Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 581
One notes the continuing additions to the family. Chickenstalker is Francis Jeffrey Dickens, born January 15, 1844: after him is Alfred Tennyson (October 28, 1845), otherwise Skittles or Sampson Brass: Hosken Peck means the Ocean Spectre, a name given to Sydney Smith Dickens (April 18, 1847), from his far-away, wistful eyes. A little later was born the eighth child, Henry Fielding Dickens (January 16, 1849).
The activities described were broken by journeys abroad and brief residences on the continent. Dickens, as already said, rented his London house for a year in 1846 and went, family and all, to Lausanne. Here he took a villa and settled happily down again to the literary work that was the proper occupation of his life. It was in Switzerland that summer that he wrote the Christmas story called the Battle of Life — voted a huge success at the time though almost forgotten by the Dickens readers of today. A larger occupation was the beginning of Dombey and Son, the writing of which filled a great part of the next two years, carried from place to place and never absent from the writer’s mind. The story came out as written, being issued after the established fashion in monthly instalments, with illustrations by Phiz. Its success was assured from the start.
His visit to Switzerland brought Dickens for a moment into sharp contact with European politics. He was in Geneva when the Roman Catholic revolution (of the Sonderbund of 1846) broke out. But he had no understanding of such things. His was the complacent assurance of the Englishman, with a generation of peace and security at the back of it. He found foreigners and their revolutions either comic or villainous. He writes home to Forster chaffing the revolution,— ‘The Sardinian consul,’ he said, ‘was gravely whispering the other day that a society called the Homicides had been formed, who were sworn on skull and cross-bones to exterminate all men of property and so forth.’ The real explanation of the trouble in Switzerland he diagnosed as due to the ‘dissemination of Catholicity, the most horrible means of political and social degradation left in the world.’ With this sweeping judgment of an Evangelical Protestant, he let the matter go, and turned back to Dombey.
Indeed Dickens never really saw the continent. He carried to it the limitations of his nation — self-assured, impregnable; of his times — unchastened by disaster; and of his temperament — converting it to literary material. Paris, to which he moved that November, was always rather a funny place to Dickens, — or partly funny and partly horrible. His house, — he rented No. 48 Rue de Courcelles, — being French, was funny. ‘We are lodged,’ he wrote home to an English friend, ‘in the most preposterous house in the world. The bedrooms are like the opera-boxes. The dining-rooms, staircases, and passages quite inexplicable. The drawing-room is approached through a series of small chambers like joints in a telescope.’ The French government, as Dickens saw it, was also an amusing spectacle. ‘I saw the king the other day coming into Paris,’ so he writes in the waning days of poor old Louis Philippe. ‘His carriage was surrounded by guards on horseback and he sat very far back in it, I thought, and drove at a good pace. It was strange to see the prefect of police on horseback some hundreds of yards in advance, looking to the right and to the left as he rode, like a man who suspected every twig in every tree in the long avenue.’
Different but equally interesting as a ‘horror,’ a thing which always appealed to Dickens, was the Paris morgue, at which he was a frequent visitor.
More natural was his contact with the French stage and his quick eye for its excellences and its peculiarities. The fun which inspires some of his comments, turning on the peculiar inability of the French to use English, is not yet extinct. Here, he tells us, is a so-called English servant in a play who is named ‘Tom Bob’ and who wears a waistcoat that reaches to his ankles. Here, in another play, is the Prime Minister of England, — name not given, — who refers to ‘Vishmingster’ and ‘Regeenstreet’; in another play, called ‘English to the Core,’ there was a character called ‘Sir Fakson,’ and a ‘Lord Mayor of London’ wearing ‘a stage-coachman’s waistcoat, the Order of the Garter and a low broadbrimmed hat, not unlike a dustman.’
It is pleasant to think that some sources of amusement are perennial. But of greater interest is the serious side. ‘There is a melodrama here,’ he writes, ‘called the French Revolution, now playing at the Cirque, in the first act of which there is the most tremendous representation of a people that can well be imagined. There are wonderful battles and so forth in the piece, but there is a power and massiveness in the mob which is positively awful.’
Here, surely enough, is the Tale of Two Cities, — the ‘echoing feet’ and the tumult. It is usual to say that Carlyle’s Revolution (which Dickens read as a bedside book for years) ‘inspired’ Dickens to write of the Reign of Terror. Yet the germ is here. It is strange that out of such an amalgam of false and true, — the comic Paris of 1848, the countryside seen from his rolling barouche, and Carlyle’s sound and fury, — Dickens could later create his marvellous picture of the horror and heroism of revolutionary France.
Meanwhile Dickens had been busy with Dombey and Son. It was commenced in Switzerland. The immortal chapter narrating the death of little Paul Dombey was written in Paris. The work was carried home to England and went steadily on to its completion. The monthly numbers, illustrated by Phiz, had begun to appear in January of 1847.
The story when it appeared was an instant and a conspicuous success. Dickens himself seemed to have the idea that his silence, or relative silence, of two years had as it were dammed up in him a reservoir of amusement and interest. In any case there was no doubt of the public reception of the new story. The monthly numbers from the start outsold Martin Chuzzlewit by over twelve thousand, and the praises showered upon the book verged upon adulation. Lord Jeffrey wrote to the author of certain chapters in the book as ‘the best thing past, present, or to come.’ ‘There is no writing against such power as this,’ groaned Thackeray, ‘one has no chance.’
It may be doubted, however, whether in the estimation of the generations of readers who have lived since the book retains its relative place. Its abstract theme of the humbling of the pride of Mr. Dombey smacks somewhat of a Victorian copybook. In our days pride can be humbled in less than a whole bookful. But at the time, no doubt, both Dickens and his public thought, or felt, this to be an advance. Mr. Pickwick had had no theme or moral at all, and did excellently without one. Oliver Twist dealt with the concrete practical theme of neglected childhood. Nickleby, at least as an opening motive, carried the practical problem of the Yorkshire schools. These were questions not of abstract qualities but of facts. Martin Chuzzlewit, it is true, turns upon the ‘theme’ of the hypocrisy of Pecksniff, but no one ever realizes that it is a theme. Dombey is built upon a conscious plan, and carried at the time, no doubt, a certain aspect of grandeur.
But the outstanding and remembered thing in Dombey and Son is the sweet and marvellous pictures of little Paul and the infinite pathos of his death. It is doubtful if we would write such things now, even if we could. The literature of every age and time has its peculiar conventions, its peculiar limitations. We do not, in our time, set down extended and harrowing pictures of physical torture; minute and accurate descriptions of the ravages of a loathsome disease. The fact that these things exist is no necessary justification for writing of them. And so it is doubtful at least whether a writer of to-day, even if he had the requisite literary power, would use it to call forth the agony of suffering involved in the last illness and the death scene of a little child. It is a cup that we would put from our lips.
But in the Victorian age it was different. The expression of sentiment over the common sorrows of life was still a new thing in literature; Shakespeare wrote of kings: Milton of hell: and Scott of the Middle Ages. It remained for the nineteenth century to break into a flood of tears over its own suffering. Scholars, who contradict everything, will deny this — their eyes can only peer at exceptions and never open to general truths. No wonder that in the exuberance of this new feeling, the current of this new stream, sentiment was washed into sentimentality. Again and again one feels that Dickens and his readers enjoy their tears. ‘Come,’ said someone once in speaking to his disparagement, ‘let us sit down and have a good cry.’
Over a lesser or a trivial object the tears become maudlin or even comic. To what extent are we to go when the occasion as depicted is real, is overwhelming. Take as the supreme example in literature the death of little Paul Dombey. Dickens spares us none of it, — the long-drawn illness of the little child, fading beside the sea: the waves that sing to the little mind already wandering away; the final illness; the sunlit room, the whispered murmur of farewell, and the unutterable end.
The public of the day read the book, shall we say enjoyed the book, in a flood of tears. ‘I have cried and sobbed over it last night,’ wrote Lord Jeffrey, ‘and again and again this morning; and felt my heart purified by those tears and blessed and loved you for making me shed them: and I never can bless and love you enough. Since the divine Nellie was found dead on her humble couch, beneath the snow and the ivy, there has been nothing like the actual dying of that sweet Paul in the summer sunshine of that lofty room.’
What are we to think of all this? Is this manly, or is it mawkish? Or what?
Dickens himself had written the chapter in a very agony of grief. Indeed he seems to have carried in his heart ever afterwards a sorrowing memory of little Paul. When he wrote some ten years later a preface for the first cheap edition of Dombey and Son he said, ‘When I am reminded by any chance of what it is that the waves were always saying, I wander in my fancy for a whole night about the streets of Paris, — as I really did, with a heavy heart, the night when my little friend and I parted company forever.’ An author may share the grief of his creations. But to what extent a reader may sit down to enjoy a good flood of tears and then jump up and play bridge, — that’s another thing. Sorrow as a deliberate luxury is a doubtful pursuit, a dubious form of art.
On the other hand, it may be argued that Dickens knew perfectly well what he was doing. He may have felt that the reader could not sympathize with the main idea of his story unless he could feel to the full the poignant suffering brought by the death of the child and its effect on the character of Dombey and his future life. In Dombey and Son the main features of the story, contrary to the method of the earlier books, were firmly constructed in the writer’s mind before the work began. The criticism was made at the time that the death of little Paul was needlessly inserted in the story to enhance a sentimental interest and that the change in the character of Dombey is violent and unnatural. Dickens resented this criticism, which is indeed groundless, and defends himself against it in his preface to the later edition.
Indeed, what he says in the preface is more than substantiated by what he wrote in a letter to John Forster while the story was still in the making. The death of little Paul, far from being incidentally introduced for sensation’s sake, is the centre round which the narrative turns. The letter merits quotation. It marks as it were a landmark in Dickens’s life. It shows the contrast with the unconscious and planless composition of Pickwick: it is leading on to the overplanned and underinspired work of much of the later books.
‘I will now go on to give you an outline,’ wrote Dickens, ‘of my immediate intentions in reference to Dombey. I design to show Mr. D. with that one idea of the Son taking firmer and firmer possession of him, and swelling and bloating his pride to a prodigious extent. As the boy begins to grow up, I shall show him quite impatient for his getting on, and urging his masters to set him great tasks and the like. But the natural affection of the boy will turn towards the despised sister; and I purpose showing her learning all sorts of things, of her own application and determination, to assist him in his lessons: and helping him always. When the boy is about ten years old (in the fourth number), he will be taken ill, and will die: and when he is ill, and when he is dying, I mean to make him turn always for refuge to the sister still, and keep the stern affection of the father at a distance. So Mr. Dombey — for all his greatness, and for all his devotion to the child — will find himself at arm’s length from him even then; and will see that his love and confidence are all bestowed upon his sister, whom Mr. Dombey had used — and so has the boy himself too, for that matter — as a mere convenience and handle to him. The death of the boy is a deathblow, of course, to all the father’s schemes and cherished hopes; and “Dombey and Son”, as Miss Tox will say at the end of the number, “is a Daughter after all.” . . . From that time, I purpose changing his feeling of indifference and uneasiness towards his daughter into a positive hatred. For he will always remember how the boy had his arm round her neck when he was dying, and whispered to her, and would take things only from her hand, and never thought of him. . . . At the same time I shall change her feeling towards him for one of a greater desire to love him, and to be loved by him; engendered in her compassion for his loss, and her love for the dead boy whom, in his way, he loved so well too. So I mean to carry the story on, through all the branches and off-shoots and meanderings that come up; and through the decay and downfall of the house, and the bankruptcy of Dombey, and all the rest of it; when his only staff and treasure, and his unknown Good Genius always, will be this rejected daughter, who will come out better than any son at last, and whose love for him, when discovered and understood, will be his bitterest reproach. For the struggle with himself, which goes on in all such obstinate natures, will have ended then; and the sense of his injustice, which you may be sure has never quitted him, will have at last a gentler office than that of only making him more harshly unjust.
In the light of this view of the composition of the book, the harrowing description of little Paul’s death becomes perhaps a literary necessity.
But of course Dombey and Son is not the only book and Paul is not the only child whose death is set forth with all its painful circumstance for Dickens’s readers. There is the equally famous instance of Little Nell, and the ‘little scholar’ in the same book. It was consistent with the mood and taste of the times. We have passed away from it. We demand now, a greater restraint, less copious tears, — not a greater hardness of heart but a greater tenderness towards grief itself. It is one thing to portray the bitterness of death and the isolation of bereavement. It is another to exploit it.
Dickens’s literary labours did not slacken with the conclusion of Dombey. The summer and autumn that followed found him busy on The Haunted Man, one of his series of Christmas stories. It had a great initial success, with an advance sale of twenty thousand, was turned at once into a play by Mark Lemon and put on at the Adelphi Theatre with excellent results. A stable feature of the little book was the illustrations, in part, by the young John Tenniel, later on the famous cartoonist of Punch, whose pictures are still familiar to us in the pages of Alice in Wonderland.
Dickens, indeed, was fortunate in the illustrators of his Christmas books. Among those who had a share in the designs for the various Christmas stories were John Leach and Richard Doyle (who also illustrated Thackeray’s Newcomes), Sir Edwin Landseer and Frank Stone.
Yet The Haunted Man is but little read to-day. Many lovers of Dickens are probably unaware of its existence. Dickens’s shorter tales have not shown the vitality of his longer books. Even the Christmas Carol is better known in scenes, in abridgements and adaptations than at its full length with its full quota of ghosts, spirits and groans. It would seem as if Dickens’s shortcomings in the way of the melodramatic and the fantastic ‘came shorter’ in the lesser stories. There was no space for the sustained attraction of the ‘characters’ to redeem them. Mr. Pickwick would have floated half a dozen ‘spectres’ and ‘apparitions’ without noticing it. But left to themselves they collapsed.
Certainly such a story as The Haunted Man, in which a lonely and miserable man makes a bargain with the ghost of himself for the gift of obliteration of memory, makes a pretty tall demand upon the reader’s imagination. Nor are we nowadays impressed with such dialogue as ‘Forbear!’ exclaimed the Spectre in an awful voice, ‘lay a hand on me and die!’ We see too many spectres in our moving pictures, with voices more awful still, to get a thrill out of that. But 1848 was different.
The usual ‘christening dinner’ to celebrate the advent of The Haunted Man was hardly over (Jan. 3, 1849) before Dickens was busy again: this time with the greatest achievement of his mature life, — David Copperfield. The story had grown up out of his plans for an autobiography. He had been turning it over in his mind for months, and groping his way towards an expressive title. It is strange that Dickens, to whom words and names meant so much, could have proposed for the new story such a ghastly title as Mag’s Diversions! David himself was tried out as Trotfield, Trotbury, and Copperstone before he came into his own as Copperfield.
The book was started early in 1849, and Dickens carried the work about with him, both literally and in his mind, till its completion and publication late in 1850. A lot of it was written down during a delightful summer at Bonchurch in the Isle of Wight. A pathetic memory of the Copperfield period of Dickens’s life is the death of his infant daughter Dora. She was born (August 16, 1850) while the book was in the writing and did not live until its close. The little girl was christened Dora Annie after the characters of the book. She was a fragile creature, marked for early death. When the fatal seizure of convulsions came upon the child Dickens was not at home. He returned to his house to find her dead. John Forster has told us of the strange and pathetic setting of little Dora’s death. Dickens had taken the chair (April 14, 1851) at a dinner given for the Actors’ Theatrical Fund.
