845), the family travelling by carriage through the mountain passes of Switzerland. In Brussels a group of his friends joined him for a holiday week in Flanders: and at the end of the month Dickens set his foot again upon his native land.
The book of travel which he published later under the name of Pictures from Italy has long since passed from current interest. He himself was very doubtful whether or not to extend for publication the various notes and letters which he had written on his travels. In the end they were published in part in the London Daily News under the head of Travel Letters Written on the Road, and issued in their final form as a book Pictures from Italy in 1846.
Apart from the light running commentary on people and things and the little incidents of daily travel, — in their nature ephemeral — and apart from the enthusiasm over the masterpieces of Italian painting and the palaces and memorials of Italy, familiar in all books, there are a few passages worthy of note in a study of the art and mind of Dickens. One may cite, for instance, his gruesome account of the torture chamber at Avignon. Here Dickens writes with all the subjective power of his imagination. It was not what he saw, but what was conjured up from the imagined past that formed the fascination and the horror of the picture. Very different is the account of the execution of an Italian murderer under the guillotine, in the open, amid a crowd of curious sightseers. Dickens with instinctive art writes the plain circumstance of what he saw, as a de Maupassant or a Zola would have written it.
He immediately kneeled down, below the knife. His neck fitting into a hole, made for the purpose, in a cross plank, was shut down, by another plank above; exactly like the pillory. Immediately below him was a leathern bag; and into it his head rolled instantly.
The executioner was holding it by the hair, and walking with it round the scaffold, showing it to the people, before one quite knew that the knife had fallen heavily, and with a rattling sound.
There was a great deal of blood. When we left the window, and went close up to the scaffold, it was very dirty; one of the two men who were throwing water over it, turning to help the other lift the body into a shell, picked his way as through mire. A strange appearance was the apparent annihilation of the neck. The head was taken off so close, that it seemed as if the knife had narrowly escaped crushing the jaw, or shaving off the ear; and the body looked as if there were nothing left above the shoulder.
Students of the literature of the nineteenth century who contrast the ‘romanticism’ of 1840 with the ‘realism’ of 1890 may mark these passages with interest.
CHAPTER VI. FLOOD TIDE (1845-1850)
THE DAILY NEWS — SWITZERLAND — PARIS — DOMBEY AND SON — DAVID COPPERFIELD
The years from the time when Charles Dickens returned from Italy in 1845 to the publication of David Copperfield in 1850 may be taken as marking the highest development of his literary power. They do not mark the height of his fame and reputation, for those increased continually until his death. Moreover, to the celebrity acquired from his written books there has still to be added the celebrity earned by his marvellous public rendering of his written works. But the publication of David Copperfield undoubtedly marks the highest reach of his achievement.
These years were for Dickens to a very great extent a migratory period with a repeated change of domicile. For convenience of record one may begin with a recapitulation of his movements from place to place and from occupation to occupation.
He returned from Italy to London in June 1845; busied himself with the project of the Daily News; sat down in his chair as editor of the first number on January 21, 1846, and got up out of it on February 9. He wrote his travel sketches, the Pictures from Italy, then let his house and was off again May 31, 1846, for another year abroad, and settled down at Lucerne to write Dombey and Son. He wrote in the autumn, on the continent, his Battle of Life as his Christmas book for the year: moved to Paris in November of 1846, still writing Dombey. Then after three months he was called back suddenly to London (early in 1847) by the illness of his son: rented a house at Chester Place and settled down again in London. That summer (1847) he was at Brighton and Broadstairs working on Dombey: back to London in the autumn: busy that winter with various public appearances and a series of amateur theatrical performances for the Shakespeare fund, finishing Dombey early in 1848. In the summer of that year he was at Broadstairs writing The Haunted Man as a Christmas book, also turned into a play.
The next year, 1849, was Dickens’s great year, — that of David Copperfield. He was busy on the book at Bonchurch in the Isle of Wight in the summer and the next winter in his own London house at Devonshire Terrace. The book began running in monthly parts in May 1849. The work went on the next year, in London, and during a summer at Brighton, — broken by a brief trip over to France in June. The book drew near its close as the summer ended: it was finished in London in October 1850.
With its publication Charles Dickens reached what has been called the ‘pinnacle of his fame’.
Such then were the happy and eventful years marking the flood tide of Dickens’s success. It would be tedious to pursue in detail each of his varied activities. But some demand a further mention. An outstanding incident of the opening of this period was Dickens’s triumphant entry on the field of daily journalism and his rapid and rather inglorious retreat (January-February 1846). His mind would seem to have been attracted then and always by the idea of moulding public opinion, or rather of dictating it, since moulding is but a slow process. The notion of being an arbiter of merit, a court of resort to award the palm to virtue and to assign to evil its appropriate condemnation, appealed at once to his genius and to his peculiar conceit. Indeed in the last twenty years of his life he occupied much such a position as the autocratic editor of Household Words and All the Year Round. Once before, as already said, at the very opening of his career he held a bread-and-butter position as the paid editor of Bentley’s Miscellany. But the work in that case was purely literary and consisted merely in the consideration and selection of manuscript material, and in the preparation of his own large contribution.
No doubt, in planning and undertaking the adventure of the Daily News, Charles Dickens entertained the idea of an editor as a Jove launching thunderbolts, a Nestor warning a nation, a Pallas Athena awarding the palm to virtue. He failed to realize how much of mere routine detail and circumscribed task falls to the lot of the Jupiter and the Athena of the editorial chairs, and how much opinion must be compromised and private wishes subordinated to plain consideration of shillings and pence.
The times were propitious. They always are. England was at a turning point. It always is. At this particular curve in the road the question was of the corn laws, of free trade, of the delivery of England by the cleaving sword of radicalism from the shackles of privilege and aristocracy. In other words, the time was opportune, as it always is, for awakening the nation to a new life.
Various newspapers, and especially the Morning Chronicle of his early days, seem to have been anxious at this time to enlist the services of Dickens as a regular contributor, not merely of fiction, but of articles on topics of the hour. From this came the idea that a newspaper might be founded under his editorship, endowed with the prestige of his name, the energy of his temperament, and his recognized championship of the rights of the dispossessed. The project was a noble one, but among Dickens’s immediate circle John Forster at any rate was opposed to it. He saw what editorial fetters would mean when clasped on Dickens’s hand.
But the proposal went forward. Indeed, in every other respect than that of its original editorship, it was a great and permanent success. Rich men in London put up £100,000 in solid cash. The paper was christened the Daily News with a selling price of five pence (The Times then sold at that figure). Charles Dickens became editor-in-chief with a salary of £2,000 a year. About him were a group of trained and brilliant men, some of whose names, — Douglas Jerrold, Mark Lemon, — have passed down into literary history. As the sub-editor, the real working editor, was H. G. Wills, afterwards so intimately associated with Dickens in his later magazines. Dickens’s quaint old father, otherwise Mr. Micawber, placed at the head of the reportorial staff, supplied a kind of comic relief.
The moral elevation of the new journal was to be on a plane with its literary distinction. The prospectus declared that the Daily News would be ‘kept free from personal influence or party bias’ and would be ‘devoted to the advocacy of all rational and honest means by which wrong may be redressed, just rights maintained, and the happiness and welfare of society promoted.’
The editor in a leading article explained further, ‘We seek, so far as in us lies, to elevate the character of the Public Press in England.’
In view of such an auspicious opening and such a fervent avowal of determination, it is almost comic to think that Dickens was thoroughly sick of the whole enterprise in a week, and out of it in less than three. The first number came out on January 21, 1846, and already on January 30, Dickens, so we are told, was ‘revolving plans for quitting the paper.’ On February 9 he resigned, ‘tired to death and quite worn out.’ John Forster took over the abandoned task: Wills stayed on as sub-editor, and the Daily News rose steadily to national eminence and power.
Fifty years later the paper held a jubilee (1896) in connection with which reminiscences of its early days were in order. Some of them, where they touch on Dickens, are unconsciously amusing. ‘He was just the man,’ said one historian, ‘to become the inspiring force of such an idea. It had a positive fascination for him. He threw his whole soul into it. He was just the man to start such a venture as the Daily News.’ In view of the fact that Dickens threw his whole soul out of it in seven days, this is rather choice. Dickens started the Daily News as a man might step on the gas of a motor car and jump out. Another patriarch, writing a little later, said, ‘We were, indeed, born fighting, and Dickens began by leading a desperate onslaught on Protection.’ Thus, too, did the Duke of Plaza Toro, of Gilbert and Sullivan, cheer on his men.
Of the novelist’s own contributions to the enterprise, none are of capital importance. His Travelling Letters, later Pictures from Italy, as already indicated, appeared in it during and after his incumbency. A letter, over his name while still editor, on the question of Ragged Schools (free schools for the poor), and, later on, three letters on capital punishment, show at least the kind of use he meant to make of the kind of vehicle created. But the whole episode drifted out of the current of his life, forgiven and forgotten. His connection with the political daily press ended for good.
A more abiding feature of the period was Dickens’s pursuit of amateur theatricals, henceforth a large element of interest in his life. All professionals and many of the rest of us entertain a sort of phobia against the amateur actor. He is indeed in a class by himself. An amateur cricketer plays as much cricket as a professional: an amateur musician may play music night and day. But an amateur actor means by definition an actor who doesn’t act, — or whose rare appearances are insufficient for real excellence. As a rule the amateur actor on the stage can neither walk, sit, nor stand still, whisper, speak or shout without betraying his inefficiency. Amateur acting of grown-up people is at best a thing for sudden inspirations, for occasions ingeniously and quickly contrived, a social effort quickly made and freely forgiven.
But Dickens and his performances, which reached presently even to the feet of royalty, belong perhaps in another class. It has been seen that from his childhood he had a passion for the stage. In the dreary days of the Doctors’ Commons he had longed to be an actor. ‘I went to some theatre every night,’ so he tells us, ‘with a very few exceptions for at least three years. . . . I practised immensely (even such things as walking in and out and sitting down in a chair), often four, five, six hours a day; shut up in my own room or walking about in the fields.’
John Forster tells us that a great actor was lost in Dickens. But his very description of Dickens’s performances make us feel that perhaps what was lost was rather an impersonator, an inspired impressionist than an actor. Dickens, says his friend, had ‘the powers of projecting himself into shapes and suggestions of his fancy which is one of the marvels of creative imagination, and what he desired to express he became.’ Forster adds, ‘His strength was rather in the vividness and variety of his assumptions than in the completeness, finish or ideality he could give to any part of them.’ But this is perhaps improvising rather than acting. An actor is a man who can do a thing not once but again and again, who can lose himself in his part and stay lost. It was not perhaps as an actor that Dickens came into his own, but when he appeared on the public platform in the dramatic rendering of his written works. Then, indeed, he carried his audience away with him, took them outside of themselves in a literal ‘ecstasy’ of appreciation.
There seems a certain quality in certain persons, in speech, in gestures, in acting, — which performs this miracle. Dickens had it in a high degree. In true acting there is no contact from mind to mind. The orator reaches for the audience; the actor for the theme. In what Dickens did the contact from mind to mind is everything.
But there is no doubt that in any public appearance, under any name, Dickens exercised an intense interest and fascination for those who saw and heard him.
Reference has already been made to his early acting at school, his preparation of little pieces for the St. James’s Theatre and to his triumph at the garrison theatricals at Montreal in 1842. Here Dickens was the life and soul of the performance. He was stage manager, producer, and autocrat at large. He played a part in each of three pieces presented and threw himself into it all with exuberant enthusiasm. But the performance was but for one night. The amateur’s little lamp is lighted only to go out. But now in 1846 arose a larger opportunity. As his fortunes enlarged, Dickens often talked with his friends of getting up a play. He spoke of it before his sojourn in Italy, and he was still talking of it when he came back. The recollection of the Montreal success was still warm within him.
The project took shape in the summer of 1846. Dickens and a group of friends rented a little theatre in Dean Street. The play selected was Ben Jonson’s Everyman in His Humour, with Dickens as Captain Bobadil, Stanfield of the Royal Academy to paint the scenery and such illustrious names as those of Douglas Jerrold, John Leach and Mark Lemon, billed for the cast. It is cheering for amateurs of lesser note to know that even in such an illustrious company, a number of the actors, including two academicians, got frightened and dropped out. But the performance, to an invited audience, on September 21, 1846, was a tumult of success, and was twice repeated for the benefit of the paying public and of deserving charities.
Later on in the year the ‘company’ presented one of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays with similar success. Indeed for a moment London seems to have been agog with interest over Charles Dickens’s players. In the next year (1847) the enterprise was reorganized on a bigger scale. The ‘troupe’ appeared in aid of certain literary charities before crowded houses in public theatres in Manchester (July 26) and Liverpool (July 28). As before, they played Everyman in His Humour, following it up each night with a minor piece as a conclusion. The receipts ran to over £900 for the two nights. As is usual with amateur enterprises, the expenses ate up nearly half of the proceeds.
But the moral and artistic glow of the performance was its own reward. The players found themselves carried forward to even greater things. A still larger opportunity occurred next year (1848). A national interest had sprung up in the question of buying Shakespeare’s house and the ‘Shakespeare fund’ afforded a splendid object and an admirable excuse. It is true that in the end the borough council of Stratford-on-Avon bought the house, but the momentum once started could not be checked. The goal was shifted from a house to that of a curator for the house. Dickens and his friends put their plays on with great triumph. After much debate and controversy, they aspired to the presentation of nothing else than Shakespeare himself. Dickens appeared as Justice Shallow in the Merry Wives with Mark Lemon as Falstaff.
For Dickens henceforth the organization and acting of amateur theatricals became a part of his life.
A success and an éclat equal to that of his theatrical performances attended Dickens’s appearance during this period at one or two great public functions. He presided at a meeting of the Leeds Mechanics’ Institute, held December 1847, and acted as chairman at the inauguration of the Glasgow Athenaeum a few weeks later (December 28, 1847). This visit to Scotland, in which Dickens was accompanied by his wife, was a tremendous success, and was made the occasion of a tumultuous welcome both public and private. He himself called it ‘a great demonstration’, and wrote home about it in his own exuberant and overflowing terms to his sister-in-law who had been left behind in charge of the nursery.
‘The meeting was the most stupendous thing as to numbers and the most beautiful as to colours and decorations I ever saw. The inimitable (this means himself) did wonders. His grace, eloquence and elegance enchanted all beholders.’ He adds at the end of the letter,— ‘Best love from both of us to Charley, Mamey, Katey, Wally, Chickenstalker, Skittles and Hosken Peck.’ All this is characteristic of the Dickens of the time — the success, the energy, the exuberance, the happy home and the nursery smothered with affectionate nicknames: no enemies, no enmities, no cares. Certainly, if Charles Dickens gave a lot to the world, the world gave much to him. Later the shadows were to fall across it all: but the shadows were of his own making and from his own temperament.
