Part 11

In an election in the “twenties,” which is reputed to have cost the candidates £30,000 ($150,000), I have been told that they chartered ships to bring electors from Holland. This is, doubtless, why all the hotels in Eatandswill were crowded, and explains the elder Mr. Weller’s adventure by the canal. Bribery was illegal; and in a famous case in 1819 Sir Manasseh Massey Lopez was fined £10,000 ($50,000) and imprisoned for two years for practising it at Grampound. But it was an exceptional case; and the Lords threw out the bill for disfranchising the borough.

Now we are on the subject of political life I cannot resist reminding you of a perfectly delightful sketch of a political fraud in the person of Mr. Gregsbury in “Nicholas Nickleby.” He comes into the story for no particular reason except to give Dickens the joy of describing the sort of man he had doubtless observed when he was a pressman in the House of Commons.

Nicholas is present when the deputation arrives to request Mr. Gregsbury to resign his seat, and Mr. Pugstyles is its spokesman.

“‘My conduct, Pugstyles,’ said Mr. Gregsbury, looking round upon the deputation with gracious magnanimity, ‘my conduct has been, and ever will be, regulated by a sincere regard for this great and happy country. Whether I look at home, or abroad; whether I behold the peaceful industrious communities of our island home: her rivers covered with steamboats, her road with locomotives, her streets with cabs, her skies with balloons of a power and magnitude hitherto unknown in the history of aëronautics--I say whether I look at home, etc., etc., I clasp my hands, and, turning my eyes to the broad expanse above my head, exclaim, Thank God I am a Briton.’” When even this outburst does not meet with approval and the deputation presses Mr. Gregsbury to resign, the member reads a letter he has addressed to Mr. Pugstyles in which he says, “Actuated by no personal motives, but moved only by high and great constitutional considerations ... I would rather keep my seat, and intend doing so.” No, in all the changes time has brought, one thing does not change--our politicians are still the same.

In “Our Mutual Friend” our author touches once more on the state of the poor and their terror of “the parish.” No one who has read this novel, with its wealth of characters amazing even for Dickens--for even in his other works you fail to find so many types as Bella Wilfer, Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, Fascination Fledgby, the dolls’ dressmaker, Mr. Silas Wegg, Mr. Venus, Rogue Riderhood, the Veneerings, to mention only a few--no one, I say, can ever forget the old washerwoman Betty Higden and her horror of the workhouse, how it haunted her whole life and gave an additional terror to death, that thereby she would fall into the hands of the parish and be buried by it. And in this novel Dickens is as severe on the injudicious charity of philanthropists and faddists as he is upon the callousness of the guardians of the poor. There is no more terrible satire on the mistakes of the education of that age than his delineation of Bradley Headstone. I have never to my recollection read any discussion of this character but I have often thought that in Headstone and Charley Hexam, his pupil, he is giving a warning of the dangers of modern education.

Universal education was not yet adopted in England, which was the most backward of countries in this respect. But it was in the air, and Dickens foresaw that some of the principles adopted would prove serious to the community. He dwells on the mechanical efficiency of the teaching; the learning to write essays on any subject exactly one slate long, for example; on the miscellaneous and useless information imparted; on a Bible teaching which has nothing to do with vital religion. Dickens recognised that the education of all classes was killing individuality, and not fostering moral or spiritual qualities. He recognised that in the type of Charley Hexam it was encouraging a desire for “respectability,” consisting, not in taking one’s coat off to work, but in working in a black coat, which was killing the finer feelings in which the poor often shew to the advantage of the rich. And in Bradley Headstone Dickens points out, that all this smug education was powerless to restrain the elemental ferocity of human nature in the schoolmaster, who looked natural in Rogue Riderhood’s clothes, and not himself in his decent black coat. There was latent in him all the ferocity of a hardened criminal; and recent events are shewing how powerless education is really to civilise the heart of man.

I have spoken of the need of a map of London to understand Dickens, and I shall now take an extract from “Oliver Twist” to illustrate this remark. Oliver has just met with John Dawkins, otherwise the Artful Dodger, who offered to take him to a lodging. “It was nearly eleven o’clock when they reached the turnpike at Islington. They crossed from the Angel into St. John’s Road; struck down the small street which terminates at Sadlers Wells Theatre; through Exmouth Street and Coppice Row; down the little court by the side of the workhouse; across the classic ground which once bore the name of Hockley in the Hole, thence to little Saffron Hill the Great and so on to when they reached the bottom of the hill, his (Oliver’s) conductor, catching him by the arm, pushed open the door of a house near Field Lane.”

Now I almost defy anyone to find all these localities in a modern map. You would have, in the first place, to start in the middle of London at the Angel at Islington. Sadlers Wells is now in the midst of a network of streets. It was only when I turned to Northcock’s history of London, which has a good map dated 1772, that all was plain. Islington was a village outside London; Sadlers Wells a suburban resort; Exmouth street was not yet built;[30] but Coppice row, Hockley in the Hole, and of course Saffron Hill and Field Lane, were all easily found.

In speaking of this great delineator of human character as now needing explanation and comment, I have no doubt that he belongs to that small group of writers whose works belong to all ages. We hear complaints in England that young people do not read him; and the same were made when we were young.

But with us, and I believe with you, his popularity from time to time revives, and no educated man or woman can ignore him. The fact that he has appealed so strongly to the imagination of America is alone a proof of the universality of his genius; for, like Shakespeare and the classics of all countries, his works are the property, not of one people, but of the world. He is not perfect; we should not love him so much if he were. He has faults of style, of arrangement, even of taste. It is easy to criticise; but because of his very excellences, his humour, his pathos, his wide sympathy, his hatred of injustice and oppression, it seems almost presumption to endeavour to sing his praises.

May I conclude with those prophetic words he puts into the mouth of Martin Chuzzlewit on leaving your country, which he made his own by denouncing its failings as unsparingly as he did those of his own mother land, in the hope that both you and we, America and England, would conquer them and become the common benefactors of humanity.

“‘I am thinking,’ said Mark, ‘that if I was a painter and was called upon to paint the American Eagle, how should I do it?’

‘Paint it as like an Eagle as you could, I suppose.’

‘No,’ said Mark, ‘that wouldn’t do for me, sir. I should want to draw it like a Bat for its shortsightedness, like a Bantam for its bragging, like a Magpie for its honesty, like a Peacock for its vanity, like an Ostrich for putting its head in the mud and thinking nobody sees it.’

‘And like a Phœnix for its power of springing from the ashes of its faults and vices and soaring up into the sky.’

‘Well, Mark, let us hope so.’”

APPENDIX TO LECTURE VI

To shew Dickens’ care in collecting his facts the following report of a case relating to Yorkshire Schools is of interest. It was supplied to the author by C. S. Kenny, Esq., Downing Professor of the Laws of England, Cambridge.

CHAPTER II. THE RELEVANCY OF EVIDENCE

[_Evidence must be confined to the points in issue._]

BOLDRON _v._ WIDDOWS

WESTMINSTER N. P. SITTINGS. 1824.

1 CARRINGTON AND PAYNE 65.

This was an action for defamation. The declaration stated that the plaintiff kept a school, and had divers scholars; and that the defendant spoke of him in his business of a schoolmaster certain words there set out. The words were variously laid in different counts; but they were, in substance, that the scholars were ill fed, and badly lodged, had had the itch, and were full of vermin. Some of the counts laid the loss of certain scholars as special damage. Pleas--the general issue; and justifications, that the whole of the words were true.

For the plaintiff, several witnesses proved the speaking of the words, and that the boys were boarded, educated, and clothed, by the plaintiff, at £20 a year each, near Richmond in Yorkshire: and the usher of the school was called to prove that the boys were well fed and well lodged, and had no itch. In his cross-examination it appeared that there were between eighty and ninety boys; that about seventy of them had had a cutaneous disease; and that they all slept in three rooms close to the roof, with no ceiling; and that there was a general combing of the heads of the whole school every morning over a pewter dish, and that the vermin combed out were thrown into the yard; no boy was free from them. A piece of bread of a perfectly black hue was shewn him: he did not think the bread in the school so black as that.

The witness having stated that he had himself been at the Appleby grammar-school, the plaintiff’s counsel wished to ask him what was the quality of the provisions used by the plaintiff’s school, compared with those consumed by the Appleby grammar-school.

The defendant’s counsel objected to this.

ABBOTT, C.J. That cannot be asked; what is done at any particular school is not evidence. You may shew the general treatment of boys at schools, and shew that the plaintiff treated the boys here as well as they could be treated for £20 a year each, for board, education, and clothes.

One of the plaintiff’s scholars was then called to prove the plaintiff’s good treatment of them.

In cross-examination, the defendant’s counsel wished to ask him whether the plaintiff did not set the boys to plant potatoes in school hours?

ABBOTT, C.J. I do not think you can ask this; the issue here being whether the plaintiff’s scholars were ill fed, badly lodged, had the itch, and had vermin. Nothing has been said as to their being badly educated. Their education is not in question here.

_Gurney_, for the defendant, addressed the jury, and called witnesses to prove the truth of the words.

Verdict for the plaintiff, damages £120.

FOOTNOTES:

[29] The question of the domicile or “settlement” of paupers was the cause of endless litigation. See Mr. Blake Odgers’ lecture V in “A Century of Law Reform.” He quotes a judgment in 1724 which has been preserved in rhyme.

“A woman, having a ‘settlement,’ married a man with none. The question was, he being dead, if what she had is gone. Quoth Sir John Pratt, the ‘settlement’ suspended did remain, Living the husband; but, him dead, it doth revive again.”

[30] It must have been named after Admiral Pellew (Lord Exmouth), who captured Algiers in 1816.

LECTURE VII

MID-VICTORIANISM. W. M. THACKERAY

The word respectable has a strange history. In the days of the later Roman Empire its equivalent “spectabilis” was applied to the highest dignitaries. In France it is a title of honour--“votre respectable mère” means something very different from “your respectable mother.” In England respectability is associated with primness, faded clothes, and possibly necessary penuriousness. One would not seek a way to a lady’s good graces by describing her as a respectable woman. When we say a man’s abilities are “respectable,” it is in order to get someone else to give him employment. It is a word which conveys ridicule ever since the famous dialogue in Thurtell’s trial for murder:

_Witness._ The prisoner was a respectable man.

_Counsel._ What do you mean by respectable?

_Witness._ Well--er--he kept a gig.

The characteristic of Mid-Victorian society was respectability, and I shall try to show that its chief exponent W. M. Thackeray was its prophet.

The English race has always had a bias in favour of what is known as Puritanism, not only in religion but in life. I think it may be said of us that we dislike intensely to have a thing forbidden by law, but love to have many forbidden by custom. We abhor a number of notices put up to say we must do this or that, that most things are forbidden, we detest a police who interfere with the ordinary affairs of life and force us under penalty to submit to trivial regulations. But we have no objections to the erection of a number of conventions far more irksome than any legal code of morals and we submit to a police system created by ourselves, more vigilant, more inquisitive, more given to informing than any secret service in the world. For what laws were ever devised more drastic in their operation than those of public opinion, and has any _vehmgericht_ or inquisition ever judged unseen and condemned unheard on the report of the police, in a more secret and summary fashion than that of the tea table of Mrs. Grundy? Never was society more under the thrall of these dominating influences than in the Early and Mid-Victorian age.

The reason for this seems plain enough. The eighteenth century had been distinguished for the coarseness of its language, manners, and morals. The upper classes combined a good deal of old world politeness with a surprisingly frank disregard of moral considerations. There were conspicuous exceptions, but the singular impunity enjoyed by men of high rank and position made them often callous as to the opinion of their inferiors. The lower classes were accustomed to brutal sports and cruel amusements and unrestrained by any effective police, besides being entirely uneducated. The middle class, which was daily becoming more and more important to the life of the nation owing to the rapid development of trade and manufacture, was gradually monopolising the political control of the nation. It was in this class that the evangelical and Methodist movements had achieved their chief successes; and those who composed it were fundamentally serious minded. Under the Regency and during the reign of George IV and William IV the court was essentially aristocratic, and neither monarch gave it any prestige on the side of morality. Queen Victoria took a middle-class view of life; domesticity was the key-note of her reign. The Prince Consort was the model husband and father, so correct, so admirable, so exemplary, that even now we are apt to forget how able and wise a man he was and how heavy a debt his adopted country owes him.

One of the effects of the Victorian age was that England awoke to a most amazing sense of its own virtue. People were continually contrasting the present with the past, to the disadvantage of the latter. In the ‘forties,’ and even ‘fifties,’ many people could remember the time when it was unsafe to approach London after dusk on account of the highwaymen, when men, women, and children were hung by the score for the merest trifles, when duels were of almost daily occurrence, when the grossest abuses existed in church and state, when immorality in the highest quarters flaunted itself unashamed before the world. Old men could recall a time when to get drunk and use the foulest possible language was almost necessary, if a man were not to be written down as a milksop. And the contrast was almost too delightful to the newly emancipated middle class in their neat villas with trim gardens, whence they went to church decorously, sat in their select pew, their large families around them, and thanked God that they were not as other people’s wicked ancestors had been.

In one of Lever’s novels--I believe--an Irish solicitor was asked by an Englishman the reason for the success of a famous Counsellor with juries and replied, “He first butthers them up; and then slithers them down.” I am going to take the same liberty with that great novelist W. M. Thackeray, only I protest that my butter is genuine and were I an Irishman myself I should say it came from the heart. I cheerfully bow before the genius of England’s master of fiction. His characters are my friends, his kindly wisdom my delight, his pathos can move me almost to tears, his cynicism is a constant stimulant. His style is to me incomparable and fills me with envy and despair. His books are my best companions in sickness and in health, in depression and in my most cheerful moments. If I am his critic, it is because he is so old a friend that I love him alike for his weaknesses and peculiarities and for his great merits. With the utmost humility I commend his scholarship and appreciation of the literature of the eighteenth century. His “Four Georges” and “English Humorists” are to me models of what literary lectures should be. I could praise him till I wearied my audience, and all my praise would be absolutely genuine.

No student of Thackeray can fail to admire the way in which he prepared himself by study for his historical novels. In “Esmond” and the “Virginians” he saturated himself in the literature of his period. He could catch the style of the pamphleteer, the newspaper writer; he reproduces the conversation of the wits so as occasionally to deceive the very elect. The descriptions of life at Castlewood, of the service in Winchester Cathedral, the letters of the old Marchioness of Esmond, Henry Esmond’s contribution to the _Spectator_, the account of the battle of Wynandael, etc., are all masterpieces. So are some of the minor characters in these novels--Will Esmond in the “Virginians,” for example, Father Holt, Esmond’s Jesuit tutor and, above all, Parson Sampson in the “Virginians.” But his principal actors are not, I think, of the eighteenth century at all. They are the people Thackeray himself knew, in the garb of their supposed period, but really men and women of the middle of the nineteenth century. Esmond and George Warrington, Rachel, Lady Castlewood, and her incomparable daughter Beatrix are, with all their perfect accessories, modern men and women playing a part, admirably it is true, but still a part, in the comedy of a bygone age. In the days of Anne and the Georges I am confident no one felt or acted or thought as they are represented by our author. It is only when Thackeray is out of sympathy with his heroes that he makes them true to their age. In “Barry Lyndon” we have the genuine article, so we do in his uncle, the Chevalier de Balibari, so again in every character in “Catherine,” which was intended as a burlesque. But in the more serious novels I feel somehow that Thackeray did not really transport his characters into a bygone age.

Of this he seems to have been conscious himself. When he drew pictures to illustrate “Vanity Fair,” he did not depict Rawdon Crawley as a Waterloo guardsman, nor Becky as a lady of fashion in 1816, nor Pitt as an aristocratic member of the Clapham set. He drew them as the people he knew himself and dressed them in the costume of his own time, thus acknowledging how he really regarded his own creations.

The ruling aristocracy came to an end when the Reform Bill was passed in 1832, but their prestige remained. The middle class entered the Promised Land and took their share in its government: but not triumphantly. I may almost say they were abashed by their success. The peers could no more return a great proportion of the House of Commons, they could no more promote or cast down common men much as they pleased. They dare no longer defy public opinion as their predecessors had done. Yet to the middle class they still appeared august enough. Their manners, their breeding, the state in which many lived, inspired no little awe among those immediately below them. Society was divided into castes almost as rigidly, though less formally, than in India to-day. The old Whig nobility still considered themselves divinely called to rule the country and to dictate to the sovereign. The county families held aloof from the inhabitants of the town; and barely tolerated the professional classes. The beneficed clergy, barristers, medical men, lesser army officers, etc., scorned the traders. The wholesale trader held the retail storekeeper in scorn and so on _ad infinitum_. But in England the barriers of rank were never insurmountable, and in a free country anyone was at liberty to try to climb them. Hence everybody endeavored with varying success to ascend the social ladder, and did not scruple to use other people as stepping stones. Thus arose the fierce fight to get into what is still called “Society” and the rampant snobbery which Thackeray was never tired of denouncing. With this we may begin the investigation of his attitude towards the society of his age.

The great example of this pushfulness is Thackeray’s most delightful creation in “Vanity Fair,” Becky Sharp, though she assuredly was no snob. With all her doubtful antecedents, however, Becky, at least, married into the ranks of the aristocracy; and in her husband our author has created so real a person that one is actually disposed to question whether he was rightly judged by the author of his being. We are told that Rawdon Crawley was stupid, badly educated, unaccustomed to good society, at least when ladies were present. But if he were such an oaf why did his rich aunt Miss Crawley, who had known Sheridan and the wits, make such a fuss about him and make him sit at table with herself and Becky because “we are the only Christians in the county.” Why was he allowed to act in the Charades at Gaunt House on that memorable night of his wife’s triumph? The fact is that Thackeray was obsessed with the idea that all young men of fashion were necessarily stupid. It is a thoroughly middle-class tradition and we find it constantly in his pages. Because of certain mannerisms and affectations, because they cared little for literature, because they fought duels and gambled, all young men about town were not necessarily fools; and it was a mistake to depict Rawdon Crawley as on the one hand uncommonly sharp and also a fool. But it is because Thackeray’s genius has created such a living being that we are indignant at his failure to make him conform to our ideas of what we think he really was. We regard him as a living man whom his creator has misjudged, and not as the figment of the brain of the author.