Chapter 3
Not a few of the dwellings into which Mr. Dickens conducts us in the course of some of his best-known stories, have their walls decorated with prints illustrative of familiar scenes from sacred history. Thus when Martin Chuzzlewit went away from Pecksniff’s, and was ten good miles on his way to London, he stopped to breakfast in the parlour of a little roadside inn, on the walls of which were two or three highly-coloured pictures, representing the Wise Men at the Manger, and the Prodigal Son returning to his Father. On the walls of Peggotty’s charming boat-cottage there were prints, showing the Sacrifice of Isaac, and the Casting of Daniel into the Den of Lions. When Arthur Clennam came home after his long absence in the East, he found the Plagues of Egypt still hanging, framed and glazed, on the same old place in his mother’s parlour. And who has forgotten the fireplace in old Scrooge’s house, which “was paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures?”
Here are a few comparisons. Mr. Larry, in bestowing a bachelor’s blessing on Miss Cross, before “somebody” came to claim her for his own, “held the fair face from him to look at the well-remembered expression on the forehead, and then laid the bright golden hair against his little brown wig, with a genuine tenderness and delicacy which, if such things be old-fashioned, were as old as Adam.” As old as Adam here means so long ago as Adam’s time; while Methuselah suggests great age. Thus Miss Jellyby relieved her mind to Miss Summerson on the subject of Mr. Quale, in the following energetic language:—“If he were to come with his great shining, lumpy forehead, night after night, till he was as old as Methuselah, I wouldn’t have anything to say to him.” And Mr. Filer, in his eminently practical remarks on the lamentable ignorance of political economy on the part of working people in connexion with marriage, observed to Alderman Cute that a man may live to be as old as Methuselah, and may labour all his life for the benefit of such people; but there could be no more hope of persuading them that they had no right or business to be married, than he could hope to persuade them that they had no earthly right or business to be born. Miss Betsy Trotwood declared to Mr. Dick that the natural consequence of David Copperfield’s mother having married a murderer—or a man with a name very like it—was to set the boy a-prowling and wandering about the country, “like Cain before he was grown up.” Joe Gargery’s journeyman, on going away from his work at night, used to slouch out of the shop like Cain, or the Wandering Jew, as if he had no idea where he was going, and had no intention of ever coming back. Describing the state of “the thriving City of Eden,” when Martin and Mark arrived there, the author of “Martin Chuzzlewit” says—“The waters of the Deluge might have left it but a week before, so choked with slime and matted growth was the hideous swamp which bore that name.” The Deluge suggests Noah’s ark. The following reference to it is from “Little Dorrit,” descriptive of the gradual approach of darkness up among the highest ridges of the Alps:—“The ascending night came up the mountains like a rising water. When at last it rose to the walls of the convent of the great St. Bernard, it was as if that weather-beaten structure were another ark, and floated on the shadowy waves.” Here is something from the Tower of Babel:—“Looming heavy in the black wet night, the tall chimneys of the Coketown factories rose high into the air, and looked as if they were so many competing towers of Babel.” When Mortimer Lightwood inquired of Charley Hexam, with reference to the body of the man found in the river, whether or not any means had been employed to restore life, he received this reply:—“You wouldn’t ask, sir, if you knew his state. Pharoah’s multitude that were drowned in the Red Sea ain’t more beyond restoring to life.” The boy added, further, “that if Lazarus were only half as far gone, that was the greatest of all the miracles.” When the Scotch surgeon was called in professionally to see Mr. Krook’s unfortunate lodger, the Scotch tongue pronounced him to be “just as dead as Chairy.” Job’s poverty is not likely to be forgotten among the comparisons. No, Mr. Mell’s mother was as poor as Job. Nor Samson’s strength: Dot’s mother had so many infallible recipes for the preservation of the baby’s health, that had they all been administered, the said baby must have been done for, though strong as an infant Samson. Nor Goliath’s importance: John Chivery’s chivalrous feeling towards all that belonged to Little Dorrit, made him so very respectable, in spite of his small stature, his weak legs, and his genuine poetic temperament, that a Goliath might have sat in his place demanding less consideration at Arthur Clennam’s hands. Nor Solomon’s wisdom: Trotty Veck was so delighted when the child kissed him that he couldn’t help saying, “She’s as sensible as Solomon.” Miss Wade having said farewell to her fellow-travellers in the public room of the hotel at Marseilles, sought her own apartment. As she passed along the gallery, she heard an angry sound of muttering and sobbing. A door stood open, and, looking into the room, she saw therein Pet’s attendant, the maid with the curious name of Tattycoram. Miss Wade asked what was the matter, and received in reply a few short and angry words in a deeply-injured, ill-used tone. Then again commenced the sobs and tears and pinching, tearing fingers, making altogether such a scene as if she were being “rent by the demons of old.” Let us close these comparisons by quoting another from the same book, “Little Dorrit,” descriptive of the evening stillness after a day of terrific glare and heat at Marseilles:—“The sun went down in a red, green, golden glory; the stars came out in the heavens, and the fire-flies mimicked them in the lower air, as men may feebly imitate the goodness of a better order of beings; the long, dusty roads and the interminable plains were in repose, and _so deep a hush was on the sea_, _that it scarcely whispered of the time when it shall give up its dead_.”
Looking over the familiar pages of “Nicholas Nickleby,” our eye lights upon a passage, almost at opening, which refers to God’s goodness and mercy. As Nickleby’s father lay on his death-bed, he embraced his wife and children, and then “solemnly commended them to One who never deserted the widow or her fatherless children.” Towards the close of Esther Summerson’s narrative in “Bleak House” we read these touching, tender words regarding Ada’s baby:—“The little child who was to have done so much was born before the turf was planted on its father’s grave. It was a boy; and I, my husband, and my guardian gave him his father’s name. The help that my dear counted on did come to her; though it came in the Eternal Wisdom for another purpose. Though to bless and restore his mother, not his father, was the errand of this baby, its power was mighty to do it. When I saw the strength of the weak little hand, and how its touch could heal my darling’s heart and raise up hopes within her, I felt a new sense of the goodness and tenderness of God.” After these illustrations of the great lessons of the goodness of God, and that there is mercy in even our hardest trials, we come next upon one which teaches the duty of patience and resignation to God’s will. Mrs. Maylie observed to Oliver Twist, with reference to the dangerous illness of Rose, that she had seen and experienced enough to “know that it is not always the youngest and best who are spared to those that love them; but this should give us comfort in our sorrow, for Heaven is just, and such things teach us impressively that there is a brighter world than this, and that the passage to it is speedy. God’s will be done!”
Our Saviour’s life and teaching afford so many interesting illustrations to Charles Dickens that our great difficulty, in the limited space to which we are now confined, is to make a good selection. Here is a sketch entitled “A Christmas Tree,” from one of his reprinted pieces, which contains this simple and beautiful summary of our Lord’s life on earth:—“The waits are playing, and they break my childish sleep! What images do I associate with the Christmas music as I see them set forth on the Christmas Tree? Known before all the others, keeping far apart from all the others, they gather round my little bed. An angel speaking to a group of shepherds in a field; some travellers, with eyes uplifted, following a star; a Baby in a manger; a Child in a spacious temple talking with grave men; a solemn figure, with a mild and beautiful face, raising a dead girl by the hand; again, near a city gate, calling back the son of a widow, on his bier, to life; a crowd of people looking through the opened roof of a chamber where He sits, and letting down a sick person on a bed with ropes; the same, in a tempest, walking on the water to a ship; again, on a sea-shore, teaching a great multitude; again, with a child upon His knee, and other children round; again, restoring sight to the blind, speech to the dumb, hearing to the deaf, health to the sick, strength to the lame, knowledge to the ignorant; again, dying upon a cross, watched by armed soldiers, a thick darkness coming on, the earth beginning to shake, and only one voice heard, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’”
These passages, which are only a few out of a very much longer list that might be made, will be sufficient, we trust, to show how much our greatest living novelist is in the habit of going to the sacred narrative for illustrations to many of his most touching incidents, and how reverent and respectful always is the spirit in which every such illustration is employed. To think of Charles Dickens’s writings as containing no religious teaching, is to do them a great injustice.
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The first of Mr. Dickens’s famous public Readings was given at Birmingham, during the Christmas week of 1853. At a meeting held on Monday, January 10, 1853, in the theatre of the Philosophical Institution, “for the purpose of considering the desirableness of establishing in Birmingham a Scientific and Literary Society upon a comprehensive plan, having for its object the diffusion,” &c., Mr. Arthur Ryland read a letter from Mr. Charles Dickens, received by him the day after the Literary and Artistic Banquet, containing an offer to visit Birmingham next Christmas, and read his Christmas Carol, in the Town Hall, for the benefit of the proposed Institution, with the proviso, however, that as many as possible of the working class should be admitted free. “It would,” said Mr. Dickens, “take about two hours, with a pause of ten minutes half-way through. There would be some novelty in the thing, as I have never done it in public, though I have in private, and (if I may say so) with a great effect on the hearers. I was so inexpressibly gratified last night by the warmth and enthusiasm of my Birmingham friends, that I feel half ashamed this morning of so poor an offer. But as I had decided on making it to you before I came down yesterday, I propose it nevertheless.”
The readings—three in number—came off with great _éclat_ during the last week of the year, and brought in a net sum of £400 to the Institute. Mr. Dickens continued from this time to give similar readings, for charitable purposes, both in the provinces and in London; but it was not till five years later (1858) that he began to read on his own account.
As we are writing, that long series of readings—continued through sixteen years, in both hemispheres—is drawing to a close, and the voice and figure of Charles Dickens, that have grown so familiar to us all, will dwell henceforth in the memory alone, but in one of its most honoured niches.
We ought not to omit to mention what any reader may well surmise, that Charles Dickens is inimitable in enlivening correspondence or table-talk with humorous anecdote, appropriate to the occasion. We subjoin a few specimens. The first is from one of his letters to Douglas Jerrold, and is dated Paris, 14th February, 1847:—“I am somehow reminded of a good story I heard the other night from a man who was a witness of it, and an actor in it. At a certain German town last autumn there was a tremendous _furore_ about Jenny Lind, who, after driving the whole place mad, left it, on her travels, early one morning. The moment her carriage was outside the gates, a party of rampant students, who had escorted it, rushed back to the inn, demanded to be shown to her bedroom, swept like a whirlwind upstairs into the room indicated to them, tore up the sheets, and wore them in strips as decorations. An hour or two afterwards a bald old gentleman, of amiable appearance, an Englishman, who was staying in the hotel, came to breakfast at the _table d’hôte_, and was observed to be much disturbed in his mind, and to show great terror whenever a student came near him. At last he said, in a low voice, to some people who were near him at the table, ‘You are English gentlemen, I observe. Most extraordinary people, these Germans! Students, as a body, raving mad, gentlemen!’ ‘Oh, no!’ said somebody else; ‘excitable, but very good fellows, and very sensible.’ ‘By God, sir!’ returned the old gentleman, still more disturbed, ‘then there’s something political in it, and I am a marked man. I went out for a little walk this morning after shaving, and while I was gone’—he fell into a terrible perspiration as he told it—‘they burst into my bedroom, tore up my sheets, and are now patrolling the town in all directions with bits of ’em in their button-holes!’ I needn’t wind up by adding that they had gone to the wrong chamber.”
Dickens now and then administers a little gentle rebuke to affectation, in a pleasant but unmistakable manner. Here is an instance of how he silenced a bilious young writer, who was inveighing against the world in a very “forcible feeble manner.” During a pause in this philippic against the human race, Dickens said across the table, in the most self-congratulatory of tones:—“I say—what a lucky thing it is you and I don’t belong to it? It reminds me,” continued the author of Pickwick, “of the two men, who on a _raised_ scaffold were awaiting the final delicate attention of the hangman; the notice of one was aroused by observing that a bull had got into the crowd of spectators, and was busily employed in tossing one here, and another there; whereupon one of the criminals said to the other—‘I say, Bill, how _lucky it is_ for us that we _are up here_.’”
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Here is a humorous and graphic account which he sent to the leading newspaper of his sensations during the shock of earthquake that was felt all over England in October, 1863. It is doubly interesting, as giving a description of his country-house at Gad’s-hill, near Rochester:—
“I was awakened by a violent swaying of my bedstead from side to side, accompanied by a singular heaving motion. It was exactly as if some great beast had been crouching asleep under the bedstead, and were now shaking itself and trying to rise. The time by my watch was twenty minutes past three, and I suppose the shock to have lasted nearly a minute. The bedstead, a large iron one, standing nearly north and south, appeared to me to be the only piece of furniture in the room that was heavily shaken. Neither the doors nor the windows rattled, though they rattle enough in windy weather, this house standing alone, on high ground, in the neighbourhood of two great rivers. There was no noise. The air was very still, and much warmer than it had been in the earlier part of the night. Although the previous afternoon had been wet, the glass had not fallen. I had mentioned my surprise at its standing near the letter ‘i’ in ‘Fair,’ and having a tendency to rise.”
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But the thing which, above all others, has characterised Dickens throughout his career, that has made his world-wide fame, and rendered his name a household word, is his broad, genial sympathy with life in all its phases, and with those most who are manfully toiling towards a better day. To this “enthusiasm of humanity” John Forster has alluded in the Dedicatory Sonnet to Charles Dickens, prefixed to his “Life of Goldsmith,” (March, 1848), when he says:—
“Come with me and behold, O friend with heart as gentle for distress, As resolute with wise true thoughts to bind The happiest to the unhappiest of our kind, That there is fiercer crowded misery In garret-toil and London loneliness Than in cruel islands ’mid the far-off sea.”
The great heart of Dickens has beat in unison with his age and with the people, and his name will be dear to all English-speaking races long after this little island of ours, the old home, shall have become a summer resort—a curiosity to visit—for the children of the great Anglo-Saxon Republics that are now growing up in the New and the Southern Worlds.
_December_, 1869.
I. EDINBURGH, JUNE 25, 1841.
[At a public dinner, given in honour of Mr. Dickens, and presided over by the late Professor Wilson, the Chairman having proposed his health in a long and eloquent speech, Mr. Dickens returned thanks as follows:—]
IF I felt your warm and generous welcome less, I should be better able to thank you. If I could have listened as you have listened to the glowing language of your distinguished Chairman, and if I could have heard as you heard the “thoughts that breathe and words that burn,” which he has uttered, it would have gone hard but I should have caught some portion of his enthusiasm, and kindled at his example. But every word which fell from his lips, and every demonstration of sympathy and approbation with which you received his eloquent expressions, renders me unable to respond to his kindness, and leaves me at last all heart and no lips, yearning to respond as I would do to your cordial greeting—possessing, heaven knows, the will, and desiring only to find the way.
The way to your good opinion, favour, and support, has been to me very pleasing—a path strewn with flowers and cheered with sunshine. I feel as if I stood amongst old friends, whom I had intimately known and highly valued. I feel as if the deaths of the fictitious creatures, in which you have been kind enough to express an interest, had endeared us to each other as real afflictions deepen friendships in actual life; I feel as if they had been real persons, whose fortunes we had pursued together in inseparable connexion, and that I had never known them apart from you.
It is a difficult thing for a man to speak of himself or of his works. But perhaps on this occasion I may, without impropriety, venture to say a word on the spirit in which mine were conceived. I felt an earnest and humble desire, and shall do till I die, to increase the stock of harmless cheerfulness. I felt that the world was not utterly to be despised; that it was worthy of living in for many reasons. I was anxious to find, as the Professor has said, if I could, in evil things, that soul of goodness which the Creator has put in them. I was anxious to show that virtue may be found in the bye-ways of the world, that it is not incompatible with poverty and even with rags, and to keep steadily through life the motto, expressed in the burning words of your Northern poet—
“The rank is but the guinea stamp, The man’s the gowd for a’ that.”
And in following this track, where could I have better assurance that I was right, or where could I have stronger assurance to cheer me on than in your kindness on this to me memorable night?
I am anxious and glad to have an opportunity of saying a word in reference to one incident in which I am happy to know you were interested, and still more happy to know, though it may sound paradoxical, that you were disappointed—I mean the death of the little heroine. When I first conceived the idea of conducting that simple story to its termination, I determined rigidly to adhere to it, and never to forsake the end I had in view. Not untried in the school of affliction, in the death of those we love, I thought what a good thing it would be if in my little work of pleasant amusement I could substitute a garland of fresh flowers for the sculptured horrors which disgrace the tomb. If I have put into my book anything which can fill the young mind with better thoughts of death, or soften the grief of older hearts; if I have written one word which can afford pleasure or consolation to old or young in time of trial, I shall consider it as something achieved—something which I shall be glad to look back upon in after life. Therefore I kept to my purpose, notwithstanding that towards the conclusion of the story, I daily received letters of remonstrance, especially from the ladies. God bless them for their tender mercies! The Professor was quite right when he said that I had not reached to an adequate delineation of their virtues; and I fear that I must go on blotting their characters in endeavouring to reach the ideal in my mind. These letters were, however, combined with others from the sterner sex, and some of them were not altogether free from personal invective. But, notwithstanding, I kept to my purpose, and I am happy to know that many of those who at first condemned me are now foremost in their approbation.
If I have made a mistake in detaining you with this little incident, I do not regret having done so; for your kindness has given me such a confidence in you, that the fault is yours and not mine. I come once more to thank you, and here I am in a difficulty again. The distinction you have conferred upon me is one which I never hoped for, and of which I never dared to dream. That it is one which I shall never forget, and that while I live I shall be proud of its remembrance, you must well know. I believe I shall never hear the name of this capital of Scotland without a thrill of gratitude and pleasure. I shall love while I have life her people, her hills, and her houses, and even the very stones of her streets. And if in the future works which may lie before me you should discern—God grant you may!—a brighter spirit and a clearer wit, I pray you to refer it back to this night, and point to that as a Scottish passage for evermore. I thank you again and again, with the energy of a thousand thanks in each one, and I drink to you with a heart as full as my glass, and far easier emptied, I do assure you.
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Later in the evening, in proposing the health of Professor Wilson, Mr. Dickens said:—