THE CHARLES DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 
 15y Daniel Madise, R.A. 
 
THE CHARLES 
 
 DICKENS 
 ORIGINALS 
 
 BY EDWIN PUGH 
 
 AUTHOR OF "CHARLES DICKENS 
 THE APOSTLE OF THE PEOPLE" 
 
 Book 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 153 FIFTH AVEXUE 
 
 1912 
 

 Published November igi2 
 
 1 
 
 
 Printed by Ballantvne, Hanson <&* Co. 
 At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh 
 
PREFACE 
 
 I AM glad of this opportunity to offer my sincere 
 thanks to all those who have so kindly and cour- 
 teously assisted me in the making of this book : 
 to my friend, Mr. Nat Simmonds, to Sir Melville 
 Macnaghten, C.B.,The Assistant Commissioner 
 of Police, to the Rev. Hume Elliot, The Biblio- 
 phile Society of Boston, U.S.A., Mr. Arthur 
 Humphreys, Switzerland, to Messrs. Atwood & 
 Sons, and especially to the members of the Dick- 
 ens family, Henry Fielding Dickens, Esq., K.C., 
 Mrs. Perugini, and Miss Georgina Hogarth. I 
 am also deeply indebted to Mr. B. W. Matz for 
 the care and pains he has taken in revising the 
 proofs of this book. 
 
 E. P. 
 
 St. Ellar's, Harrow Weald. 
 October 191 2. 
 
THE LIST OF CHAPTERS 
 
 I. The Immortal Child pack i 
 
 II. Of Two Women : I. Maria Beadnell ... 21 
 
 III. Of Two Women : II. Mary Hogarth .... 57 
 
 IV. Some Pickwickians 81 
 
 V. About Squeers and Mr. Fang 99 
 
 VI. The Brothers Cheeryble and others . . .121 
 
 VII. Relics from the Old Curiosity Shop . • . 145 
 
 VIII. Family Portraits 165 
 
 IX. Of Adventures IN History 197 
 
 X. Criminal Prototypes 235 
 
 XI. The Great Grotesques 265 
 
 XII. Minor Characters 285 
 
 XIII. Some Dickens' Contemporaries 311 
 
 XIV. Dickens Himself 331 
 
 Index 341 
 
THE LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Charles Dickens Frontispiece J 
 
 By Daniel Maclise, R.A. 
 
 Charles Dickens page 8 / 
 
 Silhouette by permission of the Connoisseur, 
 
 Leigh Hunt 16/ 
 
 Engraved by H. Meyer from a drawing by J. Wayter. 
 
 Walter Savage Landor 24 / 
 
 The original of Lawrence Boythorn in Bleak House, 
 
 Maria Beadnell 40 / 
 
 Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliophile Society, 
 Boston, U.S.A. 
 
 Mary Hogarth 56^/ 
 
 By H. K. Brown. By permission of Miss Georgina 
 Hogarth. 
 
 Henry Burnett, Brother-in-Law of Charles Dickens 72 / 
 The original of Nicholas Nickleby. 
 
 Judge L. Gazalee 80/ 
 
 Sam Vale 88 '^ 
 
 The original of Sam Weller. 
 
 The Honourable Miss Monckton, afterwards Lady Cook 96/ 
 Mezzotint by J. Jacobs after Reynolds. The original of 
 Mrs. Leo Hunter in Pickwick. 
 
 Serjeant Bompas 104 / 
 
 The original of Serjeant Buzfuz. 
 
 The Right Honourable Lord Brougham . . . .112/ 
 Engraved by D. J. Pound from a photograph by Mayall. 
 
 William Grant 128"^ 
 
 Daniel Grant 136 ^ 
 
THE LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 John Dickens page 144 ^ 
 
 By John W. Gilbert. By permission of N. P. Dickens, 
 K.C. 
 
 Mrs. Cooper (Little Dorrit) 152 > 
 
 •'The Duet" 168 / 
 
 Picture by Frank Stone, father of Marcus Stone, R.A. 
 Introducing Tennyson resting chin in hand gazing 
 at performers, with Dickens in foreground. Miss Ho- 
 garth is one of the figures at the piano. 
 
 Mrs. John Dickens 184 / 
 
 By John W. Gilbert. By permission of N. P. Dickens, 
 K.C. 
 
 The Children of Charles Dickens with Grip the Raven 200/* 
 From a drawing by Daniel Maclise, R.A. By permis- 
 sion of Miss Perugini. 
 
 Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield . . 216 y 
 
 Lord Mansfield 224 
 
 Lord George Gordon 232 
 
 Bryan Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall) , . . 248/ 
 
 Lord Grenville 256 
 
 Samuel Carter Hall 264 
 
 Sir Robert Peel 272 
 
 Mrs. Hayes (Polly Toddle) ^80^ 
 
 Inspector Field 296, ' 
 
 The original of Inspector Buckett. 
 
 Judge Talfourd 312 
 
 John Forster 328 
 
 By C B. Perugini. Bequeathed by Mrs. John Forster 
 to the Victoria and Albert Museum. 
 
CHAPTER ONE 
 THE IMMORTAL CHILD 
 
CHARLES DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 CHAPTER ONE 
 
 THE IMMORTAL CHILD 
 
 THERE ARE MANY PORTRAITS OF 
 Charles Dickens ; but that portrait which photo- 
 graphy has made most familiar to the world is 
 perhaps the least expressive of his personality. 
 It shows him as a worn and haggard man, with 
 scanty grizzled locks, and a deeply-lined face. It 
 is the portrait of a man prematurely old and wise 
 and tired. It as little reflects the character of the 
 author oi Pickwick and all that magnificent sequ- 
 ence of books which culminated in DavidCopper- 
 field,diS the bald head and fat flaccid face of Shak- 
 espeare — the faceof one enjoyinga sleek, prosper- 
 ous, and smug middle-age — reflects thecharacter 
 of the author oi Romeo and Juliet, or A Midsum- 
 mer Night' s Dream. 
 
 But you will observe here certain reservations. 
 It is not suggested that this portraitof Dickens at 
 fifty does not look like the portrait of the author 
 of Bleak House or Hard Times or Little Dorrit. 
 And the original of that bourgeois Shakespeare 
 of the Stratford-on-Avon bust might quite con- 
 ceivably have written The Tetnpest or King Lear 
 or Coriolanus. We have only a feeling of vague 
 disillusion when we try to realise that men of such 
 a commonplace exterior were the mighty genius- 
 es who have created a new world for us. 
 
 And here, I think, our instinct is right. These 
 3 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 bored-looking, sophisticated men of affairs are not 
 the men who penned those flaming masterpieces 
 which have so stirred and thrilled us. These men 
 are as the shrivelled husks of that immortal shin- 
 ing soul whichonce irradiated the beautiful bloomy 
 flesh and fired the rich red blood of appropriate 
 youth. There was a time when the treasures that 
 these god-like beings — by nature divine, human 
 only by grace — poured forth in such rare abund- 
 ance, were as diamonds flashing on the fair skin 
 of a young girl's delicate bosom ; now they are 
 as pearls concealed in the craggy rugged oyster- 
 shell. 
 
 Dickens himself was acutely, whimsically con- 
 scious of this sad difference between the Ideal and 
 the Real which does so plague and vex the inveter- 
 ate hero-worshipper. Whilst on a visit to Edin- 
 burgh he wrote : 
 
 " Walking up and down the hall of the courts 
 of law (which was full of advocates, writers to 
 the signet, clerks, and idlers) was a tall, burly, 
 handsome man of eight and fifty, with a gait like 
 0'Conneirs,the bluest eyes you can imagine, and 
 long hair — longer than mine — falling down in a 
 wildwayunder the broad brimof his hat. He had 
 on a surtout coat, a blue checked shirt ; the collar 
 standing up and kept in its place with a wisp of 
 black neckerchief ; no waistcoat, and a large poc- 
 ket-handkerchief thrust into his breast, which was 
 all broad and open. At his heels followed a wiry, 
 
 4 
 
THE IMMORTAL CHILD 
 
 sharp-eyed, shaggy devil of a terrier, dogging his 
 steps as he went slashing up and down, now with 
 one man beside him, now with another, and now 
 quite alone, but always at a fast, rolling pace, with 
 his head in the air,and his eyes as wide open as he 
 could get them. I guessed it was Wilson, and it 
 was. A bright, clear-complexioned, mountain- 
 looking fellow, helooks as though he had just come 
 down from the Highlands, and had never in his 
 life taken pen inhand. But he has had an attack of 
 paralysis in his right arm within this month. He 
 winced when I shook hands with him, and once or 
 twice when we were walking up and down slipped 
 as if he had stumbled on a piece of orange-peel. 
 He is a great fellow to look at, and to talk to ; and, 
 if you could divest your mind of the actual Scott, 
 is just the figure you would put in his place." 
 
 And,echoing Dickens, theportrait that I would 
 put in the place of that well-known latter-day 
 photograph is the portrait of himself at twenty- 
 seven, painted byMaclise : a portrait that justifies 
 Mrs. Carlyle in saying that hisface was as if made 
 of steel. 
 
 More soberly Forster describes him as one 
 whose " look of youthfulness first attracted you, 
 and then a candour and openness of expression 
 which made you sure of the qualities within. The 
 features were very good. He had a capital fore- 
 head ; a firm nose, with full, wide nostril ; eyes 
 wonderfully beaming with intellect, and running 
 5 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 over with humour and cheerfulness; and a rather 
 prominent mouth, strongly marked with sensi- 
 bility. The head was altogether well-formed and 
 symmetrical, and the air and carriage of it were 
 extremely spirited. The hair . . . was then of a 
 rich brown and most luxuriant abundance, and 
 the face . . . had hardly a vestige of hair or 
 whisker ; but there was that in the face as I first 
 recollect it which no time could change, and which 
 remained implanted on it unalterably to the last. 
 This was the quickness, keenness, and practical 
 power, the eager, restless, energetic outlook on 
 each several feature, that seemed to tell so little 
 of a student or writer of books, and so much of 
 a man of action and business in the world. Light 
 and motion flashed from every part of it. . . . 
 ' What a face is his to meet in a drawing-room ! ' 
 wrote Leigh Hunt to me, the morning after I had 
 made them known to each other. ' It has the 
 life and soul in it of fifty human beings.' In such 
 sayings are expressed not alone the restless and 
 resistless vivacity and force of which I have 
 spoken, but that also which lay beneath them, of 
 steadiness and hard endurance." 
 
 Yes, that was indeed the typeof face which one 
 would associate with all, except perhaps three or 
 four, of the Dickens books. But it was not the 
 face of the man who wrote in the preface to his 
 next book after David Copperfield, when his high 
 spirits had begun to flag and the fount of his 
 
 6 
 
THE IMMORTAL CHILD 
 
 inspiration to bubble up a little less freely and 
 brightly: ''In Bleak Housel have purposely dwelt 
 upon the romantic side of familiar things. " 1 1 had 
 never before been necessary for him to dwell, of 
 deliberate set purpose, upon any particular aspect 
 of life. All aspects of life had been alike gilded 
 and glorified by the ruddy glow of his radiant fancy. 
 Even the essential repulsiveness of such human 
 monsters as Fagin,Squeers, Quilp, Sampson and 
 Sally Brass, Pecksniff, Carker, and Uriah Heep, 
 had been veiled and tempered by the merry gleam 
 and twinkle of his indomitable humour that played 
 about their hideousness like summer lightning. 
 There is romance and to spare in Bleak House ; 
 but it is dingy and grotesque romance. Even the 
 boisterous fierce sweetness and gentleness of 
 Boythorn seems to lack something of convic- 
 tion : it is a little hard and flat ; whilst the sly, self- 
 seeking dilettantism of Skimpole is as differ- 
 ent from the reckless florid Bohemianism of Mic- 
 awber as the acrid taste of Marah-water is differ- 
 ent from the mellow flavour of the famous bowl 
 of punch. It was Dickens' consciousness of a de- 
 cline in power which impelled him to insist upon 
 that note in his work which had hitherto been its 
 chief distinguishing note. 
 
 And the chief distinguishing note of Dickens' 
 work, until the hour of his apogee, was clear and 
 bell-like as the laughter of a child. Dickens was 
 7 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 the immortal boy whom Mr. Barrie has redis- 
 covered in Peter Pan. Perhaps it was because 
 Dickens' best childhood had not happened to 
 him in his earliest years that he remained a child 
 so long and indeed never grew up altogether. 
 Writing in 1853 in the editorial plural he says : 
 " We have never grown the thousandth part 
 of an inch out of Robinson Crusoe. He fits us just 
 as well, and in exactly the same way, as when 
 we were among the smallest of the small. We 
 have never grown out of his parrot or his dog, 
 or his fowling-piece, or the horrible old staring 
 goat he came upon in the cave, or his rusty money, 
 or his cap, or umbrella. There has been no change 
 in the manufacture of telescopes, since that blessed 
 ship's spy-glass was made, through which, lying 
 on his breast at the top of his fortification, with 
 the ladder drawn up after him and all made safe, 
 he saw the black figures of those cannibals mov- 
 ing round the fire on the sea-sand, as themonsters 
 danced themselves into an appetite for dinner. 
 We have never grown out of Friday, or the excel- 
 lent old father he was so glad to see, or the grave 
 and gentlemanly Spaniard, or the reprobate Will 
 Atkins, or the knowingway in which he and those 
 other mutineers were lured up into the Island 
 when they came ashore there and their boat was 
 stove. We have got no nearer heaven by the 
 altitude of an atom, in respect of the tragi-comic 
 bear whom Friday caused to dance upon a tree, 
 
 8 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 
 
THE IMMORTAL CHILD 
 
 or the awful array of howling wolves in the dismal 
 weather, who were mad to make good entertain- 
 ment of man and beast, and who were received 
 with trains of gunpowder laid on fallen trees, and 
 fired by the snappingof pistols; and who ran blaz- 
 ing into the forest darkness, or were blown up 
 famously. Never sail we, idle, in a little boat, and 
 hear the rippling water at the prow, and look 
 upon the land, but we know that our boat-growth 
 stopped for ever, when Robinson Crusoe sailed 
 round the Island, and, having been nearly lost, 
 was so affectionatelyawakened out of his sleep at 
 home again by that immortal parrot, great pro- 
 genitor of all the parrots we have ever known. . . . 
 " We have never grown out of the real original 
 roaring giants. We have seen modern giants, 
 for various considerations ranging from a penny 
 to half-a-crown ; but, they have only had a head 
 apiece, and have been merely large men, and 
 not always that. We have never outgrown the 
 putting to ourselves of this supposititious case : 
 Whether, if we, with a large company of brothers 
 and sisters, had been put in his (by which we 
 mean, of course, in Jack's) trying situation, we 
 should have had at once the courage and the pre- 
 sence of mind to take the golden crowns (which 
 it seems they always wore as night-caps) off the 
 heads of the giant's childrenas they lay a- bed, and 
 put them on our family ; thus causingour treacher- 
 ous host to batter his own offspring and spare us. 
 9 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 We have never outgrown a want of confidence 
 in ourselves, in this particular. . . . 
 
 " We have never outgrown the whole region 
 of Covent Garden. We preserve it as afine, dissi- 
 pated, insoluble mystery. We believe that the 
 gentleman mentioned in Colman's Broad Grins 
 still lives in King Street. We have a general idea 
 that the passages at the Old Hummums lead to 
 groves of gorgeous bedrooms, eating out the 
 whole of the adjacent houses : where Chamber- 
 lains who have never been in bed themselves for 
 fifty years, show any country gentleman who 
 rings at the bell, at any hour of the night, to luxu- 
 rious repose in palatial apartments fitted up after 
 the Eastern manner. (We have slept there in 
 our time, but that makes no difference.) There is 
 a fine secrecy and mystery about the Piazza ; — 
 how you get up to those rooms above it, and what 
 reckless deeds are done there. (We know some 
 of these apartments very well, but that does not 
 signify in the least.) We have not outgrown the 
 two great Theatres. Ghosts of great names are 
 always getting up the most extraordinary panto- 
 mimes in them, with scenery and machinery on a 
 tremendous scale. We have no doubt that the 
 critics sit in the pit of both houses, every night. 
 Even as we write in our commonplace ofifice, we 
 behold from the window, four young ladies with 
 peculiarly limp bonnets, and of a yellow or drab 
 style of beauty, making for the stage-door of the 
 
 lO 
 
THE IMMORTAL CHILD 
 
 Lyceum Theatre, in the dirty little fog-choked 
 street over the way. Grown-up wisdom whispers 
 that these are beautiful fairies by night, and that 
 they will find Fairyland dirty even to their 
 splashed skirts, and rather cold and dull (not- 
 withstanding its mixed gas and daylight), this 
 easterly morning. But, we don't believe it. 
 
 "... We have never outgrown the rugged 
 walls of Newgate, or any other prison on the out- 
 side. All within is still the same blank of remorse 
 and misery. We have never outgrown Baron 
 Trenck. Among foreign fortifications, trenches, 
 counterscarps, bastions, sentries, and what not, 
 we always have him, filing at his chains down in 
 some arched darkness far below, or taming the 
 spiders to keep him company. We have never 
 outgrown the wicked old Bastille. Here, in our 
 mind at this present childish moment, is a distinct 
 ground-plan (wholly imaginative and resting on 
 no kindofauthority),ofamazeof low-vaulted pass- 
 ages with small black doors ; and here, inside of 
 this remote door on the left, where the black cob- 
 webs hang likeaveilfromthearch, and the jailer's 
 lamp will scarcely burn, was shut up, in black 
 silence through so many years, that old man of the 
 affecting anecdote, who was at last set free. But, 
 who brought his white face, and his white hair, and 
 his phantom figure, back again, to tell them what 
 they had made him — how he had no wife, no 
 child, no friend, no recognition of the light and 
 1 1 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 air — and prayed to be shut up in his old dungeon 
 till he died. 
 
 " We received our earliest and most enduring 
 impressions among barracks and soldiers, and 
 ships and sailors. We have outgrown no story of 
 voyage and travel, no love of adventure, no ardent 
 interest in voyagers and travellers. We have out- 
 grown no country inn — roadside, in the market- 
 place, or on a solitary heath; no country land- 
 scape, no windy hillside, no old manor-house, no 
 haunted place of any degree, not a drop in the 
 sounding sea. Though we are equal (on strong 
 provocation) to the Lancers, and may be heard 
 of in the Polka, we have not outgrown Sir Roger 
 de Coverley, or any country dance in the music- 
 book. We hope we have not outgrown the capa- 
 city of being easily pleased with what is meant to 
 please us, or the simple folly of being gay upon 
 occasion without the leastregard to being grand." 
 
 There speaks the immortal child : the boy who 
 never grew up . . . until, as we shall see, he met 
 with his first great disillusion. 
 
 We average folk view the world with the eyes 
 of use and wont. We see things as we expect 
 or desire or have been taught to see them. Our 
 vision is clouded by mists of prepossession or pre- 
 judice; it is distorted by some moral or mental bias 
 that causes us tosquint and blink at the facts of life 
 instead of looking them fairly and squarely in the 
 
 t2 
 
THE IMMORTAL CHILD 
 
 face. As little children we lived in a new amazing 
 world, staring with grave curiosity at all the queer 
 objects that surrounded us, wondering what they 
 all meant, forming our own ideas about them, and 
 givingforth our judgments in regard to them with 
 that simple directness which is at once so scath- 
 ing and so apposite. It is out of the mouths of 
 babes and sucklings (in the Biblical phrase) that 
 praise is indeed perfected. For children praise 
 only that which is good in their eyes, and not, 
 as men do, that which they think they ought to 
 praise. And as in approval so in condemnation : 
 the criticisms of children are always at least 
 honest. They do not admire a picture because 
 it bears a famous name, but because its colour or 
 its subject appeals to their unsophisticated taste. 
 They will only consent to be nursed by Uncle 
 Midas because he tips them shillings, and not 
 even his shillings can bribe them to silence on the 
 subject of his funny nose. They go about asking 
 all manner of questions about all manner of things 
 in a most disconcertingway. And they are not to 
 be put off or turned aside by any equivocations. 
 It is not enough to tell them that certain things 
 have always been so, they want to know why they 
 havealways been so, why people have put up with 
 them so long, and why they cannot be altered. 
 
 In this they are extraordinarily like Charles 
 Dickens. 
 
 And they are like Charles Dickens in their 
 13 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 acute perception of the grotesque and the humor- 
 ous, the hideous and the fantastic, aspects of life. 
 They believe in devils and fairies, ghosts and 
 bogeys, as he did. They have in excess the ele- 
 mental twin senses of horror and fun that cause 
 them to scream in the dark at the figments of 
 their own imagination, and to laugh at the spec- 
 tacle of a fat pompous old gentleman who has 
 tripped on a piece of orange peel and fallen in the 
 mud. It does not matter to them that the dream 
 which frightened them is so improbable as to be 
 merely absurd : one thinks of the Spontaneous 
 Combustion of Krook in this connection. Nor 
 does it matter to them that the fat pompous old 
 gentleman is, say, the Lord High Chancellor, or 
 a bishop, or the Prime Minister, or even a king. 
 They do not understand social values. They do 
 not see why, because an undersized, coarse, puny, 
 stupid old gentleman, or an idle, vain, insipid, 
 selfish ladyhasmoneyorrank, he or she should be 
 served and waited on and bowed down to by big, 
 fine, strong, clever men, or hard-working, gentle, 
 loving, lovable, and unselfish women. They can- 
 not grasp the significance of that parental decree 
 which ordainsthat they may play only with certain 
 stiff, starchy children whom they detest, instead 
 of with far jollier, dirtier, noisier children whom 
 they consider charming. And they flatly refuse 
 to believe that cookie who makes such delicious 
 confections, and Annie the housemaid who knows 
 
 14 
 
THE IMMORTAL CHILD 
 
 such heaps on heaps of nursery rhymes, and Or- 
 son the groom who can whistle through his fingers, 
 are not more wonderful and admirable persons 
 than Aunt Alicia and Lady Disdain and the Hon- 
 orable Archie Purdew. In these particulars also 
 they are very like Dickens; or, one should rather 
 say, he is very like them. 
 
 It is sometimes urged against Dickens that he 
 labelled his characters, and from start to finish 
 forced them to live up to their label. I think it 
 would be truer to say that it is we, the average 
 folk, who label our friends and acquaintances and 
 neighbours, and refuse to believe in anything 
 about them that seems to contradict the label. 
 We take people for granted. Dickens did not. 
 He looked at people, as children do, with ever 
 fresh frank interest ; and he saw that they were, 
 all of them, really very funny, or very pathetic, or 
 very good, or very bad. He seized on theirsalient 
 peculiarities, and by a sort of sublime logic de- 
 duced the whole man from the cast and texture 
 of his face, the colour of his hair or eyes, the cut 
 of his clothes, his idiosyncracies of manner or 
 speech, and the general effect of his personality. 
 
 He did believe that that outward seeming 
 reflected the inner spirit. "There is (he says) no- 
 thing truer than physiognomy, taken in connec- 
 tion with manner. The art of reading that book 
 of which Eternal Wisdom obliges every human 
 creature to present his or her own page with the 
 15 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 individual character written on it, is a difficult one, 
 perhaps, and is little studied. Itmayrequire some 
 natural aptitude, and it must require (for every- 
 thing does) some patience and some pains. That 
 these are not usually given to it, that numbers 
 of people accept a few stock commonplace ex- 
 pressions of the face as the whole list of charac- 
 teristics, and neither seek nor know the refine- 
 ments that are truest, that You, for instance, give 
 a great deal of time and attention to the reading 
 of music, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Hebrew, 
 if you please, and do not qualify yourself to read 
 the face of the master or mistress looking over 
 your shoulder teaching it to you, I assume to be 
 five hundred times more probable than improb- 
 able. Perhaps a little self-sufficiency may be at 
 the bottom of this ; facial study requires no study 
 from you, you think ; it comes by nature to you 
 to know enough about it, and you are not to be 
 taken in. I confess, for my part, that I have been 
 taken in, over and over again. I have been taken 
 in by acquaintances, and I have been taken in (of 
 course) by friends ; far oftener by friends than by 
 any other class of persons. How came I to be so 
 deceived ? Had I quite misread their faces? No. 
 Believe me, my first impression of those people, 
 founded on face and manner alone, was invari- 
 ably true. My mistake was in suffering them to 
 come nearer to me and explain themselves away." 
 In this sense, then, Dickens drew from life as 
 
 i6 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 "Skimpole" 
 
THE IMMORTAL CHILD 
 
 the painter draws from the model. But it is a 
 poor painter who paints only portraits of models. 
 The true creative artist inevitably and invariably 
 endows all his subjects with some vague elusive 
 quality of his own genius which uplifts them from 
 thecommonplace, transfigures and glorifies them. 
 He paints not individuals but types. He shows 
 us men and women, scenes and incidents, which 
 suggest to us men and women we have known, 
 scenes and incidents we have ourselves beheld or 
 taken part in. He shows us old familiar things in 
 a new unfamiliar light, and so reveals their inner 
 meaning to us. It may be that hitherto these 
 things have seemed to bear no definite signifi- 
 cance; but never again shall we see them, or ex- 
 perience them, or remember them, or come into 
 close contact with them, withoutfeeling that they 
 have in some mysterious way been invested with 
 a new poignant interest. In short, the artist has 
 opened our eyes to the truth. And this is the 
 daily miracle of art : making the blind to see. 
 
 It was a miracle that only Dickens, after Shak- 
 espeare, was able to perform with consistent suc- 
 cess. We have grown so used to Shakespeare's 
 people that we never think of them'as caricatures. 
 We accept them as universal types. Yet they are, 
 in numberless instances, quite as grotesque, quite 
 as highly coloured, and quite as improbable — to 
 the average purblind intelligence — as Dickens' 
 people. Set Malvolio against Pecksniff, or Fal- 
 17 B 
 
f 
 
 THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 staff against Micawber — to choose two rough-and- 
 ready examples — and you will see that they are 
 all four alike incredible and yet living figures. 
 
 The truth is, of course, that whole masses of 
 people approximate more or less to one type, and 
 that to express that type the artist must sum up 
 all the variations from it in one colossal archetype. 
 In this way, and in this way only, is it possible to 
 create characters that shall become immortal. 
 (Sherlock Holmes, alone among modern crea- 
 tions, is likeliest to become immortal, and for this 
 reason.) For we are, most of us, so much alike 
 we differ so little from others of our own kidney 
 that it would be possible to marshal a successior 
 of individuals who, beginningwithQuiIp,evolvec 
 by infinitesimal gradations, into the saintly, pre- 
 posterous Tom Pinch. The two extremes of tha 
 line are in such violent contrast as to seem irre-f 
 concilable with the fact of their common human 
 nature ; and yet at no point in the line could you 
 point to any member of that close-packed pha-i 
 lanx and say : " It is here that one type ceases ancf 
 another type comes into being." But you could 
 set Dickens' characters in a row and say just that. 
 You can quite easily perceive the difference be- 
 tween Skimpole and Micawber, or Sam Weller 
 and Mark Tapley. And it is precisely because 
 of this stark rawness in depiction that Dickens' 
 people, by virtue of their very eccentricity, live. 
 
 But apologists of Dickens, jealous for his re- 
 
THE IMMORTAL CHILD 
 
 putation, have been at considerable pains — un- 
 necessary pains, perhaps — to prove that many 
 of his characters had actual prototypes ; that the 
 originals of Mrs. Nickleby and Mr. Micawber 
 were Dickens' own mother and father; that Skim- 
 pole and Boythorn were recognisable caricatures 
 of Leigh Hunt and Walter Savage Landor, and 
 so on. And even to-day there are certain obscure 
 Dickens-lovers who will tell you with obvious 
 conviction that they have met and talked to 
 people who might have sat to Dickens as models 
 for the Artful Dodger or Young Mr. Chivery : 
 which seems quite likely, but which proves no- 
 thing, since the merit of Dickens' creations lies, 
 not in their fidelity to any individual, but in their 
 approximation to type. 
 
 In the case of Dickens, as in the case of Scott, 
 it is safe to say, as Mr. W. S. Crockett has said 
 in a previous volume in this series, that "the 
 whole question is a somewhat thorny one ; " that 
 Dickens, like Scott, had often " an individual in 
 view, no doubt, but his identity was veiled by the 
 addition of characteristics belonging to a total- 
 ly different personage or (as often happened) 
 personages " ; that Dickens, like Scott, " paint- 
 ed in ' composites.' The living person he never 
 transferred to his pages simply as he was. That 
 were a violation of the technique of the novelist's 
 art, impossible to a great creative genius ; " that 
 Dickens' characters were like Scott's, " his own 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 matchless creation. He first lived among them^ 
 He had gone through the length and breadth o^ 
 the country and had met after a friendly fashion 
 with all the conditions of life which are so happily 
 reflected in his resplendent mirror. That every- 
 thing is so real, so true tolife, soexquisitely touch- 
 ed with the * rare sweet glamour of humanity.' " 
 
 But that Dickens was deeply influenced by 
 certain persons with whom he had been on terms 
 of intimacy in his earlier days, that his outlook 
 upon life was affected by his feelings toward 
 those persons, and that, finally, he did use and 
 exploit the superficial mannerisms of some of 
 his acquaintances and friends, is, I think, demons- 
 trably true. At any rate, it is the purpose of this 
 book to establish that theory. 
 
CHAPTER THE SECOND 
 
 OF TWO WOMEN : I. MARIA 
 BEADNELL 
 
CHAPTER THE SECOND OF 
 
 TWO WOMEN : I. MARIA BEADNELL 
 
 THERE ARE SOME JOLTERHEADS 
 who hold that Realism and Idealism are as the 
 poles asunder; that no Realist can be an Idealist; 
 that every Realist is of necessity a Pessimist and 
 every Idealist a heaven-born Optimist ; that the 
 Real is always depressing and unlovely and the 
 Ideal always exhilarating and visionary. As if 
 there were not such real things in the world as 
 mother-love and moonshine, sunshine and the 
 way of a man with a maid, art and music, the call 
 of the sea, friendship, heroism, faith, hope and 
 charity ! Dickens was at once a Realist and an 
 Idealist. He only differed from some English dis- 
 ciples of the French Naturalistic School of Fic- 
 tion in that whilst they seem to prefer to stoop 
 and sniff and examine the manure at the root of 
 the tree he preferred to stand erect and rejoice in 
 the beauty and inhale the perfume of the rose. 
 
 There are no villains more villainous than his ; 
 yet even to Quilp he gives a sense of humour ; 
 and I have always felt that Bill Sikes could not 
 have been wholly bad, or he would not have kept 
 a dog, and that he must have had his rare moments 
 of tenderness (of which, no doubt, he was heartily 
 ashamed) or Nancy would not have loved him so. 
 Dickens onlyfailed as a Realist when his sense of 
 humour failed, as it did sometimes — in the ardour 
 of propaganda, in the lame conclusions of most of 
 23 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 his novels, and in his depiction of some of his 
 heroes and heroines. Harry and Rose Maylie 
 Nicholas Nickleby and Madeline Bray, Edward 
 Chester and Emma Haredale, Walter Gay and 
 Florence Dombey : these are all lay figures, 
 mere walking gentlemen and leading ladies of 
 melodrama, the conventional dummies of tradi- 
 tion, conventionally fine, conventionally beauti- 
 ful, conventionally eloquent, and — like most con- 
 ventions — utterly unconvincing. Theymoveam- 
 ong the other characters, all vital and arrestive, 
 like grey shadows. They are indeed the shadows 
 of a dream : a dream that Dickens implicitly 
 believed in : a dream that was to him no dream 
 but a reality. 
 
 Dickens was a man of few illusions : therein 
 lay the strength of his realism ; but such illusions 
 as he had he clung to with the tenacity of a child : 
 and therein lay the weakness of his idealism. He 
 clung to the illusion that there did exist in the 
 world women who were, humanly speaking, per- 
 fect./ He was firmly convinced that he had met 
 at least one, and perhaps two such women in his 
 youth. And out of thisconvictiongrew his almost 
 pathetic faith in the idea that somewhere, in some 
 undiscovered corner of the earth, there might be 
 a perfect man also. ** At least," he seems to have 
 said to himself, " I will give mankind the benefit 
 of the doubt. It can at any rate do no harm to 
 assume the existence of my ideal. There were 
 
 24 
 
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 
 "Boythorn" 
 
MISS MARIA BEADNELL 
 
 great men before Agamemnon ; there may have 
 been good men since Christ." That was in the 
 first flush of his manhood. 
 
 But presently, as his circle of acquaintance 
 widened, as his field of observation was enlarged, 
 as his knowledge of human nature increased, and 
 still his ideal man refused to materialise, his faith 
 in that glorious figment began to droop and lan- 
 guish. After Edward Chester, who hardly con- 
 trives to breathe, there is only Walter Gay — 
 and he was meant to be somebody else. Thence- 
 forth, from the birth of Martin Chuzzlewit to the 
 supposed death of John Harmonon thecoldslimy 
 stones of the riverside causeway, we have only the 
 most fleeting glimpses of this ideal man. Itis true 
 that he flickers up into a feeble semblance of life 
 in the resurrection of John Rokesmith, but only 
 to be ruthlessly murdered as Edwin Drood. So 
 he died and was buried. But one of Dickens' 
 ideal women, though she died — died without 
 ever having lived — was never buried. The other 
 ideal woman had the misfortune to descend from 
 heaven to earth ; and, meeting her old admirer for 
 the first time in the flesh, was at one stroke made 
 both mortal and immortal by his genius. 
 
 i 
 
 Her name was Maria Beadnell, and she was 
 a very real person indeed. Her father, George 
 Beadnell, had two other daughters, Margaret 
 and Anne. He was one of two brothers, the other 
 
 25 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 named John. They were bankers who, in 1830, 
 lived and carried on their trade at No. 2 Lombard 
 Street. 
 
 I have a fancy, based on a pretty extensive 
 knowledge of Dickens' well-known passion for 
 authenticity in the matter of backgrounds and his 
 meticulous methods in describing them, that this 
 old-fashioned business house figures, in regard to 
 the official part of it, as Tellson's Bank in A Tale 
 of Two Cities, and also, in regard to its domestic 
 side, as the Aladdin's palaceoccupiedforonenight 
 only by Ralph Nickleby. It is true thatneither of 
 these interiors belongs to the locality of Lombard 
 Street : but then it was Dickens' way to take 
 liberties with topography, as with the physical 
 peculiarities of people, in his desire to achieve 
 certain effects. There is at least this circumstance 
 in support of my theory : that the Beadnell's bus- 
 iness house was the only old-fashioned business 
 house of that particular type which Dickens knew 
 intimately ; and that, when he knew it, he had had 
 so little experience of luxury, and was, moreover, 
 in such a state of exaltation, as to be unduly im- 
 pressed by its magnificence. 
 
 He describes the official premises thus : 
 *• Tellson's Bank by Temple Bar was an old- 
 fashioned place. ... It was very small, very dark, 
 very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old- 
 fashioned place, moreover, in the moral attribute 
 that the partners in the House were proud of its 
 
 26 
 
MISS MARIA. BEADNELL 
 
 smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugli- 
 ness, proud of its incommodiousness. They were 
 even boastful of its eminence in those particulars, 
 and were fired by an express conviction that, if it 
 were less objectionable, it would be less respect- 
 able. This was no passive belief, but an active 
 weapon which they flashed at more convenient 
 places of business. Tellson's (they said) wanted 
 no elbow room, Tellson's wanted no light, Tell- 
 son'swanted no embellishment. NoakesandCo.'s 
 might, or Snooks Brothers' might ; but Tellson's 
 thank Heaven ! — 
 
 " Any one of these partners would have disin- 
 herited his son on the question of rebuilding Tell- 
 son's. . . . Thus it had come to pass that Tellson's 
 was the triumphant perfection of inconvenience. 
 After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy 
 with a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tell- 
 son's down two steps, and came to your senses in 
 a miserable little shop, with two little counters, 
 where the oldest of men made your cheque shake 
 as if the wind rustled it, while they examined the 
 signature by the dingiest of windows, which . . . 
 weremade the dingier by their own iron bars. . . . 
 If your business necessitated your seeing 'the 
 House,' you were put intoaspeciesof Condemned 
 Hold at the back, where you meditated on a mis- 
 spent life, until the House came with its hands in 
 its pockets, and you could hardly blink at it in the 
 dismal twilight. Your money came out of, or 
 27 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 went into, wormy old wooden drawers, particles 
 of which flew up your nose and down your throat 
 when they were opened or shut. Your banknotes 
 had a musty odour, as if they were fast decom- 
 posing into rags again. Your plate was stowed 
 away among the neighbouring cesspools, and evil 
 communications corrupted its good polish in a 
 day or two. Your deeds got into extemporised 
 strong-rooms made of kitchens and sculleries, and 
 fretted out all the fat from their parchments into 
 the banking-house air. Your lighter boxes of fa- 
 mily papers went upstairs into a Barmecideroom, 
 that always had a great dining-table in it, and 
 never had a dinner." 
 
 It was very likely in this Barmecide room that 
 Dickens first met Maria Beadnell ; but to him the 
 whole house may have reeked of opulence, and 
 he, like Kate Nickleby,may have been "perfectly 
 absorbed in amazement at the richness and splen- 
 dour of the furniture. The softest and most ele- 
 gant carpets, the most exquisite pictures, the cost- 
 liest mirrors ; articles of richest ornament, quite 
 dazzling from their beauty and perplexing from 
 the prodigality with which they were scattered 
 around. . . . The very staircase nearlydown to the 
 hall door, was crammed with beautiful and luxuri- 
 ous things, as though the house were brim-full of 
 riches, which, with a very trifling addition, would 
 fairly run over into the street." 
 
 28 
 
MISS MARIA BEADNELL 
 
 The Beadnells seem to have been hospitable 
 folk wholoved toentertain theirfriends. And pro- 
 bably it was for the sake of the three girls that 
 most of the guests who came to that queer old 
 house wereyoung. Margaret, theeldest daughter, 
 was courted byone David Lloyd, who eventually 
 married her in 1831. The second girl, Anne, 
 espoused a friend of Dickens, Henry Kolle, and 
 became Mrs. Kolle in 1833. Both these young 
 men were of the prosperous middle-class, steady, 
 diligent, eager to get on in the world, and so likely 
 to find favour in the eyes of the well-to-do banker. 
 Both their love-affairs were in the budding stage 
 when Kolle introduced his friend, Charles Dick- 
 ens, to the Beadnell household. 
 
 Atthattime Dickens wasamereyouthof seven- 
 teen or eighteen. Having grown dissatisfiedwith 
 his prospects in the law, he had recently made up 
 his mind to qualify himself for the vocation that 
 his father had latelyadopted : that of anewspaper 
 parliamentary reporter. 
 
 " He set resolutely therefore to the study of 
 shorthand ; and, for the additional help of such 
 general information about books as a fairly edu- 
 cated youth might be expected to have, as well 
 as to satisfy some higher personal cravings, he 
 became an assiduous attendant at the British 
 Museum reading-room. ... Of the difficulties 
 that beset hisshorthand studies, as well as of what 
 first turned his mind to them, he has told some- 
 29 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 thing in Copperfield. He had heard that many 
 men distinguished in various pursuits had begun 
 life by reporting debates in Parliament, and he 
 was not deterred by a friend's warning that the 
 mere mechanical accomplishment for excellence 
 in it might take a few years to master thoroughly, 
 ' a perfect and entire command of the mystery of 
 shorthand writing and reading being about equal 
 in difficulty to the mastery of six languages.' Un- 
 daunted, he plunged into it, self-teaching in this 
 as in graver things ; and, having bought Mr. Gur- 
 ney's half-guinea book, worked steadily his way 
 through its distractions. 
 
 '"The changes that were rung upon dots, which 
 in such a position meant such a thing,and in such 
 another positionsomething elseentirely different; 
 the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; 
 the unaccountable consequences that resulted 
 from marks like flies' legs ; the tremendous effects 
 of a curve in the wrong place, not only troubled 
 my waking hours, but reappeared before me in 
 my sleep. When I had groped my way, blindly, 
 through these difficulties, and had mastered the 
 alphabet, there then appeared a procession of 
 new horrors, called arbitrary characters, the most 
 despotic characters I have ever known, who in- 
 sisted, forinstance, that athing like the beginning 
 of a cobweb meant expectation, and that a pen- 
 and-ink skyrocket stood for disadvantageous. 
 When I had fixed these wretches in my mind, I 
 
 30 
 
MISS MARIA BEADNELL 
 
 found that they had driven everything else out of 
 it ; then, beginning again, I forgot them ; while I 
 was picking them up I dropped the other frag- 
 ments of the system ; in short, it was almost heart- 
 breaking.' " 
 
 But " what it was that made it not quite heart- 
 breaking to the hero of fiction its readers know 
 (says Forster in his only mention of Miss Bead- 
 nell, whose name he seems never to have heard). 
 And something of the same kind was now to enter 
 into the actual experience of its writer. . . . He, 
 too, had his Dora, at apparently the same hope- 
 less elevation ; striven for as the one only thing 
 to be attained, and even more unattainable, for 
 neither did he succeed nor happilydidshedie ; but 
 the one idol, like the other, supplying a motive to 
 exertion at the time, and otherwise opening out 
 to the idolator, both in fact and fiction, a highly 
 unsubstantial, happy, foolish time. I used to laugh 
 and tell him I had no belief in any but the book 
 Dora, until the incident of the sudden reappear- 
 ance of the real one in his life, nearly six yearsafter 
 Copperfield was written, convinced me there had 
 been a more actual foundation for those chapters 
 of his book than I was ready to suppose. Still I 
 would hardly admit it ; and, that the matter could 
 possibly affect him then, persisted in a stout re- 
 fusal to believe. His reply (1855) throws a little 
 light on this j uvenile part of his career, and I there- 
 fore venture to preserve it. 
 31 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 " ' I don't quite apprehend what you mean by 
 my overrating the strength of the feeling of five- 
 and-twenty years ago. If you mean of my own 
 feeling, and will only think what the desperate in- 
 tensity of my nature is, and that this began when 
 I was Charley's age ; that it excluded every other 
 idea from my mind for four years, at a time of life 
 when four years are equal to four times four ; and 
 that I went at it with a determination to over- 
 come all the difficulties, which fairly lifted me up 
 into newspaper life, and floated me away over a 
 hundred men's heads ; then you are wrong, be- 
 cause nothing can exaggerate that. I have posi- 
 tively stood amazed at myself ever since ! 
 
 '"And so I suffered,andsoworked,andsobeat 
 and hammered away at the maddest romances 
 that evergot intoanyboy'sheadand stayed there, 
 that to see the mere cause of it all now loosens my 
 hold upon myself. Without for a moment sin- 
 cerely believing that it would have been better 
 if we had never got separated, I cannot see the 
 occasion of so much emotion as I should see in 
 anyone else. No one can imagine in the most dis- 
 tant degree what pain the recollection gave me in 
 Copperjield. And just as I can never open that 
 book as I open any other book, I cannot see the 
 face (even at four-and-forty), or hear the voice, 
 without going wandering away over the ashes 
 of all that youth and hope in the wildest man- 
 ner.' 
 
 32 
 
MISS MARIA BEADNELL 
 
 *' More and more plainly seen, however, in the 
 light of four-and-forty,the romanceglided visibly 
 away, its work being fairly done ; and at the close 
 of the month followinof that in which this letter 
 was written, during which he had very quietly 
 made a formal call at his youthful Dora's house, 
 and contemplated with a calm equanimity, in the 
 hall, her stuffed favourite Jip, he began the fiction 
 in which there was a Flora to set against its prede- 
 cessor's Dora, both derived from the same original. 
 The fancy had a comic humour in it he found it 
 impossible toresist, but it was kindly and pleasant 
 to the last ; and if the later picture showed him 
 plenty to laugh at in this retrospect of his youth, 
 there is nothing he thought of more tenderly than 
 the earlier, as long as he was conscious of any- 
 thing." 
 
 So, it is seen that Dickens had fallen in love 
 with thedainty, petite Maria Beadnell,whoseems 
 to have been in many respects a charming girl, 
 but an inveterate coquette. She, attracted by this 
 romantic boy of the glowing, flashing eyes, flirted 
 with him, practised all her maiden arts upon his 
 youthful susceptibility, led him on and eluded him, 
 was towardly and coy, everything in turns and 
 nothing long. 
 
 What was she like? We catch our first glimpse 
 of her, I think, in the sturdy staunch old lock- 
 smith's house in Barnaby Rudge. Her roguish 
 33 c 
 
! 
 
 THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 beauty beams at us from the looking-glass of 
 Dolly Varden. She had "a face lighted up by the 
 loveliest pair of sparkling eyes . . . the face of a 
 pretty, laughing girl, dimpled and fresh and heal- 
 thful — the very impersonation of good-humour 
 and blooming beauty." She strikes her admirer, 
 Joe Willet, "quite dumb with her beauty . . in all 
 the glow and grace of youth, with all her charms 
 increased a hundredfold by a most becoming 
 dress, by a thousand little coquettish ways which 
 nobody could assume with a better grace . ." And 
 *' there she was again, the very pink and pattern 
 of good looks, in a smart little cherry-coloured 
 mantle, with a hood of the same drawn over her 
 head, and upon the top of that hood a little straw 
 hat trimmed with cherry-coloured ribbons and 
 worn the merest trifle on one side — ^just enough, 
 in short, to make it the wickedest and most pro- 
 voking head-dress that ever malicious milliner 
 devised. And not to speak of the manner in which 
 these cherry-coloured decorations brightened her 
 eyes, or vied with her lips, or shed a new bloom 
 on her face, she wore such a cruel little muff, and 
 such a heartrending pair of shoes, and was so sur- 
 rounded and hemmed in, as it were, by aggrava- 
 tions of all kinds, that when Mr. Tappertit, hold- 
 ing the horse's head, saw her come out of the 
 house alone, such impulses came over him to de- 
 coy her into the chaise and drive off like mad, 
 that he would unquestionably have done it, but 
 
 3i 
 
MISS MARIA BEADNELL 
 
 for certain uneasy doubts besetting him as to the 
 shortest way to Gretna Green." 
 
 Again, on a certain fine bright night, Dolly, for 
 all her lowness of spirits, ' ' kept looking up at the 
 stars in a manner so bewitching (and she knew it) 
 that Joe was clean out of his senses, and plainly 
 showed -that if ever a man were — not to say over 
 head and ears, but over the Monument and the 
 topof St. Paul'sinlove.thatmanwas himself. The 
 road was a very good one; not at all a jolting road, 
 or an uneven one; and yet Dolly held the side of 
 the chaise with one little hand, all the way. If 
 there had been an executioner behind him with 
 an uplifted axe ready to chop off his head if he 
 touched that hand, J oecouldn'thave helped doing 
 it. From putting his own hand upon it as if by 
 chance, and taking it away again after a minute 
 or so, he got to riding along without taking it off 
 at all ; as if he, the escort, were bound to do that 
 as an important part of his duty, and had come out 
 for the purpose. The most curious circumstance 
 about this little incident was that Dolly didn't 
 seem to know of it. She looked so innocent and 
 unconscious when she turned her eyes on Joe, 
 that it was quite provoking. 
 
 •• She talked though, talked about her fright, 
 and about J oe's coming up to rescue her, and about 
 her gratitude, and about her fear that she might 
 not have thanked him enough, and about their 
 always being friends from that time forth — and 
 35 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 about all that sort of thing. And when Joe said, 
 not friends he hoped, Dolly was quite surprised 
 and said not enemies she hoped ; and when Joe 
 said, couldn't they be something much better than 
 either, Dolly all of a sudden found out a star which 
 was brighter than all the other stars, and begged 
 to call his attention to the same, and was ten thou- 
 sand times more innocent and unconscious than 
 ever." 
 
 I think there can be no doubt that Dolly Varden 
 was founded on Maria Beadnell. She was really 
 the first girl, the first ingenue, that Dickens suc- 
 ceeded in investing with any semblance of life. 
 And she came into being just long enough after 
 the period of his youthful infatuation to be hand- 
 led with delicacy and at the same time with fond 
 playfulness. Later on, when Dickens was at his 
 apogee, he boldly, lovingly idealised her; and of 
 all his idealised women Dora Spenlow is the only 
 one who interests us. I twill be seen that she bears 
 a close resemblance to Dolly Varden, although 
 she is of altogether finer texture, simple and art- 
 less, single-minded and sincere. 
 
 *' She was (says David Copperfield, Dickens' 
 mouthpiece) more than human to me. She was a 
 Fairy, a Sylph, I don't know what she was — any- 
 thing that no one ever saw, and everything thatj 
 everybody ever wanted. . . I don't remember whol 
 was there, except Dora. I have not the least idea 
 what we had for dinner, besides Dora. My im-j 
 
 3< 
 
MISS MARIA BEADNELL 
 
 pressionis that I dined off Dora entirely, and sent 
 away half-a-dozen plates untouched. I sat next 
 to her. I talked to her. She had the most delight- 
 ful little voice, the gayest little laugh, the pleas- 
 antest and most fascinating little ways that ever 
 led a lost youth into hopeless slavery. She was 
 rather diminutive altogether. So much the more 
 precious, I thought. ... I never saw such curls — 
 how could I, for there never were such curls? — 
 as those she shook out to hide her blushes. As 
 to the straw hat with blue ribbons which was on 
 the top of the curls, if I could only have hung it up 
 in my room in Buckingham Street, what a price- 
 less possession it would have been. . . . 
 
 "All was over in a moment. I had fulfilled my 
 destiny. I was a captive and a slave. I loved 
 Dora Spenlowto distraction! . . . I was swallowed 
 up in an abyss of love in an instant. There was 
 nopausingon the brink ; no looking down or look- 
 ing back ; I was gone, headlong, . . . 
 
 " Within the first week of my passion I bought 
 four sumptuous waistcoats — not for myself; /had 
 no pride in them ; for Dora — and took to wearing 
 straw-coloured kid gloves in the streets, and 
 laid the foundations of all the corns I have ev- 
 er had. If the boots I wore at that period could 
 only be produced and compared with the natural 
 size of my feet, they would show what the 
 state of my heart was in a most affecting man- 
 ner. . . . 
 37 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 " I don't think I had any definite idea where 
 Dora came from, or in what degree she was re- 
 lated to a higher order of beings ; but I am quite 
 sure I should havescouted the notion of her being 
 simply human, like any other young lady, with in- 
 dignation and contempt. If I may so express it I 
 was steeped in Dora. I was not merely over head 
 and ears in love with her, but I was saturated 
 through and through. Enough love might have 
 been wrung out of me, metaphorically speaking, 
 to drown anybody in ; and yet there would have 
 remained enough within me, and all over me, to 
 pervade my entire existence." 
 
 So far the story follows the events of that peri- 
 od of green-sickness ; but Dickens' imagination 
 overleaps the bounds of actual cold experience 
 and he pictures that impossibly ecstatic moment 
 of the realisation of his boyish dream. 
 
 " I don't know how I did it. I did it inamoment. 
 I intercepted Jip. I had Dora in my arms. I was 
 full of eloquence. I never stopped for a word. I 
 told her how I loved her. I told her I should die 
 without her. I told her that I idolised and wor- 
 shipped her. . . . When Dora hung her head and 
 cried and trembled, my eloquence increased so 
 much the more. If she would like me to die for 
 her she had but to say the word and I was ready. 
 Life without Dora's love was not a thing to have 
 upon any terms. I couldn t bear it, and I wouldn't. 
 I had loved her everyminute,dayand night, since 
 
 38 
 
 I 
 
MISS MARIA BEADNELL 
 
 I first saw her. I loved her at that moment to dis- 
 traction. I should always love her, every minute, 
 to distraction. Lovershadloved before, andlovers 
 would love again ; but no lover had ever loved, 
 might, could, would, or should ever love, as I loved 
 Dora ... I suppose we had some notion that this 
 was to end in marriage. We must have had some, 
 because Dorastipulated that we were never to be 
 married without her papa's consent. But, in our 
 youthful ecstasy, I don't think that we really 
 looked before us or behind us ; or had any aspira- 
 tion beyond the ignorant present. . . . What an 
 idle time it was ! What an unsubstantial, happy, 
 foolish time it was ! . . . Of all the times of mine 
 that Time has in his grip, there is none that in 
 one retrospect I can smile at half so much, or 
 think of half so tenderly." 
 
 We are vouchsafed other glimpses of this 
 fairy-like figure, growing ever more and more 
 unreal and indistinct, as the child-wife, trying to 
 be a woman. 
 
 "* Oh, what a weary boy!' said Dora one night, 
 when I met her eyes as I was shutting up my 
 desk. 
 
 " ' What a weary girl! ' said I. * That's more to 
 the purpose. You must go to bed another time, 
 my love. It's far too late for you.' 
 
 " * No, don't send me to bed ! ' pleaded Dora, 
 coming to my side. * Pray don't do that.' 
 
 " • Dora ! ' 
 39 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 " To my amazement she was sobbing on my 
 neck. 
 
 " * Not well, my dear ! not happy ! ' 
 
 '"Yes, quite well, and very happy!' said Dora. 
 * But say you'll let me stop and see you write.' 
 
 " ' Why, what a sight for such bright eyes at 
 midnight ! ' I replied. 
 
 " ' Are they bright, though ? ' returned Dora, 
 laughing. ' I'm so glad they're bright.' 
 
 *** Little Vanity!' said I. 
 
 " But it was not vanity; it was only harmless 
 delight in my admiration. I knew that very well, 
 before she told me so. 
 
 ** * If you think them pretty, say I may always 
 stop and see you write ! ' said Dora. ' Do you 
 think them pretty } ' 
 
 " ' Very pretty.' 
 
 " * Then let me always stop and see you write.' 
 
 " * I am afraid that won't improve their bright- 
 ness, Dora.' 
 
 *' * Yes, it will ! Because, you clever boy, you'll 
 not forget me then, when you are full of silent ] 
 fancies. Will you mind if I say something very, 
 very silly ? — more than usual ? ' inquired Dora, 
 peeping over my shoulder into my face. 
 
 " ' What wonderful thing is that ?' said I. 
 
 '* ' Please let me hold the pens,' said Dora. * I 
 want to havesomething to do with all those many 
 hours when you are so industrious. May I hold 
 the pens ? ' " 
 
 40 
 
MARIA BEADNELL 
 "Dolly Varden" and other characters 
 
MISS MARIA BEADNELL 
 
 And in the end she fades away. She does not 
 die, but rather seems to pass into the region of 
 those radiant shadows to which she belongs. 
 
 " It is night; and I am with her still. . . . We 
 are now alone. 
 
 " Do I know now that my child-wife will soon 
 leave me? They have told me so ; they have told 
 me nothing new tomythoughts ; but I amfarfrom 
 sure that I have taken that truth to heart. . . . 
 
 " ' I am going to speak to you, Doady. I am 
 going to say something I have often thought of 
 saying, lately. . . . Doady, dear, I am afraid I was 
 too young.' 
 
 " I lay my face upon the pillow by her, and 
 she looks into my eyes and speaks very softly. 
 Gradually, as she goes on, I feel, with a stricken 
 heart, that she is speaking of herself as past. 
 
 " * I am afraid, dear, I was too young. I don't 
 mean in years only, but in experienceand thoughts 
 and everything. I was such a silly little creature ! 
 I am afraid it would have been better if we had 
 only loved one another as a boy and girl, and for- 
 gotten it. I have begun to think I was not fit to 
 be a wife.' 
 
 ' ' I try to stay my tears, and to reply, * Oh, Dora, 
 love, as fit as I to be a husband ! ' 
 
 " *I don't know,' with the old shake of her curls. 
 'Perhaps! But if I had been more fit to be marri- 
 ed, I might have made you more so, too. Besides, 
 you are very clever, and I never was.' 
 41 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 *" We have been very happy, my sweet Dora.' 
 
 " * I was very happy, very. But, as years went 
 on, my dear boy would have wearied of his child- 
 wife. She would have been less and less a com- 
 panion for him. He would have been more and 
 more sensible of what was wanting in his home. 
 She wouldn't have improved. It is better as it is.' 
 
 " ' Oh, Dora, dearest, dearest, do not speak to 
 me so. Every word seems a reproach.' . . . 
 
 '"Oh, how my poor boy cries! Hush, hush! . . . 
 I said that it was better as it is ! ' she whispers, as 
 she holds me in her arms. ' Oh, Doady, after more 
 years, you never could have loved your child- 
 wife better than you do; and, after more years, she 
 wouldsohavetriedand disappointed you,thatyou 
 might not have been able to love her half so well ! 
 I know I was too young and foolish. It is much 
 better as it is.'" \ 
 
 In the light of Dickens' later experience of 
 his boyish ideal, Maria Beadnell, these last words 
 seem prophetic. 
 
 I 
 
 I 
 
 Itwasmuch better as it was. It was much better 
 that not only should Maria's coquetry stand in the 
 way of their union, but that her father should also 
 look with disfavour upon the suit of a mere news- 
 paper reporter. George Beadnell seems to have 
 known his daughter well. He seems to have 
 known that she was in no danger of succumbing 
 to the fascinations of her comely but impecunious 
 
 43 
 
MISS MARIA BEADNELL 
 
 young wooer. So he permits the flirtation to go 
 on for a time, standing aside and watching its pro- 
 gress with cynical amusement. Then, suddenly, 
 as the affair takes on a graver complexion, ceases 
 to be merely amusing and threatens to become 
 serious, he steps in, declares that all this folly must 
 end, and forbids Dickens his house. 
 
 Dickens, in exile, returns " the little present " 
 that Maria had once given him, with these words: 
 
 " A wish for your happiness, although it comes 
 from me, may not be the worse for being sincere 
 and heartfelt. Accept it as it ismeant, and believe 
 that nothing will afford me more real delight than 
 to hear that you, the object of my first and my last 
 love, are happy. I f you are as happy as I hope you 
 may be, you will indeed possess every blessing 
 that this world can afford." 
 
 For a while they corresponded, through the 
 agency of Kolle, who acted as love's messenger 
 and smuggled Dickens' letters past the parental 
 barriers into the hands of Maria. Kolle, then, 
 although he appears in none of the official bio- 
 graphies, was a close friend of Dickens. H e died 
 thirty years ago, and only recently have Dickens' 
 letters to him and to Maria Beadnell * been pub- 
 lished — in America. It is from these letters that 
 
 * Charles Dickens and Maria Beadnell: Private Correspon- 
 dence between Charles Dickens and Mrs. Henry Winter {n^e 
 Maria Beadnell), the original of Dora Spenlow in David Copper- 
 field ■as^di Flora Finching in Little Dorrit. — The Earliest Letters 
 of Charles Dickens : Written to his friend, Henry Kolle. 
 
 43 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 one learns of Dickens' early passion and blighted 
 hopes. He opened his heart to Kolle. In the first 
 letter of the former series he apologises to his 
 friend for not having kept an appointment. He 
 asks him to make another. * ' I fear," he says, " until 
 the House is up (Dickens was then in the press 
 gallery of the House of Commons) I can name no 
 certain night on which I can go to the play, except 
 Saturday." The letter ends " with my best remem- 
 brances to (?)." The letter was most likely written 
 in thespringof i830,and soit is fairly evident that 
 " (?) " means Maria Beadnell. j 
 
 In another letter to Kolle he says : j 
 
 "I would really feel some delicacy in asking you 
 again to deliver the enclosed as addressed, were 
 it not for two reasons. In the first place you know 
 so well my existing situation that you must be al- 
 most perfectly aware of the general nature of the 
 note, and in the second I should not have written 
 it, for I should have communicated its contents 
 verbally, were it not that I lost the opportunity of 
 keeping the old gentleman out of the way as long 
 as possible last night. To these reasons you may 
 add that I have not the slightest objection to your 
 knowing its contents from the first syllable to the 
 last. I trustunderthesecircumstancesthatyou will 
 not object to doing me the very essential service 
 of delivering the enclosed as soon this afternoon 
 as you can, and perhaps you will accompany the 
 
 44] 
 
 d 
 
MISS MARIA BEADNELL 
 
 delivery by asking Miss Beadnell only to read it 
 when she is quite alone. Of course in this sense I 
 consider you as nobody." 
 
 That letter was answered by the coquette, who 
 was still loth to relinquish her last hold upon her 
 would-be lover. But the tone of her responses 
 grows evercolder and colder, until in despair poor 
 Dickens writes thus to Kolle : 
 
 " I enclose a very conciliatory note, Sans Pride, 
 Sans Reserve, Sans anything but an evidentwish 
 to be reconciled. ... By the way, if I had many 
 friends in the habit of marrying, which friends had 
 brothers who possessed an extensive assortment 
 of choice hock, I should be dead in no time. . . . 
 Yesterday I felt like a maniac, to-day my interior 
 resembles a lime-basket." 
 
 To this " conciliatory note," which is not pre- 
 served, the reply was "cold and reproachful." 
 Dickens was finally dismissed by his captious 
 mistress. " Least said soonestmended," hewrites 
 to Kolle in his only laconic comment on the un- 
 happy termination of the affair. But, later on, he 
 writes again to Maria out of the depths of his 
 bruised heart : " I have never loved, and I never 
 can love, any human creature breathing but your- 
 self. We have had many differences, and we have 
 lately been entirely separated. Absence, how- 
 ever, has not altered my feelings in the slightest 
 45 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 degree, and the love I now tender you is as pure 
 and as lasting as at any period of our former cor-j 
 respondence." 
 
 So, one poor dream was ended, and another 
 more splendid dream began ... to continue until 
 the year 1855, when Dickens again met the lady 
 of his earlyadoration, married now toa Mr. Henry 
 Winter ; and then he awoke as with a start from 
 his long beautiful dream to find himself, cold and 
 alone and naked, a little ashamed of his former 
 self and laughing fretfully, in the bleak outer 
 darkness of disillusion. 
 
 Mrs. Henry Winter, who had once been Miss 
 Maria Beadnell, but who had never been the 
 woman of Dickens' ideal, lives for the first time, 
 as she lived in the flesh, as Flora Pinching in 
 Little Dorrit. Dickens' newstalking-horse is now 
 the rather shadowy and tedious Clennam. Clen- 
 nam goes to the house of the Patriarchal humbug 
 Casby, and there meets Plora aftermany years of 
 separation. His "eyes no sooner fell upon the 
 subject of his old passion, than it shivered and 
 broke to pieces. 
 
 * * M ost men (the narrative goes on) will be found 
 sufficiently true to themselves to be true to an old 
 idea. It is no proof of an inconstant mind, but 
 exactly the opposite, when the idea will not bear 
 close comparison with the reality, and the con- 
 trast is a fatal shock to it. Such was Clennam's 
 
 1 
 
MISS MARIA BEADNELL 
 
 case. In his youth he had ardently loved this 
 woman, and had heaped upon her all the locked- 
 up wealth of his affection and imagination. That 
 wealth had been, in his desert home, like Robin- 
 son Crusoe's money ; exchangeable with no one, 
 lying idle in the dark to rust, until he poured it out 
 for her. Ever since that memorable time ... he 
 had kept the old fancy of the Past unchanged, in 
 its old sacred place. And now, after all, the last 
 of the Patriarchs coolly walked into the parlour, 
 saying in effect, ' Be good enough to throw it 
 down and dance upon it. This is Flora.' 
 
 " Flora, always tall, had grown to be very broad 
 too, and short of breath ; but that was not much. 
 Flora, whom he had leftalily, had becomeapeony ; 
 but that was not much. Flora, who had seemed 
 enchanting in all she said and thought, was diffuse 
 and silly. That was much. Flora, who had been 
 spoiled and artless longago, was determined to be 
 spoiled and artless now. That was a fatal blow." 
 
 " This is Flora ! " 
 
 Poor Flora ! Poor Dickens ! 
 
 She ogles him, she angles for compliments 
 (which he good-humouredlypays her), she tosses 
 her head and giggles and bridles, is ridiculously 
 arch and coy and girlish, dwells romantically upon 
 the vanished past, and languishes at him. And 
 all the while she talks and talks and talks, " run- 
 ning on with astonishing speed, and pointing her 
 47 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 conversation with nothing but commas, and very 
 few of them." " Was it possible (asks Dickens in 
 the person of Clennam) that Flora could have 
 been such a chatterer in the days she referred to ? 
 Could there have been anything like her present 
 disjointed volubility in the fascinations that had 
 captivated him ? " 
 
 "... I assure you, Flora (says her old lover), 
 I am happy in seeing you once more, and in find- 
 ing that, like me, you have not forgotten the old 
 foolish dreams, when we saw all before us in the 
 light of our youth and hope." 
 
 "You don't seem so," pouted Flora, " you take 
 it very coolly, but however I know you are dis- 
 appointed in me . . . perhaps I am the cause my- 
 self. It's just as likely." 
 
 "No, no," Clennam entreated, "don't say that.'l 
 
 " Oh, I must, you know," said Flora, in a posi- 
 tive tone, " what nonsense not to, I know I am 
 not what you expected, I know that very well." 
 
 In the midst of her rapidity she had found 
 that out with the quick perception of a cleverert 
 woman. The inconsistent and profoundly un-| 
 reasonable way in which she instantly went on^ 
 nevertheless, to interweave their long-abandon-l 
 ed boy and girl relations with theirpresent inter- 
 view, made Clennam feel as if he were lighthead- 
 ed 
 
 He tried at parting to give his hand in frank- 
 ness to the existing Flora — not the vanished 
 
 48 
 
MISS MARIA BEADNELL 
 
 Flora . . but Flora wouldn't have it, couldn't have 
 it, was wholly destitute of the power of separating 
 herself and him from their bygone characters. 
 He left the house miserably enough. . . . 
 
 He could not walk on thinking for ten minutes, 
 without recalling Flora. She necessarily recalled 
 to him his life, with all its misdirection and little 
 happiness ... so long, so bare, so blank. No child- 
 hood, no youth, except for one remembrance ; 
 that one remembrance proved only that day to be 
 a piece of folly. 
 
 It was a misfortune to him, trifle as it might 
 have been to another. For while all that was hard 
 and stern in his recollection remained reality on 
 being proved — was obdurate to the sight and 
 touch, and relaxed nothing of its old indomitable 
 grimness — the one tender recollection of his ex- 
 perience would not bear the same test, and melted 
 
 ' away. . . . 
 
 He was a dreamer in such wise, because he was 
 
 ' a man who had, deep-rooted in his nature, a belief 
 in all the gentle and good things his life had been 
 
 ■ without . . . and . . . this had rescued him to judge 
 not, and in humility to be merciful, and have hope 
 and charity. And this saved him still from the 
 whimpering weakness and cruel selfishness of 
 holding that because such a happiness or such a 
 virtue had not come into his little path, or worked 
 well for him, therefore it was not in the great 
 scheme, but was reducible, when found in appear- 
 49 D 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 ance,to the basest elements. A disappointed mind 
 he had, but a mind too firm and healthy for such 
 unwholesome air. Leaving himself in the dark, 
 it could riseinto the light, seeing it shineon others 
 and hailing it. 
 
 Therefore he sat before his dying fire, sorrow- 
 ful to think upon the way by which he had come 
 to that night, yet not strewing poison on the way 
 by which othermen hadcometoit. That heshould 
 have missed so much, and at his timeof life should 
 look so far about him for any staff to bear him 
 company upon his downward journey and cheer 
 it, was a just regret. He looked at the fire from 
 which the blaze departed, from which the after- 
 glow subsided, in which the ashes turned grey,| 
 from which they dropped to dust, and thought, 
 " How soon I too shall pass through such changes 
 and be gone ! " 
 
 To review his life was like descending a green 
 tree in fruit and flower, and seeingall the branches 
 wither and drop off one by one, as he came down 
 towards them. 
 
 From that moment of his great disillusion 
 Dickens was a changed man. He was so greatly 
 changed that his art was perceptibly affected. 
 Never again does he recapture his old careless 
 mastery over his material. It is as if, from that 
 time onward, he is forced, almost against his will, 
 to examine and criticise the healthy, hearty ideals 
 
 50 
 
MISS MARIA BEADNELL 
 
 of his youth : his youth that has lasted in the full 
 bloom of its virginal innocence until now, and ev- 
 ennowis only a littlefaded, a little sere. But what 
 he has lost in buoyancy he has gained in steadi- 
 ness ; what he has lost in lightness of heart he has 
 gained in depth of insight and intensity of feeling. 
 He does not forget that idyll of his youth, or the 
 wanton maid who was its heroine ; but he re- 
 members, he wears his rue, with a difference. He 
 remembers the pain as well as the ecstasy, and he 
 raises the corpse of his old love from the dead in 
 the person of Estellain Great Expectations, which 
 was his next novel — as distinct from his romance 
 A Tale of Two Cities and his later Christmas 
 stories — after Little Dorrit. 
 
 Pip is Estella's victim. She scorns him in his 
 coarse boyhood, on oneoccasion slaps hisface,and 
 on every occasion flouts him. He meets her again 
 in early manhood in the house where he had first 
 made her acquaintance. He believes that it was 
 reserved for him to marry Estella and to "restore 
 the desolate house, admit the sunshine into the 
 dark rooms, set the clocks a-going and the cold 
 hearths a-blazing ... in short, do all the shining 
 deeds of the young Knight of Romance, and 
 marry the Princess "... Estella ! 
 
 He pauses to look at the house. 
 
 . . . its seared red brick walls, blocked windows, 
 and strong green ivy clasping even the stacks of 
 51 
 
i 
 
 THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 chimneys with its twigs and tendons, as if with 
 sinewy old arms, had made up a rich attractive' 
 mystery, of which I was the hero. Estella wa 
 the inspiration and the heart of it, of course. But 
 though she had taken such strong possession of 
 me, though my fancy and my hope were so set 
 upon her, though her influence on my boyish Hfe 
 and character had been all powerful, I did not, 
 even that romantic morning, invest her with any 
 attributes save those she possessed. I mention 
 this in this place, of a fixed purpose, because it is 
 the clue by which I am to be followed into my 
 poor labyrinth. According to my experience, the 
 conventional notion of a lover cannot be always 
 true. The unqualified truth is that when I loved 
 Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply 
 because I found her irresistible. Once for all, I 
 knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always/ 
 that I loved her against reason, against promise, 
 against peace, against hope, against happiness, 
 against all discouragement that could be. Once, 
 for all, I loved her none the less because I kneW 
 it, and it had no more influence in restraining me 
 than if I had devoutly believed her to be human 
 perfection. i 
 
 And in the record of what happened between 
 Pip and his Estella we catch an echo of the story 
 of those sad relations which had once existed be- 
 tween Charles Dickens himself and Maria Bead- 
 nell. 5^ 
 
 
MISS MARIA BEADNELL 
 
 I suffered (says Pip) every kind and degree of 
 torture that E Stella could cause me. The nature 
 of my relations with her, which placed me on 
 terms of familiarity without placing me on terms 
 of favour, conduced to my distraction. She made 
 use of me to tease other admirers, and she turned 
 the very familiarity between herself andme to the 
 accountofputtingaconstant slight on my devotion 
 to her. If I had been her secretary, steward, half- 
 brother, poor relation — if I had been a younger 
 brother ot her appointed husband — I could not 
 have seemed to myself further from my hopes 
 when I was nearest to her. The privilege of call- 
 ing her by her name and hearing her call me by 
 mine became under the circumstances an aggra- 
 vation of my trials ; and while I think it likely 
 that it almost maddened her other lovers, I knew 
 too certainly that it almost maddened me. 
 
 She had admirers without end. No doubt my 
 jealousy made an admirer of everyone who went 
 near her ; but there were more than enough of 
 them without that. 
 
 I saw her often . . . there were picnics, fete days, 
 plays, operas, concerts, parties, all sorts of plea- 
 sures, through which I pursued her — and they 
 were all miseries to me. I never had one hour's 
 happiness in her society, and yet my mind all 
 round the four-and-twenty hours was harping 
 on the happiness of having her with me unto 
 death. 
 'S3 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 Dickens wrote one more novel, Our Mutual 
 Friend, and therein paints his first really consis- 
 tent portrait of an average young and pretty girl 
 of the middle class. Bella Wilfer is quite human : 
 the most human of all his heroines. She is not a* 
 vain toy like Dolly Varden, or a dainty imposs- 
 ible fairy like Dora Spenlow. She palpitates with 
 life. She is the inevitable product of her environ-| 
 ment and her peculiar circumstances. From the 
 moment when she is first presented, "seated on 
 the rug to warm herself, with her brown eyes on 
 the fire and a handful of her brown curls in her 
 mouth," laughing, pouting, and half crying, dis- 
 contented and rebellious, whimsical and peevish, 
 inclined to be selfish and self-willed ; in all her 
 comically pathetic adventures with her cherubic 
 father ; and throughout her gradual development 
 into a fond and loving wife ; until at last she lays 
 her little right hand on her husband's eyes and 
 says : " Do you remember, John, on the day we 
 weremarried,Pa'sspeakingoftheshipsthatmight 
 be sailing towards us from the unknown seas ? " 
 " Perfectly, my darling ! " "I think . . . among 
 them . . . there is a ship upon the ocean . . . 
 bringing ... to you and me ... a little baby, 
 John." 
 
 Always Bella Wilfer is alive. She rescues 
 Dickens from the reproach that he could not de- 
 pict a typical English girl. For so much added 
 strength and wisdom, so much perfected artistry, 
 
 54 
 
MISS MARIA BEADNELL 
 
 had his Disillusion taught Dickens in the last few 
 years of his life. For so much, then, should we be 
 grateful to the lady of his first great passion, 
 Maria Beadnell,thememoryof whom kept bright 
 so many years his ideal of womanhood, and only 
 shattered that ideal when he was old enough to 
 have acquired a little philosophy. 
 
MARY HOGARTH 
 "Kate Nickleby" and other characters 
 
CHAPTER THE THIRD 
 
 OF TWO WOMEN: II. MARY 
 
 HOGARTH 
 
CHAPTER THE THIRD OF 
 
 TWO women; II. MARY HOGARTH 
 
 MARIA BEADNELL, DICKENS' LESS- 
 
 er ideal woman, as we have seen, came to earth 
 in his later years, and shattered the golden web 
 of illusion that he had spun about her. But 
 Dickens' greater ideal woman died in her girl- 
 hood. Her epitaph, written by Dickens, is still 
 to be seen upon her gravestone in the cemeteryat 
 Kensal Green, and runs: " Young, beautiful, and 
 good, God numbered her among his angels at the 
 early age of seventeen." 
 
 Her name was Mary Hogarth. She was the 
 next youngest sister of Dickens' wife. Immedi- 
 ately after the young couple's honeymoon, Dick- 
 ens and his bride returned to London and made 
 their home at No. 15 Furnival's Inn. There Mary 
 Hogarth often stayed, indeed practically lived, 
 with them, her bright wit and amiable disposition 
 proving an inexhaustible source of joyful refresh- 
 ment in the little household. Herpremature death 
 so unnerved Dickens that the course oi Pickwick 
 and Oliver Twist (produced almost simultane- 
 ously) was temporarily interrupted. Writing 
 some few weeks afterwards toMrs. Hogarthfrom 
 his next abode, he said : " I wish you could know 
 how I weary now for the three rooms in Furni- 
 val's Inn, and how I miss that pleasant smile and 
 those sweet words which, bestowed upon our eve- 
 ning's work, on our merry banterings round the 
 59 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 fire, were more precious to me than the applause 
 of a whole world would be." 
 
 "His grief and suffering were intense (says For- 
 ster, corroboratively),and affected him, as will be 
 seen, through many after years." 
 
 In 1 84 1 his wife's younger brother " died with 
 the same unexpected suddenness that had at- 
 tended her younger sister's death ; and the event 
 had followed close upon the decease of Mrs. Hog- 
 arth's mother while on a visit to her daughter and 
 Mr. Hogarth." 
 
 In reference to these fresh bereavements Dic- 
 kens wrote : 
 
 As no steps had been taken towards the funeral, 
 I thought it best at once to bestir myself . . . It is a 
 great trial to me to give up Mary's grave ; greater 
 than I can possibly express. I thought of moving 
 her to the catacombs, and saying nothing about it; 
 but then I remembered that the poor old lady is 
 buried next her at her own desire, and could not 
 find it in my heart, directly she is laid in the earth, 
 to take her grandchild away. The desire to be 
 buried next her is as strong upon me now as it 
 was five years ago; and I know (for I don't think 
 there ever was love like that I bear her) that it will 
 never diminish. I fear I can do nothing. Do you 
 think I can ? They would move her on Wednes- 
 day, if I resolved to have it done. I cannot bear 
 the thought of being excluded from her dust ; and 
 yet I feel that her brothers and sisters, and her 
 
 60 
 
MISS MARY HOGARTH 
 
 mother, have a better right than I to be placed 
 beside her. It is but an idea. I neither think nor 
 hope (God forbid) that our spirits would ever 
 mingle the^'e. I ought to get the better of it, but it 
 is very hard. I never contemplated this — and 
 coming so suddenly, and after being ill, it disturbs 
 me more than it ought. It seems like losing her a 
 second time. . . There is no ground on either side 
 to be had. I must give it up. I shall drive over 
 there, please God, on Thursday morning, before 
 they get there ; and look at her coffin. 
 
 A year later, during his first tour in America, 
 Dickens visited Niagara, and from an hotel there 
 writes thus : ** What would I give if the dear girl, 
 whose ashes lie in Kensal Green, had lived to 
 come so far along with us — but she has been here 
 many times, I doubt not, since her sweet face 
 faded from my earthly sight." 
 
 Again, two years later, he writes from Venice, 
 telling how he fell asleep, during an attack of sick- 
 ness, and dreamed a dream. 
 
 In an indistinct place, which was quite sublime 
 in its indistinctness, I was visited by a Spirit. I 
 could not make out the face, nor do I recollect that 
 I desired to do so. It wore a blue drapery, as the 
 Madonnamight ina picture by Raphael ; and bore 
 no resemblance to anyone I have known except 
 in stature. I think (but I am not sure) that I re- 
 cognised the voice. Anyway, I knew it was poor 
 Mary's spirit. I was not at all afraid, but ina great 
 6i 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 delight, so that I wept very much, and stretching 
 out my arms to it called it " Dear." At this, I 
 thought it recoiled ; and I felt ipimediately, that 
 not being of my gross nature, I ought not to have 
 addressed it so familiarly, "Forgive me!" I said. 
 "Wepoor livingcreatures areonlyableto express 
 ourselves by looks and words. I have used the word 
 most natural to our affections ; and you know my 
 heart." It was so full of compassion and sorrow 
 for me — which I knew spiritually, for, as I have 
 said, I did not perceive its emotions from its face 
 — that it cut me to the heart; and I said, sobbing, 
 " O ! give me some token that you have really 
 visited me." ** Form a wish," it said. I thought, 
 reasoning with myself: " I f I form a selfish wish it 
 will vanish." So I hastily discarded such hopes 
 and anxieties of my own as came into my mind, 
 and said, " Mrs. Hogarth issurrounded with great 
 distresses " — observe, I never thought of saying 
 "your mother" as to a mortal creature — "will you 
 extricateher?" "Yes." "And her extrication is to 
 be a certainty to me that this has really happen- 
 ed?" "Yes." "Butanswermeoneotherquestion!" 
 I said, in an agony of entreaty lest it should leave 
 me. " What is the true religion?" As it paused a 
 moment without replying, I said — Good God, in 
 such an agony of haste, lest it should go away ! — 
 "You think as I do that the Formof religion does 
 not so greatly matter, if we try to do good ? — or," 
 I said, observing that it still hesitated, and was 
 
 62 
 
MISS MARY HOGARTH 
 
 moved with the greatest compassion for me, "per- 
 haps the Roman Catholic is the best ? perhaps it 
 makes one think of God oftener, and believe in 
 him more steadily ? " " For you," said the Spirit, 
 full of such heavenly tenderness for me that I felt 
 as if my heart would break, "forj^^^^ it is the best!" 
 Then I awoke, with the tears running down my 
 face, and myself in exactly the condition of the 
 dream. 
 
 And again, from Devonshire Terrace, in the 
 midst of a letter on indifferent topics, he reverts to 
 his sorrow with tragic suddenness, in the words : 
 " This day, eleven years ago, poor Mary died." 
 
 And yet again, in the very year of his death, 
 her influence is proved to be as potent upon him 
 as ever. Again he speaks of her in that tone of 
 unconquerable regret. 
 
 She is so much in my thoughts at all times (he 
 says), especially when I am successful, and have 
 greatly prospered in anything, that the recollec- 
 tion of her is an essential part of my being, and is 
 as inseparable from my existence as the beating 
 of my heart is. 
 
 To some it may seem that there is a taint of 
 morbidity in all this gloomy obsession. But . . . 
 was it a gloomy obsession ? 
 
 " It is not in the nature of pure love (says Dic- 
 kens in Dombey and Son) to mourn so fiercely and 
 unkindly long." 
 63 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 Dickens cherished andguarded the memoryof 
 this beautiful girl, who had come into and passed 
 out of his life like a visitant from another world, 
 as we cherish and guard the innocence of our chil- 
 dren. Her radiant figure stood tohim as a type of 
 all the highest possibilities ofwhich mankind, and 
 especially womankind, is capable. - 
 
 I have said that Dickens clung to his illusions 
 with all the tenacity of a child. He was a man of 
 narrow butacuteperceptions.Hesawthings clear- 
 ly; but as a rule he saw only one aspect of most 
 things. Wilfullyhe shut his eyes to theworse side 
 of human nature and life generally. Thus the very 
 squalor of his backgrounds is invariably pictures- 
 que; and the very vileness of his evil characters 
 grotesque or whimsical. He could not, would not, 
 dare not believe that there was anything or any- 
 body wholly bad. He fought with all the vigour 
 and earnestness of his sanguine temperament for 
 his conception of a world in which goodness tri- 
 umphed over badness. He needed always some 
 standard of perfection by which to measure the ! 
 moralstatureof his fellow creatures; and his ideal- 
 ised memoryof Mary Hogarth provided him with 
 that standard. As, one by one, his illusions faded, 
 withered, anddied ; as, one by one, theuglier facts 
 of life obtruded themselves more and more insist- 
 ently upon him, so he clung the more tenaciously 
 to his faith in the existence of an ideal human be- 
 ing . . . somewhere! It was as necessary to his 
 
 64 
 
MISS MARY HOGARTH 
 
 art, as to his perfervid nature, that he should hold 
 that faith unflinchingly. 
 
 I think that Dickens was not much given to in- 
 trospection. He was not of that school of writers 
 which is forever taking out its heart and examin- 
 ing its works and passing it round for others' in- 
 spection, like a boy with a new watch. He lived in 
 other, simpler times than these. He worshipped 
 other, simpler gods than the grim forces which the 
 theory of evolution has created . H is was a religion 
 of symbols : the symbol of the shrouded body, 
 with its calm still face drained of all grossness, set 
 in an expression of eternal peace; the symbols of 
 the grave, and the Last Great Day of universal re- 
 surrection, the pale shadows of wandering souls in 
 the twilight of that bourne from whence no travel- 
 ler returns, the Judgment and the shining hosts 
 of Heaven, the lost legionsof Hell, God enthron- 
 ed among his angels, discoursing celestial music. 
 
 I think it was all as simple, or almost as sim- 
 ple, as that to the immortal child Dickens. In the 
 dream that he dreamed in Venice, when the Spirit 
 of Mary Hogarth appeared to him in the guise of 
 a conventional Madonna, it may be that we glim- 
 pse darkly the gaunt spectres of doubt, misgiving, 
 and inquiry that even in his crowded, hurried life, 
 could not always be gainsaid. But, you will ob- 
 serve that he was ill when that dream came to him. 
 Itwasonlywhenhisbrainwassickthathisthoughts 
 revolved about the mysteries of Here and Here- 
 
 65 E 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 after. At all other times, at all such times as hisi 
 thoughts ran easily and smoothly along the old ac- 
 customed grooves, he took for granted all that he 
 could not understand, and accepted without cavil 
 or question what was beyond his readycomprehen- 
 sion. H is mind worked as an infinitesimal part of 
 a vastand intricate machine with the ulterior parts 
 of which he had no earthly concern. And some 
 sort of spiritual ideal is as necessary to the health 
 of simple souls of that calibre as oxygen is neces- 
 sary to the health of the body. 
 
 The analogue of the parent and child recurs and 
 clamours for further consideration. To the best 
 types of father and mother there is no more agon- 
 ising moment than that in which the child ceases 
 tobeachild, discards its last vestures of childhood, 
 and suddenly becomes a queer sort of stranger 
 stalking the house in the likeness of its former self. 
 For the younger generation is always so much 
 more terribly wise than the old. It begins where 
 the old generation ends. The mother, beholding 
 a daughter for the first time in the place of her 
 baby-girl, has an irreparable sense of loss. The 
 father, watching the new-born son that was once 
 his little laughing boy, feels naked as Elijah must 
 have felt after he had cast his mantle upon Elisha. 
 It is a change worse than death. The lost child 
 lies more deeply buried than in the silence of the 
 tomb. And that is why the child, who dies as a 
 child, lives forever as a child in the hearts of its 
 
 66 
 
MISS MARY HOGARTH 
 
 parents. That is why the children who die are al- 
 ways so much more beautiful and bright and good 
 than the children wholive. That is why, if they had 
 not died, they would have grown into men and 
 
 . women whose like the world has never looked 
 
 ; upon. 
 
 Dickens believed in the perfect woman because 
 
 ; Mary H ogarth died in the dawn of her womanhood . 
 
 , Dickens left his heroines on the steps of the marri- 
 
 . age-altar, and fled from the vision of them as wives 
 and mothers, because Mary Hogarth had never 
 
 I husband or child. H is heroines, havingexisted as 
 
 1 shadows, stiffened at the last into cold stark out- 
 lines, as the shadowy figure of Mary Hogarth, hav- 
 j ing passed away, stiffened in his memory into a 
 j pure cold unearthly thing in a coffin. 
 
 2 In vain he protests that he neither thinks nor 
 J hopes that their spirits would ever mingle in the 
 I grave. In spite of himself, as it were sub-consci- 
 5 ously,he doessomehowcontrivetothinkandhope 
 : that their spirits will so mingle ; or he would not 
 ,; long so passionately to be laid beside her, or so 
 5 dread the thought of being excluded from her dust. 
 
 3 He would not feel so much satisfaction in the pros- 
 it pect of looking once again upon her coffin. 
 
 ^ In his dream of her she bearsnoresemblanceto 
 J the bodily form of Mary Hogarth. He is not even 
 , sure that he recognises her voice. And this is sig- 
 ; nificant as suggesting that his recollection of her 
 pface and form and manner had long since become 
 ;67 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 vague. He remembered only the aura of heryouth 
 and gaiety and beauty and goodness that had once? 
 pervadedhis home like a heavenly presence. His> 
 fancy could only visualiseherinthe guiseof a con- 
 ventional Madonna, just as in his novels he coulc| 
 only depict her in the guise of the simpering dolls 
 with whose stereotyped prettiness and colourless- 
 ness and mindlessness the fashionable Books of| 
 Beauty of that artificial period had no doubt made 
 him familiar. j 
 
 In his types of folly and wickedness, of jollity, ' 
 eccentricity, whimsicality, grotesquerie, and hear- 
 ty simplicity, he was triumphantly successful, be- 
 cause such types did not clash withhis ideals. But j 
 he could notgraft folly on to both dignity and good- ' 
 ness, or beauty on to both wickedness and folly. 
 He could blend niceness with nastiness, as in the 
 case of Carker ; he could make his rascals eccentric 
 or whimsical or grotesque ; but he couldnot make 
 them hearty or simple or jolly. To have done any 
 of those things would have been to debase his 
 ideals : to forfeit that most blessed heritage of im- 
 mortal childishness which made him a genius. 
 
 And so he presents to us that galaxy of amaz- 
 ing dolls variously christened Rose Maylie, Kate 
 Nickleby, Madeline Bray, Little Nell, Emma 
 Haredale, Mary Graham, Florence Dombey, Ag- 
 nes Wickfield, Ada Clare, and LucyManette. On 
 the subject of these femininanities much bitter 
 black ink has been shed ; there has been much 
 
 6i 
 
MISS MARY HOGARTH 
 
 laughter like the crackling of thorns under the pot 
 of the pot-boiler. Modern criticism has exhausted 
 itself in scathing denunciation of these poor pup- 
 pets. And yet there is perhaps something to be 
 said in defence of the convention that created 
 them. Dickens was never a self-conscious artist. 
 He had indeed no use for the word Art. And all 
 classicism was Greek to him. Nevertheless, as I 
 say, in this vexed matter of his heroines he proved 
 himselfone oftheGreeks. They are goddesses all: 
 not the goddesses of the Greek mythology, of 
 course, but the angels of Christianity. They tower 
 above the dear sweet women whom we knowand 
 love and reverence as the huge stone effigies in the 
 grounds of the Crystal Palace tower above the little 
 Cockneygirls in their sweethearts' arms under the 
 moonofa Bank Holiday night. Devoid ofall colour 
 ,and movement and warmth, gazing out upon the 
 .worldwithsightlesseyes, immunefromtheillsthat 
 ,flesh and blood is heir to, aloof from the petty con- 
 cerns of every day, immutable, unapproachable, 
 severely correct, at once supremely perfect and 
 supremelyuninteresting: they are as inhuman and 
 repellent as they are beautiful, and as little like 
 humanity as theyare like the seraphim. But this, 
 which is accounted as a fault in Dickens, is hailed 
 is sublimity in ^schylus or Sophocles. So inevit- 
 ably does distance lend enchantment to the view. 
 J Yet it must be confessed that these Dickens 
 l^ieroines are great bores, when they are not some- 
 J9 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS^' 
 
 thing infinitely worse : that is to say, when thevti 
 are not used as vehicles for the expression or I 
 Dickens' incurable sentimentality. Their only 
 merit consists in their author's ingenuous belief 
 in their inherent attractiveness or in their power 
 of pathetic appeal. And this belief is founded on 
 the solid rock of his faith in a perfected woman- 
 hood: a faith that grew out of his illusive memo- 
 ries of that fair frail girl, who died without ever 
 having lived — the Mary of his boyish dream! 
 
 She makes her first appearance as Rose May- 
 lie. She is described as being ... in the lovely 
 bloom and springtime of womanhood ; at that age 
 when, if ever angels be for God's good purposes 
 enthroned in mortal forms, they may be without 
 impiety supposed to abide in such as hers. She 
 was not past seventeen. Cast in so slight and ex- 
 quisite a mould; so mild and gentle; so pure and 
 beautiful; that earth seemed not her element, nor 
 its rough creatures her fit companions. The very 
 intelligence that shone in her deep blue eye, and 
 was stamped upon her noble head, seemed scarce- 
 ly of her age, or of the world ; and yet the chang- 
 ing expression of sweetness and good humour, 
 the thousand lights that played about the face, 
 and left no shadow there ; above all, the smile, the 
 cheerful, happy smile, were made for Home, and 
 
 fireside peace and happiness She playfully 
 
 put back her hair, which was simply braided on 
 
 70 
 
MISS MARY HOGARTH 
 
 her forehead ; and threw into her beaming look 
 such an expression of affection and artless love- 
 liness, that blessed spirits might have smiled to 
 look upon her. 
 
 That reads uncommonly like a fanciful por- 
 trait of Mary Hogarth. She falls ill. And then in- 
 deed one finds it hard to forgive Dickens for pil- 
 ing on the agony, as he does, in this wise : 
 
 Oh ! the suspense, the fearful, acute suspense, 
 of standing idly by while the life of one we dearly 
 love is trembling in the balance ! Oh, the rack- 
 ing thoughts that crowd upon the mind, and 
 make the heart beat violently, and the breath 
 come thick, by the force of the images they con- 
 jure up before it; the desperate anxiety to be do- 
 ing something to relieve the pain, or lessen the 
 danger, which we have no power to alleviate; the 
 sinking of soul and spirit, which the sad remem- 
 brance of our helplessness produces ; what tor- 
 tures can equal these; what reflections or endeav- 
 ours can, in the full tide and fever of the time, allay 
 them! 
 
 Morning came, and thelittle cottage was lonely 
 and still. People spoke in whispers ; anxious faces 
 appeared at the gate, from time to time ; women 
 and children went away in tears. . . ."It is hard," 
 said the good doctor, turning away as he spoke ; 
 " so young, so much beloved ; but there is very 
 little hope." 
 71 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 Another morning. The sun shone brightly : 
 as brightly as if it looked upon no misery or care; 
 and, with every leaf and flower in full bloom about 
 her : with life and health and sounds and sights 
 of joy surrounding her on every side : the fair 
 young creature lay, wasting fast. . . . 
 
 There was such peace and beauty in the scene ; 
 so much of brightness and mirth in the sunny 
 landscape ; such blithesome music in the songs 
 of the summer birds ; such freedom in the rapid 
 flight of the rook, careering overhead ; so much of 
 life and joyousness in all ; that . . . the thought 
 instinctively occurred . . . that this was not a 
 time for death ; that Rose could surely never die 
 when humbler things were all so glad and gay ; 
 that graves were for cold and cheerless winter ; 
 not for sunlight and fragrance . . . that shrouds 
 were for the old and shrunken ; and that they 
 never wrapped the young and graceful form in 
 their ghastly folds. 
 
 A knell . . . Another! Again! It was tolling 
 for the funeral service. A group of humble mour- 
 ners entered the gate : wearing white favours ; for 
 the corpse was young. They stood uncovered by 
 a grave ; and there was a mother — a mother once 
 — among the weeping train. But the sun shone 
 brightly, and the birds sang on. 
 
 It is all very crude and unnecessary and rather 
 nauseous. But perhaps Mr. Percy Fitzgerald is 
 
 72 
 
 1 
 
HENRY BURNETT 
 "Nicholas Nickleby" 
 
MISS MARY HOGARTH 
 
 right when he says : " There is such a feeling real- 
 ity in the author's account of the illness of Rose 
 Maylie that I am convinced the character was 
 drawn from the Mary Hogarth whose loss he had 
 felt so deeply and mourned so passionately. . . . 
 These anxieties that he describes were surely his 
 own personal ones." 
 
 That he certainly had Mary Hogarth in his mind 
 when he wrote of the death of Little N ell in The Old 
 Curiosity Shop is plain from his own references to 
 that incident. Writing in anticipation of the chap- 
 ter in which the death is to be described he says : 
 
 . . . this part of the story is not to be galloped over, 
 I can tell you. I think it will come famously — but 
 I am the wretchedest of the wretched. It casts the 
 most horrible shadow upon me, and it is as much 
 as I can do to keepmoving at all. I tremble to ap- 
 proach the place a great deal more than Kit ; a 
 great deal more than Mr. Garland ; a great deal 
 more than the S ingle Gentleman. I shan't recover 
 it for along time. Nobody will miss her like I shall. 
 It is such a very painful thing to me that I really 
 cannot express my sorrow. Old wounds bleed 
 afresh when I only think of the way of doing it : 
 what the actual doing it will be,Godknows. Ican't 
 preach to myself the schoolmaster's consolation, 
 though I try. Dear Mary died yesterday when I 
 think of this sad story. 
 
 And, five days later, the deed done, he writes 
 73 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 that he had " resolved to try and do something 
 which might be read by people about whom death 
 had been, with a softened feeling, and with con- 
 solation." And certainly he has this justification 
 that, among the more unsophisticated of his read- 
 ers, he succeeded in his endeavour. 
 
 But there is no purpose to be achieved in en- 
 larging unduly upon this theme, now that the 
 identity of Mary Hogarth with Rose May lie, 
 Little Nell, and a whole train of similar characters 
 has been established. Skipping the intervening 
 books, all of which are hauntedmore or lessbythe 
 ghost of Mary Hogarth, reference need only be 
 made, I think, to the book in which it is said that 
 her sister, Georgina Hogarth, takes her place. 
 
 In the Agnes Wickfield of David Copperfield 
 we have her apotheosis: the apotheosis of the 
 female prig and bore. This pale feeble figment 
 whom he apostrophises thus : "Oh, Agnes, oh my 
 soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life 
 indeed; so may I , when Realities are melting from 
 me like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find 
 thee near me, pointing upward ! " this bloodless 
 creature, who never told her love, but let conceal- 
 ment, like a worm in the bud, prey on her damask 
 cheek ; this pale shadow of an outworn ideal, 
 "pointing ever upward," is the last word in insi- 
 pidity. Fortunately she was not sufficiently alive 
 to die in the book. But — which is even more for- 
 tunate — neither was she sufficiently alive to sur- 
 
 74 
 
MISS MARY HOGARTH 
 
 vive the interval between that book and Dickens' 
 next. Ada Clare oi Bleak House is indeed a poor 
 thing ; butscratch herand she does seemtobleed 
 a sort of thin milky fluid ; and Lucy Manette of 
 A Tale of Two Cities, on one occasion at least, 
 shows distinct signs of animation. 
 
 Butthe influence of Mary Hogarth upon Dick- 
 ens' art made itself felt in other directions. We 
 haveseenhow it inspired his ideal of womanhood, 
 and how it stultified his genius by warping his 
 conception of the Eternal Feminine. Because of 
 that youthful illusion which wove a spell about 
 his heroines as Harlequin with his magic wand 
 weaves a spell about poor Columbine andchanges 
 her into a pantomime fairy, all glitter and pose ; 
 because of this perversion of his innate sense 
 of proportion, Dickens remained for the greater 
 part of his life blind to the better part of woman's 
 nature : that better part which makes her a help- 
 meet fit for man, an equal partner in his joys and 
 sorrows, his lordly lusts and slavish weaknesses, 
 his proud ambitions and his secret sins, a sympa- 
 thetic companion and good comrade rather than 
 a guardian angel. And the mischief did not end 
 there. Having conceived his perfect woman he 
 must needs conceive a perfect man to match her 
 and mate with her. H e seems to have argued that 
 if such radiant creatures as Mary Hogarth were, 
 as he expressed it, "made for Home and fireside 
 75 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 peace and happiness," it behove him to evolve an 
 appropriate demi-god to share that rarefied at- 
 mosphere with her. The heroine must have her 
 hero, fashioned of the same ethereal stuff. And 
 so he cast about him for some high-falutin' male 
 upon whom to found his ideal man. 
 
 We do not know why he should have hit upon 
 his brother-in-law, Henry Burnett. Weknowvery 
 HttleofMr. Burnett beyondthat hemarried Dick- 
 ens' sister Fanny, and that he was a dissenter. Yet 
 he was commonly accepted by Dickens' intimates 
 as the original of Nicholas Nickleby ; and if of 
 Nicholas Nickleby why not the original also of 
 Harry Maylie, Edward Chester, Tom Pinch, Wal- 
 ter Gay, and the rest of those walking gentlemen 
 whoalljinmoments of acute crisis, fell into Nicho- 
 las Nickleby 's offensive habit of indulging in wild 
 heroics of the ' ' Whence- will-come-curses-at-your- 
 command?" brand. Still it is hard to believe that 
 any young man of this type ever existed — even in 
 those stilted times — except as a gorgeous figment 
 ofa rawyoungnovelist's imagination, Thetruthis, 
 I think, that Dickens, in thefever and rush of over- 
 production, only too readily accepted certain sta- 
 gey conventions of melodrama in lieu of the real 
 stuff of life. He had not yet arrived at that stage 
 of mental development which instinctively mis- 
 trusts the grandiose and is very much more inclin- 
 ed to seek for romance by the wayside than in the 
 limelight. 
 
 76 
 
MISS MARY HOGARTH 
 
 And yet Dickens was at all times so eager 
 to justify the extravagances and excesses into 
 which his buoyant fancy did so often betray him 
 that even in the depiction of his preposterous her- 
 oes he must draw from some living model that 
 he could point to as the prototype of his most im- 
 probable character. So, it may be that he copied 
 the features, the manner, the style and the tone 
 of his brother-in-law, and in the ardour of crea- 
 tion lost sight of the real man. Then, the puppet 
 that he had fashioned out of that incongruous 
 material becoming to him more real than the 
 actual figure upon whom it was founded, he had 
 breathed into it some semblance of life, had in- 
 vested it with strange bombastic qualities lack- 
 ing in the model, and at last got its machinery to 
 work, if a little awkwardly and jerkily. Inevitab- 
 ly an automaton resulted. But Dickens loved the 
 automaton as children love their dolls. 1 1 matter- 
 ed nothing to him that it was with his own voice 
 the automaton spoke ; that its every movement 
 was imparted to it by his own hands, that no- 
 thing changed it, and that nothing came out of 
 it, except sawdust : to him it was real and vital, 
 not so much a speaking likeness of the man upon 
 whom it was modelled as the man himself, a little 
 sublimated, translated from the commonplace 
 atmosphere of everyday into the glamorous twi- 
 light of romance. 
 
 There is no doubt that Dickens thought to pay 
 77 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 his brother-in-law a handsome compliment by 
 turning him to suchqueer uses. He liked Burnett 
 and continued to like him, even after he had shed 
 some illusions abouthim. Rewrites to Forster in 
 May 1 848telling him that Mrs. Burnett(hissister 
 Fanny) is dangerously ill. And two months later 
 he writes again : 
 
 A change took place In poor Fanny, about the 
 middle of the day yesterday, which took me out 
 there last night. Her cough suddenly ceased al- 
 most, and, strange to say, she immediately became 
 aware of her hopeless state ; to which she resign- 
 ed herself, after an hour's unrest and struggle, with 
 extraordinary sweetness and constancy. ... I 
 had a long interview with her to-day alone. . . . 
 I asked her whether she had any care or anxiety 
 in the world. She said no, none. It was hard to 
 die at such a time, but . . . Burnett had always 
 been very good to her; they had neverquarrelled; 
 she was sorry to think of his going back to such 
 a lonely home ; and was distressed about her chil- 
 dren, but not painfully so. . . . Her husband be- 
 ing young, she said, and her children infants, she 
 could not help thinking sometimes that it would 
 be very long in the course of nature before they 
 were reunited. . . . 
 
 All that we know of Mr- Henry Burnett is con- 
 tained in that brief reference to him. The curtain 
 rises and falls on that sad vision of the husband 
 
 78 
 
MISS MARY HOGARTH 
 
 and the brother drawn together by a common sor- 
 row, revealing themselves to one another for the 
 first time, perhaps. At any rate it is significant 
 that in his next ho6k,David Copperfield, Dickens 
 definitely abandons his old banal convention of 
 the stereotyped hero of melodrama. His new 
 hero David — in his childhood, boyhood, youth, 
 and early manhood — has an air of authenticity. 
 We are interested in him, as we have never been 
 interested in any of his predecessors. It is as if 
 Dickens, seeing Burnett for the first time as he 
 really was, sees also that he is a man very like 
 other men, very like Dickens himself, ^'litkis — 
 this homely, kindly, simple, companionable man 
 — this man who is so much like me — if this is a 
 hero," says Dickens in effect, " then /have been 
 a sort of hero all my life without knowing it." 
 And forthwith he proceeded to evolve his next 
 hero out of his own inner consciousness. 
 
JUDGE GAZALEE 
 "Justice Stareleigh" 
 

CHAPTER THE FOURTH 
 SOME PICKWICKIANS 
 
CHAPTER THE FOURTH 
 
 SOME PICKWICKIANS I 
 
 IT WAS IN 1836 THAT MR. HALL (OF 
 Messrs. Chapman and Hall) approached the 
 young author of Sketches by Boz with a project 
 for a humorous serial, to be published in monthly 
 parts. Dickens himself has described what passed 
 at this momentous interview. 
 
 The idea propounded to me (he says) was that 
 the monthly something should be a vehicle for cer- 
 tain plates to be executed by Mr. Seymour ; and 
 there was a notion, either on the part of that ad- 
 mirable humorous artist, or of my visitor, that a 
 NiMROD Club, the members of which were to go 
 out shooting, fishing, and so forth, and getting 
 themselves into difficulties through their want of 
 dexterity, would be the best means of introducing 
 these. I objected, on consideration, that although 
 born and partly bred in the country, I was no great 
 sportsman, except in regard to all kinds of loco- 
 motion ; that the idea was not novel, and had al- 
 ready been much used; that it would be infinitely 
 better for the plates to arise naturally out of the 
 text ; and that I would like to take my own way, 
 with a freer range of English scenes and people, 
 and was afraid I should ultimately do so in any 
 case, whatever course I might prescribe to myself 
 atstarting. My viewsbeing deferred to, I thought 
 of Mr. Pickwick and wrote the first number, from 
 83 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 the proof-sheets of which Mr. Seymour made his 
 drawing of the club and his happy portrait of its 
 founder, I connected Mr. Pickwick with a club 
 because of the original suggestion, and I put in 
 Mr. Winkle expressly for the use of Mr. Seymour. 
 
 Dickens wrotethus, thirteen years later, inreply 
 to some foolish statements made by members of 
 Mr. Seymour's family in which they claimed that 
 it was the artist and not the author who had been 
 responsible for the creation of the Pickwick Club. 
 Mr. Hall was dead when this controversy arose; 
 but Mr. Chapman " clearly recollected his part- 
 ner's account of the interview, and confirmed every 
 part of it . . . with one exception. In giving Mr. 
 Seymour credit for the figure by which all the 
 habitable globe knows Mr. Pickwick, and which 
 certainlyat theoutsethelpedto make him a reality, 
 it had given the artist too much. The reader will 
 hardly be so startled as I was (says Forster in his 
 Life) on coming to the closing line of Mr. Chap- 
 man's confirmatory letter. * As this letter is to b« 
 historical, I may as well claim what little belongs 
 to me in the matter, and that is the figure of Pickj 
 wick. Seymour's first sketch was of a long thiif 
 man. The present immortal one he made from 
 my description of a friend of mine at Richmond — 
 afat old beau who would wear, in spiteof theladies' 
 protests, drab tights and black gaiters. His name 
 was J ohniFoster.' " 1 1 
 
 84 
 
SOME PICKWICKIANS 
 
 The name, Pickwick, Dickens took from that 
 of a celebrated coach-proprietor, Moses Pickwick, 
 of Bath. This Mr. Pickwick was also the landlord 
 of the White Hart Hotel in Bath, which stood 
 "opposite the great Pump Room, where the wait- 
 ers, from their costume, might be mistaken for 
 Westminster boys, only they destroy the illusion 
 by behaving themselves so much better." ^ "The 
 White Hart flourished in Stall Street, and until 
 1864 (when the house was given up) the waiters 
 wore knee-breeches and silk stockings, and the 
 women-servants donned neat muslin caps. The 
 old coaching inn no longer exists, and its site is 
 indicated by theGrand Pump Room Hotel, the or- 
 iginal carved sign of a white hart being preserved 
 and still used over the door of an inn of the same 
 name in Widcombe, a suburb of Bath." 
 
 Thus we see that in Pickwick Papers Dickens 
 did not scruple to avail himself of the assistance 
 that any handy ready-made material might afford 
 him. The truth was, of course, that he began by 
 regarding this comic serial as a mere job — just as 
 his Life of Grimaldi was a job ; that he entered 
 upon hispartof theenterprise lightheartedly, with 
 no serious artistic purpose, his sole aim being to 
 [ amuse the many-headed and thus justify his pub- 
 ■ lishers' faith inhim. He borrowed names, he bor- 
 rowed personalities, he borrowed backgrounds, 
 I he accepted certain suggestions : and this was all 
 * The Dickens Country^ by F. G. Kitton. 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 quitelegitimate. Butit haslately been said, rather 
 spitefully, that he also borrowed — and this, if true, 
 would be hardly as defensible — from at least one 
 of his contemporaries. Let us examine into the 
 truth of this charge. 
 
 II 
 
 In May, 1822, Edmund Kean appeared at the 
 Drury Lane Theatre as Cardinal 'WoXst.ym Henry 
 VIII. In those spacious days an entire programme 
 did not consist merely of three short acts, begin- 
 ning at nine o'clock and lasting, with intervals, 
 until eleven o'clock, as it does now sometimes. 
 Theatrical managers offered far more generous 
 fare to their patrons in the early nineteenth cen- 
 tury. Tragedy, melodrama, comedy, and farce 
 were often represented in the course of one even- 
 ing's entertainment. And so it was at Drury Lane 
 in May, 1822. 
 
 Henry VIII. was followed by The Boar din 
 House, an uproarious farce of the broadest and' 
 most rollicking kind, of which, however, nothingis 
 remembered save one character. This character, 
 bearing the nameof S imon Spatterdash, was origi-| 1 
 nallyplayed by a forgotten actor, Knight. Knight 
 doesnot seem to have scored any very notable suc- 
 cess in the part ; but, some years later, the farce was 
 revived atthe Surrey Theatre,andthecharacterof 
 Simon Spatterdash was then made hugely popu- 
 lar by another comedian named Sam Vale. It is 
 claimed that this SamVale was the original of Sam 
 
 86 
 
 le 
 
SOME PICKWICKIANS 
 
 WelIer,andthatthename"Weller"wassuggested 
 by Vale ; but this at least isunlikely since weknow 
 that the Dickens family once employed a nurse 
 named Mary Weller. Ithasalsobeenclaimed that 
 he invented what we know now as Wellerisms. 
 And he certainly did give off a good number pf 
 those quaint sayings. H ere are a few of his best ; 
 anditmustbeadmittedthatthey are, someof them, 
 quite as good as Dickens' own. 
 
 I know the world, as the monkey said when he 
 
 cut off his tail. 
 I am down upon you, as the extinguisher said to 
 
 the rushlight. 
 Let everyone take care of himself, as the jackass 
 
 said when he danced among the chickens. 
 Come on, as the man said to the tight boot. 
 I am turned soger, as the lobster said when he 
 
 popped his head out of the boiler. 
 I am all of a perspiration, as the mutton-chop said 
 
 to the gridiron. 
 
 But to whomsoever the creditof inventing Wel- 
 lerisms is due it is certainly not due to Sam Vale, 
 nor to the author of The Boarding House. Walter 
 Scotthad discovered the peculiar virtue of a Wel- 
 lerism as long before as 1 8 1 8. In Rob Roy ^ written 
 in that year, Andrew Fairservice says : " Ower 
 mony maisters — asthepaddocksaid totheharrow 
 when every tooth gae her a tig." And in Kenil- 
 worth, published three years later, Michael Lam- 
 bourne says : '* The hope of bettering myself, to 
 (87 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 be sure, as the old woman said when she leaped 
 over the bridge at Kingston." 
 
 Moreover there was a certain periodical entitled 
 The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, Instruc- 
 tion, &e., published weekly at twopence, in which 
 appeared, on May 21,1823, mostofthe Wellerisms 
 uttered and popularised by Sam Vale, and several 
 more besides. 
 
 And finally, to emphasise the dubiety of this 
 vexed question, we find Longfellow, in The Span- 
 ish Student, published in 1 840, just after Pickwick 
 Papers had finished its course, putting similar say- 
 ings into the mouth of the man-servant, Chispa. 
 Says Chispa : 
 
 Peace be with you, as the ass said to the cabbages. 
 And a good beginning of the week it is, as he said who 
 
 was hanged on Monday morning. 
 And so we plough along, as the fly said to the ox. 
 
 From these instances, then, it will be seen that 
 this kind of jesting was the commonestform of cur- 
 rent wit during the first part of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. For there are fashions in humourasin most 
 other things. Just now the mode is to affect the 
 Yankee idiom and a Yankee accent, because it is 
 so much easier to be funny in American. Fifteen, 
 twenty, twenty-five years ago, we all talked epi- 
 gram and paradox. A little earlier there was a 
 plague of puns. And before then practical joking 
 was rife. Sowemight go back, skipping the Dick- 
 ens period, to the coarse heavy buffoonery that pre- 
 
 88 
 
SAM VALE 
 
 "Sam Weller" 
 
SOME PICKWICKIANS 
 
 ceded his gaiety of highspirits, to the stilted witof 
 the Addison period, to the lewdnessof the Wych- 
 erley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar school, 
 to the foul greasy japes of Dekker and his filthy 
 tribe, and at last to the sturdy hearty bawdiness 
 of the Elizabethans. 
 
 It hadhappened that Wellerisms were invogue 
 at the time when Dickens began to write; and so 
 of course he had to try his hand at them, like any 
 other smart young man. For it is to be borne in 
 mind that Dickens was,inall salient aspectsof his 
 character at least, essentially aman who belonged 
 to hisown period. He reflected the ideaand opin- 
 ions, the tastes and the foibles, the prejudices and 
 the prepossessions of the moment to a most re- 
 markable degree. He did thisconsistently,in his 
 work, passing from phase to phase of social deve- 
 lopment as his art grew and matured, and so pre- 
 senting us with a series of reviews of the manners 
 and customs, not only in dress and habits but in 
 thought and feeling, of the half-century during 
 which he lived and of which he wrote. 
 
 The delicate art of Great Expectations (which 
 may be accounted his lastworthybook) is in asdi- 
 rectcontrasttothehappy-go-luckymethodsofthe 
 PickwickPapersd^sih^ railway train of the Seven- 
 ties was to the old postchaise. The only real dis- 
 tinction between Dickens and hiscontemporaries 
 consists in that instinctive faculty of selection 
 which does always stamp even his most haphaz- 
 89 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 ard and seemingly casual work with the hall-mark 
 of genius. 
 
 I think it isoftentoo lightly assumed that Dick- 
 ens was very ill-acquainted with the work of his im- 
 mediate predecessors and contemporaries in the 
 higher walks of literature; though, beyond ques- 
 tion, there was never anything of the mere book- 
 man about him at any time. And probably, in his 
 early days, he knew surprisingly little of the great 
 poets and philosophers who had attained their apo- 
 gee when he was only just emerging from his swad- 
 dling-clothes. And yet, despitethis limitation, he 
 had as I say an instinctive faculty of selection that 
 saved him from the very pitfalls into which the 
 mere academic critic would say that he was bound 
 to fall. This faculty saved him from the thin fla- 
 vourless mode of the pun. It saved him from the 
 brutal rough-and-tumble of the practical j oke. 1 1 
 saved him from the fustian and bombast of the mid- | 
 Victorian school of fiction, as exemplified in Bui- ■ 
 wer Lytton. It saved him from coarseness and 
 grossnessandcrudenessinthemidstofgrotesque- 
 rie and eccentricity. Itdidnotsavehiminhisyouth || 
 from the influence of the prevalent Wellerism; and 
 for this good reason : that he did not need to be 
 saved from a form of humoursorichin possibilities 
 to one of his quick fancy and inimitable drollery. 
 H elifted the Wellerism out of the gutter as S hake- 
 speare VihediheC/ironulesoi Holinshedoutofthe 
 dust — to breathe into them the breath of life. H e 
 
 90 
 
SOME PICKWICKIANS 
 
 didwhat every triumphant genius has done — and 
 been carped at for doing; he took an ugly shapeless 
 lump of clay and fashioned it into form and come- 
 liness. I have seen it gravely stated that Dickens 
 owed his first great inspiration to Sam Vale, the 
 comic actor of the Surrey Theatre. It would be as 
 true to say that Sam Vale invented the Cockney. 
 Whereas we know that the Cockney invented 
 himself. And so likewise did Dickens. 
 
 Ill 
 
 But apart from these very doubtful prototypes 
 of Mr. Pickwick himself and Sam Weller — and 
 one other exception — it is fairly well established 
 that Pickwick Papers does contain several auth- 
 entic portraits, whimsically, and in one case cruelly, 
 caricatured. 
 
 To speak of old Tony Weller, the other excep- 
 tion, first. 
 
 Mrs. Lynn Linton declared, in that tone of 
 settled conviction for which she was ever remark- 
 able, as well in small things as in great, that " Old 
 Weller was a real person and we knew him. He 
 was ' Old Chumley ' in the flesh and drove the stage 
 daily from London to Rochester and back again 
 . . . a good-natured, red-faced old fellow." 
 
 But it is also claimed that the real original of 
 Tony Weller was one Cole, driver of the "Shan- 
 non" coach between London and Ipswich. A few 
 quaint sayings are attributed to Cole. Onone occa- 
 91 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 sioii he was asked about an old companion of his 
 named Stedman, and replied : " Stedman ? Law 
 bless you, sir ; he's been dead this many a year. 
 Leastways, if he ain't, they'veusedhim werry bad, 
 for they've buried him ! " Which is quite in the 
 Tony Weller vein. 
 
 Butthen thefashion of speech, the slow dry wit, 
 the manner, and the outward appearance of the old 
 stage-coach-driver would very fitly haveapplied to 
 some of the old London bus-drivers of not so many 
 years ago. He was a '* stout, red-faced, elderly man 
 . . . smoking with great vehemence, but between 
 every half-dozen puffs he took his pipe from his 
 mouth, and looked first at Mr. Weller and then at 
 Mr. Pickwick. Then, he would bury in a quart pot 
 as much of his countenance as the dimensions of 
 the quart pot admitted of its receiving, and take 
 another look at Sam and Mr. Pickwick. Then he 
 would take another half-dozen puffs with an air of 
 profound meditation and look at them again. At 
 last the stout man, putting up his legs on the seat, 
 began to puff at his pipe without leaving off at all, 
 and to stare through the smoke at the new-comers 
 as if he had made up his mind to see the most he 
 could of them." His swaddlings in layer on layer 
 of shawls and wraps and rugs, his hoarse voice, 
 " like some strange effort of ventriloquism," and 
 his habitofphilosophisingat great length on things 
 ingeneral: all these are peculiarities thatoldTony 
 Weller shared with several bus-drivers of my ac- 
 
SOME PICKWICKIANS 
 
 quaintance, besidewhom I havesatupon the box- 
 seat, and to whose discourse I have listened as to 
 the words of anoracle.onmanylongcoldjourneys 
 in the Eighties. IthinkthatTonyWellerwasjust 
 a good sample of Dickens' skill, already referred 
 to, in summing up all the variations from one well- 
 known national type in one colossal archetype ; 
 and that is all. 
 
 But elsewhere in Pickwick there can be little 
 doubt that Dickens drew from the actual living 
 model. 
 
 Serjeant Buzfuz, for instance, really existed in 
 the person of Serjeant Bompas, whose son is the 
 eminent K.C. still living. Skimpinmayverylikely 
 have been Wilkins; and Snubbin, Arabin, both 
 of themwell-knowncounsel intheirday. Of Snub- 
 bin, who may pose as a specimen barrister of that 
 time, and of whom we are given a full-length por- 
 trait, we are told that he 
 
 was a lantern-faced, sallow-complexioned man, of 
 about five-and-forty, or — as the novels say — he 
 might have been fifty. He had that dull-looking 
 boiled eye which is often to be seen in the heads 
 of people who have applied themselves during 
 many years to a weary and laborious course of 
 study ; and which would have been sufficient, 
 without the additional eyeglass which dangled 
 from a broad black ribbon round his neck, to warn 
 a stranger that he was very near-sighted. His hair 
 93 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 was thin and weak, which was partly attributable 
 to his never having devoted much time to its ar- 
 rangement, and partly to his having worn for five- 
 and-twenty years the forensic wig which hung on 
 a block beside him. The marks of hair-powder on 
 his coat-collar, and the ill- washed and worse tied 
 white neckerchief roundhisthroat, showed thathe 
 had notfoundleisuresinceheleftthecourt tomake 
 any alteration in his dress : while theslovenly style 
 of the remainder of his costume warranted the in- 
 ference that his personal appearance would not 
 have been very much improved if he had. Books of 
 practice, heaps of papers, and opened letters, were 
 scattered over the table, without any attempt at 
 order or arrangement ; the furniture of the room 
 was old and rickety ; the doors of the bookcase 
 were rotting in their hinges ; the dust flew out of] 
 the carpet in little clouds at every step; the blinds 
 were yellow with age and dirt; the state of every- 
 thing in the room showed, with a clearness not to 
 be mistaken, that Mr. Serjeant Snubbin was far 
 too much occupied with his professional pursuits || 
 to take any great heed or regard of his personal 
 comforts. 
 
 There are slovenly barristers nowadays ; but 
 none in general practice quite so careless of their 
 person and surroundings, I should say. But that 
 their methods have not greatly changed, in spite 
 of the changes in their appearance, Mr. Fitz- 
 
 94 
 
SOME PICKWICKIANS 
 
 gerald points out in the following passage in his 
 book, Bozland: 
 
 Notlongsince,inabreachofpromise casein Mr. 
 Justice Lawrence's Court, the late Serjeant Buz- 
 fuz reappeared in the flesh, and began his speech by 
 declaring that "not merely in 'the whole course of 
 his professional experience, but never at anytime, 
 had facts more painful been brought before a jury. 
 The plaintiff, gentleman, the plaintiff was a young 
 lady, the daughter of a gentleman deceased, who 
 was at one time in the War Office. She lived with 
 her mother and her two sisters, Kate and Jessie, in 
 the peaceful and innocent atmosphere of a small 
 preparatory school at Thornton Heath. Gentle- 
 men," Mr. went on, in tender accents, " she 
 
 was ayounggirl ; she knew nothing of London life ; 
 she had been delicately and tenderly nurtured by 
 a loving mother, and had lived a quiet country life 
 athome, beloved of her two younger sisters. Vir- 
 tuous, poor — but, gentlemen, though poor, happy 
 — knowingnothingand suspecting nothingof evil 
 and deceit. Gentlemen, she got in the train for 
 London Bridge, not knowing thatin the same car- 
 riage was a person whom, for brevity, I will call 
 a man! . . ." 
 
 Mr. Justice Stareleigh was in real life Mr. Jus- 
 tice Gazalee, of whom we have thisportrait, which 
 is said to resemble the original closely : "a most 
 95 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 particularly short man, and so fat that he seemed 
 all face and waistcoat. He rolled in, upon two little 
 turnedlegs,and having bobbed gravely to the bar, 
 who bobbed gravely to him, put his little legs un- 
 derneath his table, and his little three-cornered hat 
 upon it; and when Mr. Justice Stareleighhaddone 
 this, all you could see of him was two queer little 
 eyes, one broad pink face, and somewhere about 
 half of a big and very comical-looking wig. 
 
 One other lawyer in Pickwick Papers, Mr. 
 Perker,issaid to have been founded on Mr. Ellis, 
 of Blackmoreand Ellis, solictors, for whom Dick- 
 ens worked in his youth as a clerk. 
 
 Of the other characters there remains Mr. Dow- 
 ler, * 'a stern-eyed man of about five-and-forty, who 
 had a bald and glossy forehead, with a good deal 
 of blackhair at thesides and back of his head, and 
 large black whiskers," who had "a fierce and per- 
 emptory air, which was very dignified," and who 
 "hummeda tunein a manner whichseemed to say |l 
 that he rather suspected someone wanted to take 
 advantage of him,butit wouldn'tdo." Thisissaid 
 to be an excellent description of Dickens' bio- 
 grapher, John Forster ; but, for certain reasons to 
 be mentioned later on, this seems doubtful. Then 
 there are Doctor Slammer who bore a colourable 
 resemblance to Dickens' uncle Dr. Lamert; Mrs. 
 Leo Hunter, a recognizable caricature of the 
 
 96 
 
THE HONOURABLE MISS MONCKTON 
 "Mrs Leo Hunter" 
 
SOME PICKWICKIANS 
 
 Honorable Miss Monckton (afterwards Lady- 
 Cook) ; the Fat Boy who, in real life, was "James 
 Budden, and whose father kept the Red Lion Inn 
 at the corner of High Street and Military Road, 
 Chatham, where the lad's remarkable obesity at- 
 tracted general attention;" and, lastly, Mr. Pott. 
 
 Mr. Pott, editor of the Eatanswill Gazette, was 
 unmistakably founded on Lord Brougham. His 
 original description in a draft number of Pick- 
 wick Papers might have been a description of the 
 statesman himself. This was afterwards toned 
 down a little ; but even so the likeness was in- 
 stantly recognisable to Dickens' contemporaries. 
 "... a tall, thin man, with a sandy-coloured head 
 inclined to baldness, and a face in which solemn 
 importance was blended with a look of unfathom- 
 able profundity. He was dressed in a long brown 
 surtout, with a black cloth waistcoat, and drab 
 trousers. A double eyeglass dangled at his waist- 
 coat; and on his head he wore averylow-crowned 
 hat with a broad brim." And the personality of 
 Mr. Pott bore, in some of its most salient pecu- 
 liarities, a grotesque resemblance to that of the 
 great Whig chancellor. 
 
 No stronger and stranger a figure than his 
 (says Mr. Justin McCarthy in A History of 
 Our Own Times') is described in the modern 
 history of England. . . . He might have been 
 described as one possessed by a very demon of 
 work. His physical strength never gave way. 
 97 G 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 His high spirits never deserted him. His self- 
 confidence was boundless. He thought he knew 
 everything and could do everything better than 
 any other man. He delighted in giving evid- 
 ence that he understood the business of the 
 specialist better than the specialist himself. His 
 vanity was overweening, and made him ridicu- 
 lous almost as often and as much as his genius 
 made him admired. The comic literature of more 
 than a generation had no subject more fruitful 
 than the vanity and restlessness of Lord Broug- 
 ham. ... He was not an orator of the highest 
 class . . . his style was too diffuse and sometimes 
 too uncouth . . . his action was wild, and some- 
 times even furious ; his gestures were singularly 
 ungraceful; his manners were grotesque. . . . 
 Brougham's was an excitable and self-assertive 
 nature . . . his personal vanity was immense . . . 
 his eccentricities and his almost savage temper 
 made him intolerable. . . ." 
 
 This from an admirer ! 
 
 Dickens, in his reporting days, must often have 
 watched and listened to Lord Brougham ; and 
 somehow he seems to have conceived a violent 
 antipathy toward him. But in that cruel carica- 
 ture of the statesman in the absurd person of Pott 
 we have the only instance of his ever gratifying 
 a personal dislike by putting his victim in the 
 pillory. 
 
 94 
 
CHAPTER THE FIFTH 
 \BOUT SQUEERS &^ MR. FANG 
 
CHAPTER THE FIFTH 
 
 ABOUT SQUEERS AND MR. FANG 
 
 DICKENS NEVER AGAIN GRATIFIED 
 a personal dislike by pillorying the object of his 
 aversion; but he did great social service in pillory- 
 ing the figureheads of systems and the upholders 
 and exponents of laws of which he disapproved. 
 I think he rejoiced in his power to do this ; and in 
 the consciousness of his power and in the exuber- 
 ance of his rejoicing it maybe that he was at times 
 a little indiscriminate, a little too emphatic, a little 
 unjust. 
 
 But . . . try to realise the position that this 
 young man of twenty-four held in 1836. Try to 
 realise how his lightest word was quoted and ac- 
 claimed as wisdom by not only the scanty reading 
 public of that illiterate time, but also by those who 
 could not read, and so had to have his writings 
 read to them. As Forster says of the reception of 
 Pickwick Paper's. 
 
 Of what the reception of the book had been up to 
 this time, and of the popularity Dickens had won 
 as its author, this also will be the proper place to 
 speak. For its kind, its extent, and the absence of 
 everything unreal or factitious in the causes that 
 contributed to it, it is unexampled in literature* 
 Here was a series of sketches, without the pret- 
 ence to such interest as attends a well-constructed 
 
 lOI 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 Story; put forth in a form apparently ephemeral as 
 its purpose; havingnone that seemed higher than 
 to exhibit some studies of cockney manners with 
 help from acomicartist; and after four orfiveparts 
 had appeared, without newspaper notice or puff- 
 ing, and itself not subserving in the public any- 
 thingfalse or unworthy, it spranginto a popularity 
 that each part carried higher and higher, until 
 people at this time talked of nothing else, trades- 
 men recommended their goods by using its name, 
 and its sale, outstripping at a bound that of all the 
 most famous books of the century, had reached 
 to an almost fabulous number. Of part one, the 
 binder prepared four hundred ; and of part fif- 
 teen, his order was for more than forty thousand. 
 Every class, the high equally with the low, were 
 attracted to it. The charm of its gaiety and gooc 
 humour, its inexhaustible fun, its riotous overflow 
 of animal spirits, its brightness and keenness o 
 observation, and above all, the incomparable ease 
 of its many varieties of enjoyment, fascinatec 
 everybody. Judges on the bench and boys in the 
 street, gravity and folly, the young and the old, 
 those who were entering life and those who were 
 quitting it, alike found it to be irresistible. " An 
 archdeacon," wrote Mr.Carlyle . . . "with his own 
 venerable lips, repeated to me the other night, a 
 strange profane story : of a solemn clergyman 
 who had been administering ghostly consolation 
 to a sick person ; having finished, satisfactorily 
 
 102 
 
ABOUT SQUEERS ^ MR. FANG 
 
 as he thought, and got out of the room, he heard 
 the sick person ejaculate: 'Well, thank Godi, Pick- 
 wick will be out in ten days anyway ! ' " 
 
 Try to realise how this consciousness of power 
 over the minds and hearts of the British public 
 must have intoxicated the mere youth that Dick- 
 ens was then, and wonder rather that he preserved 
 so much of his level-headedness in the whirlwind 
 of applause that surged about him, than that, oc- 
 casionally, he was betrayed into any slightabuse 
 of his power. 
 
 One likes — it is human ! — to bring these great 
 ones down to earth. One likes to feel one's kin- 
 ship withthem,even in unworthy things. But one 
 does not like, and one finds no difficulty in utterly 
 disbelieving, the story that because, when Dick- 
 ens and Mr. Hablot Browne went down to the 
 neighbourhood of Barnard Castle to interview 
 the notorious Yorkshire schoolmaster, William 
 Shaw, they were received " with extreme hau- 
 teur," Dickens took his revenge for that slight by 
 lampooning him as Squeers. The whole story is 
 rendered the more improbable by the assertion 
 that " Phiz " (Halbot Browne) drew an instantly 
 recognisable portrait of Shaw on his thumbnail. 
 
 Shaw lacked an eye. A man of the same name 
 and address had been twice tried, sixteen years 
 before the publication of Nickleby, for atrocities 
 similar tothose describedin theaccountof Dothe- 
 103 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 boys Hall. But, according to Shaw's old pupils, 
 he was quite a nice man, really. 
 And yet . . . Dickens. 
 
 1 
 
 ^'' . . . had gone down provided with some ficti- 
 tious letters of introduction, which his friend Nit- 
 ton had prepared — "a pious fraud" he calls it. 
 He was supposed to be looking for a suitable 
 school wherein to place a widow's child. . . . 
 Four miles away was Barnard Castle, which was 
 to be his real hunting-ground. " All the schools 
 are round about that place." . . . The visitors 
 were only however to devote a day or two days, 
 Thursday and Friday, to the investigation. They 
 took a post-chaise — Nicholas and Squeers drove 
 over in a pony-cart . . . and arrived at a long, 
 cold-looking house one storey high, with a few 
 straggling outbuildings behind, and a barn and 
 stable adjoining ... he (Dickens) had no time 
 to waste . . . had to commence and introduce 
 Squeers and his school scenes almost at once. 
 . . . as to the original of Squeers. It was in 
 sisted that as the house was sketched from some- 
 thing existing, so also must have been the school- 
 master himself. The result was unfortunate, but; 
 Dickens was not in the least responsible. Squeers 
 is wholly imaginary in appearance, manner, and 
 diction, and for the purposes of fiction it was 
 necessary that he should be so. It was enough 
 
 * Bozland, by Percy Fitzgerald. 
 
 lOi 
 
SERJEANT BOMPAS 
 "Serjeant Buzfuz" 
 
ABOUT SQUEERS &" MR. FANG 
 
 for the author that the notorious system existed 
 of which Squeers was a type. A wretched peda- 
 gogue, exercising his sordid cruelties, however 
 accurately drawn from life, would be no gain to a 
 fiction. The author indeed declares positively in 
 his original preface that Squeers is the represen- 
 tative of a class and not of an individual. The 
 subject had long been in his thoughts. Even 
 when a child at Rochester he had been vividly 
 impressed by a lad who had come from a York- 
 shire school " with a suppurated abscess " which 
 his master had "ripped open with an inky pen- 
 knife." . . . 
 
 Dickens, however, was not the first to attract 
 the attention of the kingdom to these horrors. 
 Some sixteen years before the appearance of 
 Nickleby they had all been revealed in the course 
 of some actions which were tried in London in 
 October, 1823, before Judge Park — ]ovi&^versus 
 Shaw, and Ockerby against the same. These were 
 the parents of the ill-used boy, and during the 
 course of the trial many of the Squeers incidents 
 were brought out. There can be no doubt that 
 though Dickens did not sketch Squeers from 
 Shaw, he certainly made use of many of the in- 
 cidents which Shaw's case supplied. There was 
 once sold by auction in London one of Shaw's 
 cards, dating from near Greta Bridge, offering 
 to teach young gentlemen Latin, English, arith- 
 105 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 metic, geography, and geometry, and to board and 
 lodge them for ;!^20 a year, which, it will be recol- 
 lected, were Mr. Squeers' terms. A manuscript 
 note states that Mr. Shaw " leaves the Saracen's 
 Head, Snow Hill, at half-past seven o'clock, 
 Thursday morning, July 25." Numbers of the 
 boys, it seems, had losttheir sight througha horr- 
 ible neglect. One of the Jones boys told his story, 
 and it certainly seemed like poor " Graymarsh " 
 or one of his fellows, telling of his treatment by 
 Squeers. 
 
 "There were nearly three hundred boys in the 
 schools. We had meat three times a week, and 
 on the other days potatoes and bread and cheese. 
 When any gentleman came to see his children, 
 Mr. Shaw used to order the boys who were with-! 
 out trousers or jackets to get under the desks; we 
 were sometimes without our trousers for four or 
 five days while they were being mended. The 
 boys washed in a long trough similar to what the 
 horses drink from ; the boys had but two towels, 
 and the big boys used to take advantage of the 
 little boys, and get to the towels first ; we had no 
 supper; we had warm water and milk for tea and 
 dry bread ; we had hay and straw beds, and one 
 sheet to each bed, in which four or five boys slept; 
 there were about thirty beds in one room, and a 
 large tub in the middle ; there were only three or 
 four boys in some of the beds ; we had fleas every 
 other morning (a laugh) ; I mean, we had quillst 
 
 106 
 
ABOUT SQUEERS &' MR. FANG 
 
 furnished us to flea the beds every other morning, 
 and we caught a good beating if we did not fill 
 the quills with fleas; we had the skimmings of the 
 pot every Sunday afternoon ; the usher offered 
 a penny for every maggot, and the boys found 
 more than a quart full, but he did not give them 
 the money (a laugh) ; we had soap every Satur- 
 day afternoon, but that was always used by the 
 big boys, and we had no soap but what we bought ; 
 on one occasion (in October) I felt a weakness in 
 my eyes, and could not write my copy; the defen- 
 dant said he would beat me ; on the next day I 
 could not see at all, and I told Mr. Shaw, who 
 sent me, with three others, to the wash-house ; he 
 always sent those boys who were ill to the wash- 
 house, as he had no doctor ; those who were 
 totally blind were sent into a room ; there were 
 nine boys in this room totally blind ; a Mr. Ben- 
 ning, a doctor, was sent for; while I remained in 
 the wash-house no doctor attended us; I was in 
 the room two months, and the doctor then dis- 
 charged me, saying I had lost one eye; in fact, I 
 was blind with both ; I went to the wash-house a 
 second time, but no doctor attended me then." 
 
 . . . Mr. Squeers, too, was in the habit of con- 
 fiscating the boys' clothes, dressing them in old 
 ragged garments that were too tight or too large, 
 as the case might be. . . . 
 
 The strangest part, however, was the defence, 
 which was that Shaw was rather a humane and 
 107 
 
1 
 
 lat I 
 
 THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 amiable man — "in private life "at least — and that 
 it was the system of his school that was responsi 
 ble, "avowedlyfoundedon themost parsimonious 
 principles, with a view to suit certain parties." 
 He kept five ushers, and the doctor's charge for 
 one year, it was sworn, was ^loo. Mrs. Shaw 
 was reported to be " tender-hearted." . . . 
 
 The upshot of that trial was that Shaw was 
 mulcted in heavy damages ; but continued his k 
 school. Then, when Nickleby appeared, Dick- I 
 ens' description of Dotheboys Hall revived all f 
 the old odium that had attached to the Yorkshire 
 schoolmaster. It was insisted that the sketch of 
 Squeers was intended for Shaw. " He became 
 an object of ridicule to his thoughtless, or perhaps 
 spiteful, neighbours, which, together with the | 
 ruin that soon after overtook him through loss of 
 pupils, broke his spirit and hastened his death." 
 
 Certainly it was a good thing that Shawshould 
 die, and with him his infamous kind of school. But 
 one is somehow intrigued to consider whether 
 Dickens was actuated by a pure zeal for reform, 
 or by the exigencies of his story, to journey so \ 
 far afield and find material for those chapters on 
 Mr. Squeers' establishment which gave weight to 
 Nickleby and attracted to it that kind of attention \ 
 which the methods of Mr. Hall Caine and Miss \ 
 Marie Corelli attract to their novels. I think that \ 
 there is something valid in my suspicion that 
 
 io8 
 
ABOUT SQUEERS ^ MR. FANG 
 
 Dickens, in his earliest period, vamped so heavily 
 on the strain of public abuses in order to lam- 
 poon individuals for whom he had conceived a 
 dislike. But, at any rate, he abandoned this un- 
 worthy habit in Nicholas Nickleby ; and thence- 
 forward devoted himself not to the derision, de- 
 nunciation, and destruction of individuals by 
 means of gross caricature, but to the abolition of 
 social evils such as his inimitable combination of 
 talents in indignation and ridicule enabled his 
 mind to compass. 
 
 But there is at least one wholly authentic por- 
 trait, as to the identity of which there can be no 
 possible question, in one of Dickens' books. This 
 is the portrait of Mr. Fang in Oliver Twist. Mr. 
 Fang was drawn with meticulous care from a 
 living original. Dickens himself was always de- 
 lighted to admit this. 
 
 Wanting (says Forster) an Insolent and harsh 
 police-magistrate, he bethought him of an original 
 ready to his hand in oneof the London offices ; and 
 instead of pursuing his later method of giving 
 a personal appearance that should in some sort 
 render difficult the identification of mental pecu- 
 liarities, he was only eager to get in the whole man 
 complete upon his page, figure, and face as well 
 as manners and mind. He wrote accordingly 
 ... to Mr. Haines, a gentleman who then had 
 109 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 general supervision over the police-courts for I 
 the daily newspapers. " In my next number of 
 Oliver Twist I must have a magistrate ; and cast- 
 ing about for a magistrate whose harshness and 
 insolence would render him a fit subject to be 
 shown up, I have as a necessary consequence 
 stumbled upon Mr. Laing of Hatton Garden 
 celebrity. I know the man's character perfectly 
 well ; but as it would be necessary to describe 
 his personal appearance also, I ought to have 
 seen him, which (fortunately or unfortunately as .1 
 the case may be) I have never done. In this '| 
 dilemma it occurred to me that perhaps I might 
 under your auspices be smuggled into the Hat- 
 ton Garden office for a few moments some morn- 
 ing. If you can further my object I shall be really 
 very greatly obliged to you." The opportunity | 
 was found; the magistrate was brought up before ' 
 the novelist. . . . 
 
 And Dickens got him down on paper, thus : 
 
 Mr. Fangwas a lean, long-backed, stiff-necked, 
 middle-sized man, with no great quantity of hair, 
 and what he had growing on the back and sides of 
 his head. His face was stern, and much flushed. 
 If he were really not in the habit of drinking 
 rather more than was exactly good for him, he 
 might have brought an action against his counte- 
 nance for libel and recovered heavy damages. 
 
 no 
 
 II 
 
ABOUT SQUEERS &^ MR. FANG 
 
 The old gentleman (Mr. Brownlow) bowed 
 respectfully ; and advancing to the magistrate's 
 desk, said, suiting the action to the word : " That 
 is my name and address, sir." He then with- 
 drew a pace or two ; and, with another polite 
 and gentlemanly inclination of the head, waited 
 to be questioned. 
 
 Now it so happened that Mr. Fang was at that 
 moment perusing a leading article in a newspaper 
 of the morning, adverting to some recent decision 
 of his, and commending him for the three hun- 
 dred and fiftieth time to the special and particular 
 notice of the Secretaryof State for the Home De- 
 partment. He was out of temper ; and he looked 
 up with an angry scowl. 
 
 " Who are you ? " said Mr. Fang. 
 
 The old gentleman pointed, with some sur- 
 prise, to his card. 
 
 " Officer ! " said Mr. Fang, tossing the card con- 
 temptuously away with the newspaper. " Who 
 is this fellow .'* " 
 
 *' My name, sir, "said the old gentleman, speak- 
 ing /zke a gentleman , * * my name, sir, is Brownlow. 
 Permit me to inquire the name of the magis- 
 trate who offers a gratuitous and unprovoked in- 
 sult to a respectable person, under the protec- 
 tion of the bench." 
 
 Saying this, Mr. Brownlow looked round the 
 office as if in search of some person who would 
 afford him the required information. 
 Ill 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 " Officer!" said Mr. Fang, throwing the paper 
 on one side, " what's this fellow charged with ?" 
 
 " He's not charged at all, your worship," re- 
 plied the officer. " He appears against the boy, 
 your worship." 
 
 His worship knew this perfectly well; but it 
 was a good annoyance, and a safe one. 
 
 "Appears against the boy, does he?" said 
 Fang, surveying Mr. Brownlow contemptuously 
 from head to foot. " Swear him ! " 
 
 " Before I am sworn I must beg to say one 
 word," said Mr. Brownlow; "and that is, that 
 I never, without actual experience, could have 
 believed " 
 
 " Hold your tongue, sir ! " said Mr. Fang, per- 
 emptorily. 
 
 " I will not, sir," replied the old gentle- 
 man. 
 
 " Hold your tongue this instant, or I'll have 
 you turned out of the office ! " said Mr. Fang. 
 " You are an insolent, impertinent fellow. How 
 dare you bully a magistrate ! " 
 
 " What! " exclaimed the old gentleman, red- 
 dening. 
 
 " Swear this person ! " said Fang to the clerk. 
 " I'll not hear another word. Swear him." 
 
 Mr.Brownlow's indignation wasgreatly roused; 
 but reflecting perhaps that he might only injure 
 the boy by giving vent to it, he suppressed his 
 feelings and submitted to be sworn at once. 
 
 112 
 
LORD BROUGHAM 
 
 "^^• Pour' 
 
ABOUT SQUEERS ^ MR. FANG 
 
 "Now," said Fang, "what's the charge against 
 this boy ? What have you got to say, sir ? " 
 
 "I was standing at a bookstall — " Mr. Brown- 
 low began. 
 
 " H old your tongue, sir,"said Mr. Fang. "Police- 
 man! Where's the policeman ? Here, swear this 
 policeman. Now, policeman, what is this ? " 
 
 Thepoliceman, withbecominghumility, related 
 howhehadtakenthecharge; how he had searched 
 Oliver and found nothing on his person ; and how 
 that was all he knew about it. 
 
 "Are there any witnesses?" inquired Mr. Fang. 
 
 " None, your worship," replied the policeman. 
 
 Mr. Fangsat silent for some minutes, and then, 
 turning round to the prosecutor, said in a tower- 
 ing passion : 
 
 " Do you mean to state what your complaint 
 against this boy is,man,or doyounot? You have 
 been sworn. Now if you stand there, refusing to 
 give evidence, I'll punish you for disrespect to 
 the bench, I will, by " 
 
 As a direct result of that scathing indictment 
 Mr. Laing was removed from the bench by the 
 Home Secretary, very shortly afterward, on the 
 occasion of some fresh outbreak of foul ill-temper 
 and intolerable brutality. 
 
 And whilst we are on this theme it may profit 
 113 H 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 us, perhaps, to consider how it came about that 
 Dickens did always show this fierce hostility to 
 all sorts and conditions of lawyers. In all his 
 amazing gallery of legal figures there is hardly 
 one, from Messrs. Dodson and Fogg to thei 
 stately Mr. Tulkinghorn, who is not in some way 
 a repellent figure. I think the explanation of this 
 antagonism is to be found in the circumstance 
 that Dickens had once been a solicitor's clerk. 
 As a solicitor's clerk it was his misfortune to be- 
 come too early acquainted with the sadder, shad 
 ier side of human nature ; and so he had con 
 ceived one of his peculiar aversions to all that 
 reminded him of that period of his career : an 
 aversion which included all the people for whose 
 interests and advantages the lawyer stands. 
 
 As I have said elsewhere : if there had ever 
 beenany tendency in Dickens'nature to associate 
 gentlehood with the class that consists of ''gentle- 
 men " and " ladies," his experiences in Mr. Mol- 
 loy's and Mr. Blackmore's offices must assuredly 
 have dispossessed him of it. One can hardly ap- 
 preciate at its true value the goodness of the 
 Have-Nots until one has traded in the badness 
 of the Haves. It may be urged that a lawyer's ex- 
 perience is confined solely to the worst and not 
 necessarily most typical cases. That notion falls 
 to the ground, however, when one remembers 
 that the whole fabric of the law is built upon the 
 principle of mutual mistrust. Every clause, every 
 
 114 
 
ABOUT SQUEERS (Sf MR. FANG 
 
 article, every stipulation and condition ; every 
 enactment, rule, and precedent is drafted and re- 
 drafted and re-drafted again, and rough-copied 
 and fair-copied and fair-copied again, is settled 
 and re-settled and copied and re-copied, and 
 settled and yet again re-settled, and bandied from 
 hand to hand and argued and squabbled and 
 fought over, and finally engrossed and signed and 
 sealed and delivered — in every stage of its pro- 
 gress on the frank assumption that either of the 
 parties concerned is entirely bent on cheating 
 and robbing all or any of the others if it is barely 
 possible for him to do so. The whole practice of 
 the law is an exercise in cunning and chicanery. 
 Truth and honour, good faith and charitableness, 
 mercy and kindness : thesearethe instinctsagainst 
 which it wages unremitting war. To be generous 
 is to be madly foolish. To be fair-minded is to be 
 quixotic. To forego the seizing of any advantage 
 offered by another's innocence or ignorance or 
 oversight is to write yourself down an ass. To 
 voice scruples against suppressing ugly facts and 
 distorting equivocal circumstances is to forfeit the 
 respect of your legal advisers. To confound law 
 with equity is to amuse them. 
 
 Dickens' experience of the law was the one 
 thing needed to add to the effect upon his tem- 
 perament of his other varied experiences, just 
 that salutary touch of hard sophistication which 
 conduces to perfect clearness of vision. He knew 
 115 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 the law and lawyers far too well to have any re- 
 spect for anything or anyone connected with itsj 
 practice. 
 
 So, throughout his whole life, he kept handy a 
 whip with which to thrash the myrmidons of the 
 law whensoever they seemed to him to deserve 
 chastisement. 
 
 In August 1855 ^^ wrote : 
 
 II 
 
 It is altogether a mistake to suppose that if 
 a magistrate wilfully deliver himself of a slander- 
 ous aspersion, knowing it to be unjust, he is unfit 
 for his post. 
 
 It is altogether a mistake to suppose that if a^. 
 magistrate, in a fit of bile brought on by recent 
 disregard of some very absurd evidence of his, so 
 yield to his ill-temper as to deliver himself, in a 
 sort of mad exasperation, of such slanderous as- 
 persion as aforesaid, he is unfit for his post. 
 
 It is altogether a mistake to suppose it to be 
 very questionable whether, even in degraded 
 Naples at this time, a magistrate could from the 
 official bench insult and traduce the whole people, 
 without being made to suffer for it. 
 
 It is altogether a mistake to suppose that it 
 would be becoming in some one individual out of 
 between six and seven hundred national repre- 
 sentatives, to be so far jealous of the honour of 
 his country, as indignantly to protest against its 
 being thus grossly stigmatised. 
 
 Ill 
 
ABOUT SQUEERS ^f MR. FANG 
 
 It is altogether a mistake to suppose that the 
 Home Office has any association whatever with 
 the general credit, the general self-respect, the 
 general feeling in behalf of decent utterance, or 
 the general resentment when the same is most 
 discreditably violated. The Home Office is mere- 
 ly an ornamental institution supported out of the 
 general pocket. 
 
 It is altogether a mistake to suppose that Mr. 
 Hall (Chief Police Magistrate, sitting at Bow 
 Street at that time) is anybody's business, or that 
 we, the mere bone and sinew, tag rag and bobtail 
 of England, have anything to do with him, but 
 to pay him his salary, accept his justice, and 
 meekly bow our heads to his high and mighty 
 reproof. 
 
 And again in March 1856 he wrote : 
 
 I wonder why I feel a glow of complacency in a 
 court of justice, when I hear the learned judges 
 taking uncommon pains to prevent the prisoner 
 from letting out the truth. If the object of the 
 trial be to discover the truth, perhaps it might be 
 as edifying to hear it, even from the prisoner, as 
 to hear what is unquestionably not the truth from 
 the prisoner's advocate. I wonder why I say, in 
 a flushed and rapturous manner, that it would be 
 " un-English " to examine the prisoner. I sup- 
 pose that with common fairness it would be next 
 to impossible to confuse him, unless he lied ; and 
 117 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 if he did lie, I suppose he could hardly be brought 
 to confusion too soon. Why does that word "un- 
 English" always act as a spell upon me, and why 
 do I suffer it to settle any question ? Twelve 
 months ago it was un-English to abstain from 
 throttling our soldiers. Thirty years ago it was 
 un-English not to hang people up by scores ev- 
 ery Monday. Sixty years ago it was un-English 
 to be sober after dinner. A hundred years ago it 
 was un-English not to love cock-fighting, prize- 
 fightingjdog-fighting, bull-baiting, and other sav- 
 ageries. Why do I submit to the word as a clin- 
 cher, without asking myself whether it has anylj 
 meaning ? I don't dispute that I do so, every day 
 of my life; but I want to know why I do so .-* 
 
 On the other hand, why am I meek in regard 
 of really non-English sentiments, if the potent 
 bugbear of that term be not called into play? 
 Here is a magistrate tells me I am one of a nation 
 of drunkards. All Englishmen are drunkards, is' 
 the judicial bray (of Mr. Hall). Here is another 
 magistrate propounding from the seat of justice) 
 the stupendous nonsense that it is desirable that' 
 every person who gives alms in the streets should 
 be fined for that offence. This to a Christian 
 people, and with the NewTestamentlying before 
 him — as a sort of Dummy, I suppose, to swear 
 witnesses on. Why does my so-easily-frightened 
 nationality not take offence at such things } My 
 hobby shies at shadows ; why does it amble so 
 
 ii8 
 
ABOUT SQUEERS &> MR. FANG 
 
 quietly past these advertising-vans of Block- 
 heads seeking notoriety ? 
 
 Why, indeed ? And why have we no modern 
 Dickens to deal thus faithfully with the Shallows 
 of our own time? 
 
CHAPTER THE SIXTH 
 
 THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 
 OTHERS 
 
CHAPTER THE SIXTH 
 
 BROTHERS CHEERYBLE & OTHERS 
 
 IN SOME RESPECTS OLIVER TWIST 
 is the most remarkable of Dickens' books. The 
 same might be said, perhaps, of all Dickens' 
 books, since each is remarkable in some way 
 which distinguishes it from every other. But of 
 Oliver Twist it can be said with peculiar force, 
 because in no other book did Dickens depart al- 
 together from his usual style, and deal with his 
 characters and his theme so entirely from the ob- 
 jective point of view, as distinct from the subjec- 
 tive ; and in no other book did he write of things 
 and people that he had so little first-hand know- 
 ledge of. 
 
 In Oliver Twist he went for his facts behind 
 the figures of a Royal Commission appointed in 
 1832 to inquire into the operation of the Poor 
 Laws, and the evils that had grown out of the mal- 
 administration of the old Act of 1796, in spite of 
 the two subsequent Vestry Acts of 18 17, which 
 had been passed on the report of an earlier Com- 
 mission in order to check them. This report was 
 issued in 1834. As a piece of officialdom it was 
 admirable. As an unconscious revelation of the 
 spirit of the times it was piquant. But as an ex- 
 pression of the attitude of those in authority to- 
 ward the poor it was one of the most damning 
 human documents ever written. Its cynicism, its 
 123 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 effrontery, its callousness, its brutality, are almost I 
 beyondbeliefin these somuch more humanitarian I 
 days. Only a stupid and heartless rage for econ- 
 omy in the outlay of money at any cost of suffer- 
 ing seems to have guided the Commissioners to 
 their ultimate conclusions and recommendations. 
 
 Dickens, during the days of his Parliamentary 
 reporting, had had some pretty extensive experi- 
 ence of Royal Commissions. He realised that 
 they were thenadays of as little avail in the ameli- 
 oration of social injustices as they are now. His- 
 wrath was aroused, his sympathies kindled. He" 
 was aflame to right the fresh wrongs with which 
 these vile enactments threatened the common 
 people. So, in a white heat, regardless of the ex- 
 pectations that Pickwick Papers was bound to 
 have raised in the mind of his public, he cast aside 
 the methods that had won him his first great suc- 
 cess and wrote Oliver Twist. Out of the fire and 
 fury of his indignation, but not out of his own ex- 
 perience of the evils therein described, he wrotei 
 that astounding book. 1 
 
 The whole workhouse gang and its infamous 
 system : Bumble, Mr. Limbkins, Mr. Gamfield, 
 the gentleman in the white waistcoat, Mr. Sower- 
 berry, Mrs. Corney, and the rest : in all these hej 
 has created types so monstrous in their inhuman- 
 ity that public opinion inevitably arose in revolt 
 and insisted on the total abolition of a state of 
 things that made such horrors possible. That 
 
 124 
 
THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 
 
 state of things has not been abolished yet. Per- 
 haps it never will be utterly abolished. But if the 
 existence of such a state of things ever had, or 
 ever could have, any justification of any kind — 
 which seems hardly possible — that justification 
 is to be found, at present, only in the fact that it 
 moved Dickens to embark upon his first crusade 
 against established iniquity, and inspired him 
 with that zeal for public service which burned in 
 him throuorhout the rest of his career. 
 
 So much for the propaganda side of Oliver 
 Tivist. 
 
 As to the soundness of his other purpose, in 
 depicting the infamous crew that circled around 
 the Jew Fagin, I am not so well satisfied; be- 
 cause to put it bluntly, he tried to depict what he 
 had never seen, to describe a phase of life with 
 which he was essentially unfamiliar, and so drew 
 an unconvincing picture. Bill Sikes never was, 
 or ever could be, a convincing type of the pro- 
 fessional burglar. He is altogether too burly and 
 coarse, too gross and clumsy — as a visit to any 
 of our police-courts will prove to the most scep- 
 tical. And in Fagin, who was probably drawn 
 from a notorious criminal of that time named I key 
 Solomons (of whom there will be further men- 
 tion) he sacrificed an effect of authenticity to his 
 passion for the picturesque — as in the case of 
 Squeers. 
 
 Neither do I agree with him that whilst " a 
 125 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 Massaroni in green velvet is an enchanting crea- 
 ture ... a Sikes in fustian is insupportable ; " or 
 that "a Mrs. Massaroni, | being a lady in short 
 petticoats and a fancy dress ... a thing to imitate 
 in tableaux and have in lithograph on pretty 
 songs . . ./a Nancy, being a creature in a cotton 
 gown and cheap shawl, is not to be thought of. 
 It is wonderful (says Dickens in his preface to 
 Oliver Twisty how virtue turns from dirty stock- 
 inos ; and how Vice, married to ribbons and a 
 little gay attire, changes her name, as wedded 
 ladies do, and becomes Romance." 
 
 It would be wonderful if it were true. But it 
 is not true, or we should none of us be so hor- 
 ribly fascinated, as deaf old Mrs. Wardle was, by 
 the Fat Boy's desire to make our flesh creep, or 
 so ea^er to listen to the fearsome tale that he 
 has to unfold. I am inclined to think that deaf 
 old Mrs. Wardle was a little disappointed in the , 
 Fat Boy's narrative. I have an idea that she ex- f 
 pected at least a little gore, and would have been f 
 vastly more thrilled if it had been a murder and 
 not merely a projected elopement that the Fat 
 Boy had to divulge. And I am Irresistibly per- 
 suaded to this belief by the fact that in all ages ' 
 and in all climes human nature has never fail- 
 ed to evince a similar intense interest — morbid, 
 if you like — in the most foul and revolting of 
 crimes, in the most raw and crude villainy, in 
 viciousness the most naked and unashamed, in 
 
 126 
 
THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 
 
 degradation the most abject and nauseous. If 
 this were not so, why should our present-day- 
 editors serve up for our delectation so many more 
 columns of description, when they are dealing 
 with some hideous story of murder and mutila- 
 tion, than when they have only to tell us how 
 some polite and genteel scoundrel has by devious 
 courses succeeded in evading the Bankruptcy 
 Court only to land himself at last in the abyss of 
 gaol? 
 
 But at this early stage of his development 
 Dickens was peculiarly susceptible — unlike most 
 sanguine, ardent young men — to the influence of 
 middle-class conventions : which is merely to say 
 that, though he had learned to see aright, he had 
 not yet learned to think aright — to think for him- 
 self, that is. 
 
 According to the accepted convention of his 
 day, the thief and the prostitute, the pickpocket 
 and the murderer, and all the rest of the criminal 
 hoi polloi, were — to use a favourite word of that 
 period — " low " ; and, being " low," they must 
 needs be also dirty and violent, crapulous and ob- 
 scene. A like convention ordained that alldecent 
 and law-abiding people were superior, not only 
 in outward seeming, but in mental capacity and 
 spiritual grace, to these bestial outlaws. Dickens 
 accepted both conventions andsubscribed to them 
 heartily: it was all a part of his childlike inno- 
 cence; with the result that all the villains in his 
 127 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 earlier booksareinstantly recognisable as villains 
 at first sight, whilst all his good people exhale 
 an unmistakable odour of sanctity ; whereas the 
 truth is, of course, that a villain's appearance of _ 
 virtue is usually his best asset, and that if bad men | 
 went about like blind men, with descriptive labels 
 attached to them, they would never be given a 
 chance to do any wrong at all ; equally is it true 
 that an odour of sanctity may be assumed to 
 smother the evil odour of a mind festering and 
 rotting with disease. 
 
 Thus, in Oliver Twist, ^^ have Dickens' burg- 
 lars and his Nancys, his Artful Dodgers and his 
 Noah Claypoles, and so on, all alike presented to 
 us as beings from whom we should instinctively 
 shrink in disgust ; and we have, on the other hand, 
 his Brothers Cherryble presented to us as two 
 cherubic saints, whom to meet only once is to ac- 
 cept as embodiments of goodness, whom to know 
 for but an hour is to love. j 
 
 In his preface to Nicholas Nicklehy he says, 
 after having defended his delineation of Squeers 
 and his denunciation of the whole race of school- 
 masters for whom the figure of Squeers stands as 
 the archetype: "To turn to a more pleasant sub- 
 ject, it may be right to say, that there are two 
 characters in this book which are drawn from 
 life. It is remarkable that what we call the world, 
 
 128 
 
WILLIAM GRANT 
 One ot the "Cheeryble Brothers ' 
 
THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 
 
 which is so very credulous in what professes to be 
 true, is most incredulous in what professes to be 
 imaginary ; and that, while, every day in real life, 
 it will allow in one man no blemishes, and in 
 another no virtues, it will seldom admit a very 
 strongly-marked character, either good or bad, 
 in a fictitious narrative, to be within the limits of 
 probability. But those who take an interest in 
 this tale will be glad to learn that the Brothers 
 Cheeryble live ; that their liberal charity, their 
 singleness of heart, their noble nature, and their 
 unbounded benevolence, are no creations of the 
 Author's brain ; but are prompting every day 
 (and oftenest by stealth) some munificent and 
 generous deed in that town of which they are the 
 pride and honour. If I were to attempt to sum up 
 the thousands of letters, from all sorts of people 
 in all sorts of latitudes and climates, which this 
 unlucky paragraph brought down upon me, I 
 should get into an arithmetical difficulty from 
 which I could not easily extricate myself. Suffice 
 it to say that I believe the applications for loans, 
 gifts, and offices of profit, that I have been re- 
 quested to forward to the originals of the Brothers 
 Cheeryble (with whom I never interchanged any 
 communication in my life) would have exhausted 
 the combined patronage of all the Lord Chan- 
 cellors since the accession of the House of Bruns- 
 wick, and would have broken the Rest of the 
 Bank of England. The Brothers are now dead." 
 129 I 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 One might add that they were never alive. 
 Even the genius of their creator could not make 
 them credible, implicitly as he believed in them. 
 
 But, in another sense, one asks : Were they 
 really dead at the time when Dickens wrote the 
 above words ? 
 
 Forster says very definitely : " A friend now 
 specially welcome also, was the novelist, Mr. 
 Ainsworth, who shared with us incessantly for 
 the three following years in the companionship 
 which began at his (Dickens') house (in Devon- 
 shire Terrace) ; with whom we visited . . . friends 
 of art and literature in his native Manchester, 
 from among whom Dickens brought away hi* 
 Brothers Cheeryble." 
 
 Mr. Kitton says : 
 
 In a literary sense Manchester can boast o( 
 . . . Dickensian associations, for here resided the 
 originals of the delightful Cheeryble Brothers^ 
 who (the author assures us in his preface to Nich- 
 olas Nickleby) were "very slightly and imperfectly! 
 sketched" from life. . . . The actual models whence 
 he portrayed the Cheerybles with approximate 
 accuracy were the Brothers Grant, William and! 
 Daniel, merchants of Ramsbottom and Man-; 
 Chester. . . . From evidence recently forthcoming 
 . . . we learn that in 1838 (the year prior to the 
 publication oi Nickleby) he and Forster were the 
 guests of Mr. Gilbert Winter, of Stocks House, 
 
 130 
 
THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 
 
 Cheetham Hill Road, Manchester, to whom they 
 went with a letter of introduction from Harrison 
 Ainsworth. It was at Stocks House that Dickens 
 became acquainted with the Grants The Rev- 
 erend Hume Elliott informs us that although 
 William and Daniel Grant had residences in 
 Manchester, they preferred to live together at 
 Springside, Ramsbottom, " which they made a 
 veritable home of hospitality and good works," 
 and it is fair to assume that Dickens must have 
 seen at their home the original of David, " the 
 apoplectic butler," or ascertained from an auth- 
 entic source the peculiarities of Alfred (Boot), 
 who served the Grants in a like capacity and 
 possessed similar idiosyncrasies. . . . The rare 
 combination of the qualities of charity and hu- 
 manity with sound business instincts such as are 
 ascribed to the Cheeryble Brothers, was exactly 
 trueof the Grants. On thedeath of William Grant, 
 the elder brother, in 1842, the novelist, writing 
 from Niagara Falls to his American friend, Pro- 
 fessor Felton, said : " One of the noble hearts who 
 sat for the Cheeryble Brothers is dead. If I had 
 been in England I would certainly have gone into 
 mourning for the loss of such a glorious life. His 
 brother is not expected to survive him. ... I am 
 told that it appears from a memorandum found 
 among the papers of the deceased that in his life- 
 time he gave away ;^6oo,ooo, or three million 
 dollars." There is a marble tablet to the memory 
 1 131 
 
i 
 
 THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 of William Grant in Saint Andrew's Presbyterian 
 Church, Ramsbottom, recording his "vigour of 
 understanding, his spotless integrity of character, 
 and his true benevolence of heart. ... If you are 
 in poverty," the inscription continues, " grieve || 
 for the loss of so good a friend ; if born to wealth 
 and influence, think of the importance of such a r 
 trust, and earn in like manner by a life of charit-f 
 able exertion the respect and love of all who knew 
 you, and the prayers and blessings of the poor." 
 Honoured descendants of the two philanthropists 
 are still surviving in the city which cherishes 
 their memory. 
 
 And Mr. Fitzgerald, who is equally circum- 
 stantial, says : 
 
 A portly volume of some 400 pages has been! 
 written on the subject of the Cheeryble Brothers 
 — whose real name was Grant — most of which is 
 devoted to an accountof a Dissenting chapel with 
 which they were connected, the Dundee Chapel 
 it was called. The brothers were William, Daniel, 
 John, and I think Charles. In their early days, 
 they kept a shop at Bury St. Edmund's, but mi- 
 grated to Manchester, where they became lead-| 
 ing merchants. The novelist's father always held 
 them out to him as a pattern to imitate. They 
 were well known for their philanthropic char- 
 acter. A Liverpool merchant, who came to ask 
 assistance at a crisis, was given ^10,000 without 
 
 132 
 
 
THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 
 
 any security. One of the brothers was alive in 
 1855- 
 
 This was the brother who, according to the re- 
 port echoed by Dickens, was not expected to sur- 
 vive hisbrother's death in 1 842. The brother who 
 died in 1 842 was William Grant, of whom the fol- 
 lowing passage in Nickleby is said to give an ex- 
 cellent description : 
 
 He was a sturdy old fellow in a broad-skirted 
 blue coat, made pretty large to fit easily, and 
 with no particular waist; his bulky legs clothed in 
 drab breeches and high gaiters, and his head pro- 
 tected by a low-crowned, broad-brimmed white 
 hat, such as a wealthy grazier might wear. He 
 wore his coat buttoned ; and his dimpled double 
 chin rested in the folds of a white neckerchief — 
 not one of your stiff-starched, apoplectic cravats, 
 but a good easy old-fashioned white neck-cloth 
 that a man might go to bed in and be none the 
 worse for. But what principally attracted the at- 
 tention of Nicholas was the old gentleman's eye 
 — never was such a clear, twinkling, honest, 
 merry, happy eye as that. And there he stood, 
 looking a little upward with one hand thrust into 
 the breast of his coat, and the other playing with 
 his old-fashioned gold watch-chain ; his head 
 thrown a little on one side, and his hat a little 
 more on one side than his head (but that was evi- 
 dently accident; not his ordinary way of wearing 
 133 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 it), with such a pleasant smile playing about his 
 mouth, and such a comical expression of mingled 
 slyness, simplicity, kindheartedness, and good- 
 humour lighting up his jolly old face, that Nicho- 
 las would have been content to have stood there, 
 and looked at him until evening, and to have for-|' 
 gotten, meanwhile, that there was such a thing as 
 a soured mind or a crabbed countenance to be 
 met with in the whole wide world. 
 
 Now I think the most significant sentence in| 
 all the above extracts is that which mentions 
 that Dickens' father had always held the Grant i 
 Brothers out to his son Charles as a pattern to'| 
 imitate. The time is not yet for us to consider 
 Dickens' father in the character of Mr. Micaw- 
 ber; but I think that these prosperous merchants 
 would be just the kind of men that the John 
 Dickenses of this world do always set upas heroes. 
 Your incurably unsuccessful man is almost in- 
 variably the warmest admirer of your successful 
 man, so long as he does not come into personal 
 contact with him. And so when the time came 
 for the brilliant son of the poor failure to meet his 
 father's ideal type in the flesh, it was natural that 
 he should look at him with his father's eyes. 
 
 Who and what were these men, these four 
 Brothers Grant ? They were Scotsmen of El- 
 chies. It is said that in their hot youth they 
 tramped from their native place to Bury with all 
 
 134 
 
THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 
 
 their worldly possessions tied up in a bundle. It 
 is more usual for the future millionaire to descend 
 upon the unfortunate country or town in which 
 he is to make his millions with only half a crown 
 in his pocket ; and I have always been con- 
 strained to wonder if he had also a hundred 
 pounds or so tied up in the tail of his shirt, since 
 the crowning mystery of his career is invariably 
 that sudden accession of capital which enables 
 him to spring from penury into prosperity at one 
 bound. It is, then, so much the more satisfactory 
 to learn that the Brothers Grant brought their 
 half-crowns in a bundle. It absolves them from 
 that suspicion of indulging in some sharp prac- 
 tices — such as robbing their masters' till or cook- 
 ing his accounts — which always does lurk at the 
 back of my mind whenever I read the biographies 
 of self-made men. 
 
 These young men had been graziers in Scot- 
 land, and had failed as graziers. Mr. Fitzger- 
 ald mentions incidentally that, before coming to 
 Manchester, they had kept a shop in Bury St. Ed- 
 mund's — and presumably again failed, this time 
 as shopkeepers. But it is reassuring to know that, 
 despite these and perhaps other early set-backs, 
 they were miraculously enabled to set up as 
 Woollen and Linen Drapers in their new domi- 
 cile (no doubt on the contents of the bundle), and 
 very soon were flourishing like the green bay 
 tree : flourishing to such an extent that they could 
 135 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 afford at least two residences, and could also lend t 
 ten thousand pounds without security, but not 
 without hope of advertisement, or that transac- 
 tion would never have been made public. 
 
 William Grant, who was obviously the chief 
 moving spirit inthefirm, seemsto have beenaman 
 of character. He is said to have been extremely 
 witty ; and so it is a pity that the only sayings of 
 his which tradition has preserved are the usual 
 insolences of the lucky, boastful speculator. 
 
 He had a pet maxim : " Good masters make 
 good workmen." 
 
 And his other good thing was said in reply to 
 a remark by some one: "I believe, Mr. Gran t,you 
 were very poor when you came to these parts ? " 
 
 " Oh yes," replied William with a droll twin- 
 kle of the eye — that same twinkle which Dick- 
 ens had observed — " Oh yes. And if I had been 
 you I should have remained poor ! " 
 
 What the other man retorted is not on record, 
 unfortunately ; but if I had been in his shoes I 
 should have said : "Yes, poor but honest." 
 
 Frankly, one does not like these Cheerybles or 
 Grants. But then, as it is impossible for anyone 
 to believe in them, no harm is done. And at least 
 there is this beautiful aspect of their case, which is 
 summed up in the surprising factthat Dickens did 
 believe in them, in the simplicity of his glorious 
 youth — or, rather, believed in his father's belief 
 in them. He did believe — thanks to his father — 
 
 136 
 
DANIEL GRANT 
 One of the "Cheeryble Brothers* 
 
THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 
 
 that it is possible to be at once a millionaire and a 
 humanitarian; and that it is a creditable thing for 
 a man to laugh and grow fat whilst those out of 
 whose labour he has made his riches do not laugh 
 but oftener weep, and are mercifully saved from 
 the vice of laziness by such hard work that they 
 must remain of necessity thin. 
 
 " The Brothers are now dead." 
 
 Oh, no doubt they are dead — very dead. And 
 perhaps, after all, even Dickens' dear illusions 
 about them had begun to fade a little by the time 
 he wrote that sentence in his preface to Nicholas 
 Nickleby. It would almost seem so ; for never ag- 
 ain do their like appear in any of his later work, 
 although we have recognisable variations on the 
 Brothers Grant in the Gradgrinds, Bounderbys, 
 Merdles — the original of Merdle was the infam- 
 ous John Sadlier, forger and swindler, a sort of 
 Whitaker Wright — Veneerings, and so on, of his 
 final embittered period. 
 
 Our pleasure is now to dwell upon the real 
 triumphs oi Nickleby : Newman Noggs and Miss 
 La Creevy ; and upon those rather less likely 
 characters, John Browdie and Smike: all four of 
 whom are said to have been founded upon living 
 prototypes. 
 
 "My friends," wrote Sydney Smith,describing 
 to Dickens the anxiety of some ladies of his ac- 
 quaintance to meet him at dinner, " have not the 
 137 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 smallest objection to be put into a number, but 
 on the contrary would be proud of the distinction; 
 and Lady Charlotte, in particular, you may marry 
 to Newman Noggs." 
 
 History does not disclose the identity of this 
 Lady Charlotte; but it is sufficiently revealed that 
 she was a woman of nice discrimination and ex- 
 quisite taste. Newman Noggs, whom wehave all 
 met in the flesh, and — if we are discerning — pitied 
 with the pity that is akin to love, is one of those 
 unfortunates who, having been dowered with all I 
 the virtues, are cursed by the addition of one small 
 vice that renders all their virtues absurd and holds 
 them up for evermore to the coarse ridicule or the ■ 
 stern obloquy or the silent contempt of their im- 
 measurable inferiors, the cruel, the self-righteous, 
 and the purblind or unthinking. 
 
 Newman Noggs was 
 
 a tall man of middle age, with two goggle eyes 
 whereof one was a fixture, a rubicund nose, a 
 cadaverous face, and a suit of clothes (if the 
 term be allowable when they suited him not at 
 all) much the worse for wear, very much too 
 small, and placed upon such a short allowance of 
 buttons that it was marvellous how he contrived 
 to keep them on. . . . He gave a peculiar grunt, I 
 as his custom was at the end of all disputes with I 
 his master, to imply that he (Noggs) triumphed ; ' 
 and (as he rarely spoke to anybody unless some- 
 
 138 
 
THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 
 
 body spoke to him) fell into a grim silence and 
 rubbed his hands slowly over each other : crack- 
 ing the joints of his fingers, and squeezing them 
 into all possible distortions. The incessant per- 
 formance of this routine on every occasion, and 
 the communication of a fixed and rigid look to 
 his unaffected eye, so as to make it uniform 
 with the other, and to render it impossible for 
 anybody to determine where or at what he was 
 looking, were two among the numerous peculi- 
 arities of Mr. Noggs which struck an inexperi- 
 enced observer at first sight. . . . 
 
 "Don't cry," says Newman Noggs to Kate 
 Nickleby on a certain pitiful occasion. " Don't," 
 said he, gliding out of his recess and accompany- 
 ing her across the hall. " Don't cry, don't cry." 
 Two very large tears, by the by, were running 
 down Newman's face as he spoke. 
 
 " I see how it is," said poor Noggs, drawing 
 from his pocket what seemed to be a very old 
 duster, and wiping Kate's eyes with it as gently as 
 if she were an infant. *' You're giving way now. 
 Yes, yes ; very good. That's right ; I like that. 
 It was right not to give way before him. Yes, yes ! 
 Ha, ha, ha! Oh, yes. Poor thing ! " 
 
 With these disjointed exclamations, Newman 
 wiped his own eyes with the aforementioned dus- 
 ter, and, limping to the street door, opened it to 
 let her out. 
 
 " Don'tcry any more," whispered Newman. " I 
 139 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 shall see you soon. Ha, ha, ha! . . . Yes, yes. 
 Ho, ho!" 
 
 " God bless you, "answered Kate, hurrying out. 
 *' God bless you." 
 
 "Same to you," rejoined Newman, opening the 
 door again a little way to say so. "Ha, ha, ha 1 
 Ho, ho, ho!" 
 
 And Newman Noggs opened the door once 
 again to nod cheerfully, and laugh — and shut it, to 
 shake his head mournfully, and cry. 
 
 But yes, she was a woman of infinite womanli- 
 ness, that unknown Lady Charlotte ! 
 
 The real Newman Noggs was a certain New- 
 man Knott, a broken-down ne'er-do-weel who 
 had seen better days as a tenant-farmer. He 
 used to call at irregular intervals at the office of 
 Messrs. Blackmore & Ellis, during the time that 
 Dickens was working for them as a clerk, for a 
 weekly dole of seven shillings allowed him by 
 some wealthy relative as the price of his self-im- 
 molation. He was apparently of that dissolute, 
 queer, eccentric type which is still common 
 enough in London. Like all his kind, having dis- 
 sipated his past, he was ever eager to mortage 
 his future by forestalling his weekly dole. He 
 used to borrow small sums from the clerks ; and 
 in lieu of interest they baited him. I daresay the 
 boy Dickens baited him too, for boys are all imi- 
 tative as monkeys ; but, if so, he atoned hand- 
 
 140 
 
 I 
 
THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 
 
 somely afterward by canonising him in the ab- 
 stract. 
 
 It seems to me (for I accept the reality of New- 
 man Noggs as implicity as Lady Charlotte did) 
 that this excellent creature, and not the Cheery- 
 bles' jackal, Tim Linkinwater — who, neverthe- 
 less, was a hearty old cock — should have married 
 Miss La Creevy. He would have found ample 
 consolation for his wasted life on the soft, if with- 
 ered, bosom of that dear good little miniature 
 painter, who, living by herself, overflowing with 
 aflections she had no one to enrich withal, was 
 always cheerful by dint of industry and good- 
 heartedness. The antic figure of that mincing 
 young lady of fifty, in her preposterous yellow 
 headdress recurs to the memory as one of the 
 most winning in the gallery of Dickens' portraits. 
 We see her, when she is disappointed in the char- 
 acter of a woman she has been to visit, easing her 
 mind by saying cutting things at the woman's 
 expense in a soliloquy, thereby draining her heart 
 of its gall ; and thereby, as she herself would have 
 said, being a philosopher in her way, also illus- 
 trating one of the advantages of having lived 
 alone so long that she had always made a con- 
 fidant of herself; was as sarcastic as she could 
 be, by herself, on the subject of people who 
 offended her ; pleased herself and did no harm. 
 
 She and Newman Noggs would have made a 
 most excellent match ; for they had both in excess 
 141 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 the highest virtue — beside which all other virtues l 
 are as naught — the virtue of kindness. But she 
 had, besides a certain measure of shrewdness and 
 steadiness of purpose, which should have helped 
 her heaven-sent consort to vindicate his man- 
 hood. 
 
 Miss La Creevy, it is said, was founded on a 
 Miss Rose Emma Drummond,to whom Dickens 
 sat for his portrait — and to whom she sat for 
 her portrait — in 1 835. The portrait was done on 
 ivory, and given to his future wife, Miss Hogarth, . 
 as an engagement present. I have an idea, based •] 
 upon nothing more substantial than a whimsy, 
 that that miniature was rather a poor thing as art, 
 and yet possessed a certain value of quaintness 
 that lifted it above utter mediocrity. 
 
 There remain of this Nickleby group only I 
 Smike and John Browdie, neither of them very 
 convincing figures. 
 
 It is said, on the authority of a Mrs. Ewebank 
 whose husband once kept the King's Head Hotel 
 at Barnard Castle, that John Browdie had a living J 
 
 original in one John F or S , of Broadis- 
 
 wood, a farmer. 
 
 In the last chapter it is told how Dickens had 
 gone down to Barnard Castle provided with some 
 bogus letters of introduction to inspect the York- 
 shire schools. One of the persons to be victim- 
 ised by this fraud was this same John F or 
 
 S . 
 
 142 
 
THE BROTHERS CHEERYBLE 
 
 Not being at home when the novelist called 
 upon him, he journeyed through the snow to the 
 inn where Dickens was staying, and entreated 
 him to advise the (figmentary) widow (whom 
 Dickens had invented for the occasion) to refrain 
 from sending her boy to any of those wretched 
 schools "while there's a harse to hoold in a' 
 Lunnon, or a goother to lie asleep in ! " The old 
 coaching-house where this memorable interview 
 is believed to have taken place (says Mr. Kitton 
 in the passage I am now quoting) was the still 
 existing Unicorn at Bowes. 
 
 Of the last of this group, Smike, it only remains 
 to say that in 1889 an absurd old person, keeping 
 a toyshop at Bury St. Edmund's, claimed to be 
 the original of Crummies' ideal Apothecary. He 
 is described as a tall, hatchet-faced, very aged 
 and decrepit gentleman ; and his claim was 
 based upon the circumstance that when he was a 
 boy he was sent to a school in Yorkshire by a 
 wicked uncle and ran away from it. As if he were 
 the only nephew that ever ran away from school! 
 
 Moreover, this egregious old toy-seller seems 
 hardly to have realised that by living to a ripe old 
 age, and thus dispelling any atmosphere of pathos 
 that may attach to Smike's death, he had robbed 
 himself of his only possible claim upon our affec- 
 tionate interest. 
 143 
 
I 
 
 JOHN DICKENS 
 
 "Mr Mtcawber" 
 
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH 
 
 RELICS FROM THE OLD 
 CURIOSITY SHOP 
 
 K 
 
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH RELICS 
 FROM THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 
 
 IN HIS NEXT BOOK AFTER NICHO- 
 LAS NICKLEBY we find Dickens dipping a 
 little deeper yet into the seemingly bottomless 
 well of his early experiences. He was still work- 
 ing at high pressure, turning from project to pro- 
 ject with that restless hunger after new food for 
 his genius which was one of his most amazing 
 characteristics, and doing with all his might what- 
 soever his hand found to do, as if it were the only 
 thing to be done, with equally characteristic self- 
 confidence and self-abandonment. 
 
 The splendour of his achievements during the 
 first six years of his career, during which period 
 he published six immensely long books, certainly 
 writing every word of five of them, besides en- 
 gaging in all manner of outside tasks, editorial 
 and other, is now a little dimmed by the mists of 
 time ; but if we consider that not all Mr. J. M. 
 Barrie's twenty-five years of labour has produced 
 in mere bulk such an output of words, we get a 
 little nearer perhaps to a realisation of the inex- 
 haustible fecundity, the untiring industry, and 
 the prodigious powers of application that would 
 have made Dickens, had he been the veriest 
 hack, a phenomenon of letters. Only the first 
 Dumas can bear comparison with him in this 
 particular regard; and Dumas, we have reason 
 to suspect, kept a kind of literary factory in which 
 147 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 he employed many hands for the turning out of 
 romance, as if by machinery. Moreover, Duma^i 
 had his materials ready-made to draw upon at ' 
 will ; whereas Dickens, at any rate until this 
 time, had to spin his material out of his own in- 
 terior like a spider. 
 
 The Old Curiosity Shop was begun as a mere 
 sketch, done in a hurry and without any thought 
 of further development. From that tentative be- 
 ginning it grew spontaneously out of the exub- 
 erance of its author's fancy, taking on form and 
 substance as it grew, budding and sprouting lux- 
 uriantly, throwing out wide branches like a tree, 
 bearing abundance of sweetest flowers and rip- 
 est fruit, and at last, as it were, dying of its own 
 furious energy, shedding its sere and withered 
 leaves in whirling gringolades, that fell ever 
 slower and more slowly until they rested on the 
 melancholy earth, cold and dank as fresh-turned 
 graves and sodden as with a rain of tears. 
 
 Dickens'lifewasonelongseriesof experiments. 
 For it was at once his good fortune and his mis- 
 fortune to serve his apprenticeship to his art in 
 public. The slips and trips, the fumblings and 
 stumblings, the faulty workmanship of uncon- 
 genial tasks hastily scamped and left half-finished 
 with all their rawness and crudeness of outline 
 stark to view : these inevitable blunders and mis- 
 takes, these ghastly failures that usually are per- 
 petrated in secrecy, in the agony and bloody 
 
 1 
 
THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 
 
 sweat, the tears and bitter heartbreak of solitude : 
 which solitude has nevertheless its compensa- 
 tions in that it hides the shame of our defeat from 
 other eyes than ours, and spares us many blushes 
 in the future : all these ordeals by trial of faith 
 which are incidental to the greatest of careers, 
 Dickens had to undergo in the full glare of that 
 fierce white light which beats upon the bays of 
 fame. 
 
 And Dickens was famous before he had cut his 
 wisdom teeth. The world had discovered him 
 before he had discovered himself. From that 
 moment in which, lightheartedly, he accepted a 
 commission for a "series of sporting sketches,' 
 and set him down to fulfil a business contract in a 
 business-like way, and yet in a sort of careless rap- 
 ture, too, born of his youth : from that moment he 
 was ordained to the religion of humanity as surely 
 and irrevocably as any acolyte is ordained to the 
 religion of the Church. From that moment his 
 foot was set upon the slippery way. But he climb- 
 ed the steep toilsome ascent not alone, as the vast 
 majority of his fellows have done. He climbed in 
 the full light of day with multitudes of spectators 
 lining his path on either hand, with the gaze of 
 
 ; countless eyes fixed intently upon him, with a 
 
 ) babble and tumult of voices applauding, encour- 
 aging, triumphing in his triumph — nay, turning 
 his very failures into triumphs by the din of their 
 
 ( acclaim. 
 
 i 149 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 A spectacle for the gods ! A spectacle to bringi 
 tears into the eyes and misgivings into the hearts* 
 of those more staid and calm who stood aloof 
 from the rabble, and to whom all such valorous 
 displays of youthful daring are occasions for self- 
 searching and regret. He stood forth before the 
 thunderous throng, as of old the Roman gladiat- 
 ors stood forth in the arena of death before their 
 emperor and his glittering train of courtiers and 
 satellites; but in no mood oi Ave CcBsar! We 
 who are about to die salute thee ! H is form was as 
 the form of a child. His face was as a child's facci 
 bright and happy in the sunshine of universa 
 favour. There was the unconscious grace ol 
 childhood in his easy unaffected pose ; and the 
 sublime graciousness of childhood in his gay ac- 
 ceptance of these plaudits as his right. These 
 reverend elders, these grave and wise seigneurs 
 surely if they believed in him he must of sheel 
 necessity believe in himself! . . . 
 
 That, as it seems to me, was Dickens' attitudc| 
 toward the world. That was why he failed so 
 often, and never knew that he failed. That was 
 why he failed so seldom, and never knew that he 
 had attained greatness. . . . 
 
 Fantastic, all this? Perhaps it is. A little be 
 side the point } Maybe. But then, what woul 
 you ? I know it is a dreadful thing to be enthusi 
 astic in these bloodless days. I know that to be in 
 earnest and to be carried away by your earnest- 
 
 150 
 
 \ 
 
THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 
 
 ness is a grievous fault, a fault never committed 
 in the best society ; that to rejoice in your theme 
 and to let the voice of your rejoicing rise to 
 Heaven is a sin beyond say the pardon of Mr. St. 
 Loe Strachey ; that to say what your heart, rather 
 than your head, impels you to say, and that with- 
 out regard to the formulas of the schoolmen is 
 to outrage all the fair — or is it unfair ? — canons 
 of art ; and that to be honest is to be indecent. 
 . . . "Gentlemen," said a sportive sage, who had 
 been playing leapfrog with some fellow-sages, 
 or indulging in some similar flippancy; " gentle- 
 men, we must be serious. Here comes a fool." 
 How can one be serious in the company of Dick 
 Swiveller.-* One could conceivably have been se- 
 rious in the company of Newman Noggs, Dick's 
 father. There was that incident of the duster. . . . 
 But with this tremendous fellow, this rakehell, 
 this heart-breaker, this lineal descendant of the 
 hosts of Rabelais, this more blithe and gay and 
 reckless young Hopeful, this child of the devil 
 and happiness, chip of the old block as he is, this 
 humorous dog who greets us at the very outset 
 of our acquaintance with the query, breathed in a 
 sigh of resignation to the drabness of an every- 
 day world after an evening red : " But what . . . 
 is the odds so long as the fire of soul is kindled at 
 the taper of conviviality, and the wing of friend- 
 ship never moults a feather ! What is the odds so 
 long as the spirit is expanded by means of rosy 
 151 
 
! 
 
 THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 wine, and the present moment is the least happi-k 
 est of our existence ! " And again : " There is a 
 proverb which talks about being merry and wise. 
 There are some people who can be merry and 
 can't be wise, and some who can be wise (or think 
 they can) and can't be merry. I'm one of the first 
 sort. If the proverb's a good 'un, I suppose it is 
 better to keep to half of it than none ; at all ev- 
 ents I'd rather be merry and not wise than be like 
 you — neither one nor t'other." 
 
 Frankly, it seems to me to be impossible for 
 anyone not a professional tea-taster to keep a- 
 straight face in the presence of this most repre- 
 hensible person. So that if, as I do verily be- 
 lieve, Dick Swiveller is the son and heir of New- 
 man Noggs ; and if, as we are told, Newman 
 Noggs was in real life Mr. Newman Knott ; and 
 if Mr. Newman Knott embodied in himself only 
 a suggestion of his offspring's gorgeous persona- 
 lity, then I can only marvel at the stupidity, and' 
 be sorry for the meanness of that unfortunate 
 gentleman's relatives, and most heartily approve* 
 the generosity and wisdom of Dickens' fellow-* 
 clerks' conduct in pandering to that immortal 
 being's carnal lusts. I 
 
 Out of his past Dickens drew inspiration for^ 
 at least three of the characters that illumine the} 
 gloom of The Old Curiosity Shop. j 
 
 There was, first of all, the Poet of Mrs. Jarley*^ 
 
 152 
 
MRS COOPER 
 
 "Little Dorrit" 
 
THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 
 
 Waxworks. Mr. Slum makes only a very brief ap- 
 pearance upon the stage ; but I think he should 
 be given his chance, as he belongs to a milieu 
 that Dickens seems to have had a strange dis- 
 taste for. He was 
 
 ... a tallish gentleman with a hook nose and 
 black hair, dressed in a military surtout very 
 short and tight in the sleeves, and which had once 
 been frogged and braided all over, but was now 
 sadly shorn of its garniture and quite threadbare 
 — dressed too in ancient grey pantaloons fitting 
 tight to the leg, and a pair of pumps in the winter 
 of their existence. . . . He looked in at the door 
 and smiled affably. Mrs. Jarley's back being then 
 towards him, the military gentleman shook his 
 forefinger as a sign that her myrmidons were not 
 to apprise her of his presence, and stealing up 
 close behind her, tapped her on the neck, and 
 cried playfully " Boh ! " 
 
 "What, Mr. Slum ! " cried the lady of the wax- 
 work. ** Lor! who'd have thought of seeing you 
 here!" 
 
 "Ton my soul and honour," said Mr. Slum, 
 " that's a good remark. Ton my soul and honour 
 that's a wise remark. Who would have thought 
 it ! . . . I came here . . . 'pon my soul and honour 
 I hardly know what I came here for. It would 
 puzzle me to tell you, it would by Gad. I wanted 
 a little inspiration, a little freshening up, a little 
 153 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 change of ideas, and — 'pon my soul and honour," 
 said the military gentleman, checking himself 
 and looking round the room," whatadevilish clas- 
 sical thing this is ! By Gad, it's quite Minervan !" 
 
 "It'll look well enough when it comes to be 
 finished," observed Mrs. Jarley. 
 
 " Well enough ! " said Mr. Slum. " Will you 
 believe me when I say it's the delight of my life 
 to have dabbled in poetry, when I think I've ex- 
 ercised my pen upon this charming theme ? By 
 the way — any orders ? Is there any little thing I 
 can do for you ? " 
 
 "It comes so very expensive, sir," replied Mrs. 
 Jarley, "and I really don't think it does much 
 good." 
 
 " Hush ! No, no ! " returned Mr. Slum, elevat- 
 inghishand. "Nofibs. I '11 not hear it. Don'tsay 
 it don't do good. Don't say it. I know better ! " 
 
 " I don't think it does," said Mrs. Jarley. 
 
 "Ha, ha!" cried Mr. Slum, "you're giving 
 way, you're coming down. Ask the perfumers, 
 ask the blacking-makers, ask the hatters, ask the 
 old lottery-office-keepers — ask any man among 
 'em what my poetry has done for him, and mark 
 my words, he blesses the name of Slum. If he's 
 an honest man he raises his eyes to heaven, and 
 blesses the name of Slum — mark that ! You 
 are acquainted with Westminster Abbey, Mrs. 
 Jarley?" i 
 
 " Yes, surely." '- 
 
 154 
 
THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 
 
 " Then upon my word and honour, ma'am, 
 you'll find in a certain angle of that dreary pile, 
 called Poets' Corner, a few smaller names than 
 Slum," retorted that gentleman, tapping himself 
 expressively on the forehead to imply that there 
 was some slight quantity of brain behind it. " I' ve 
 got a little trifle here now, "said Mr. Slum, taking 
 off his hat which was full of scraps of paper, " a 
 little trifle here, thrown off in the heat of the mo- 
 ment, which I should say was exactly the thing 
 you wanted to set this place on fire with. It's an 
 acrostic — the name at this moment is Warren, but 
 the idea's a convertible one, and a positive inspi- 
 ration for Jarley. Have the acrostic." 
 
 " I suppose it's very dear," said Mrs. Jarley. 
 
 "Five shillings," returned Mr. Slum, using 
 his pencil as a toothpick. "Cheaper than any 
 prose." 
 
 " I couldn't give more than three," said Mrs. 
 Jarley. 
 
 " Andsix,"retortedSlum. "Come. Three 
 
 and six." 
 
 Mrs. Jarley was not proof against the poet's 
 insinuating manner, and Mr. Slum entered the 
 order in a small note-book as a three-and-six- 
 penny one. Mr. Slum then withdrew to alter the 
 acrostic, after taking a most affectionate leave 
 of his patroness, and promising to return, as 
 soon as he possibly could, with a fair copy for the 
 printer. 
 155 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 It is unworthy of me, but somehow I have an 
 uneasy feeling that Mr. Slum did not return as 
 soon as he possibly could; and that when he did 
 return it was with something utterly unsuitable. 
 But before giving reasons for this lack of faith, a 
 digression. 
 
 Dickens, in his early childhood — as all the 
 world knows, I suppose — worked in a blacking 
 factory. The firm for which he worked was an 
 enterprising firm. It is in connection with one of 
 their advertising dodges, by the way, that one 
 of the neatest puns in existence was once made. 
 They employed men to chalk on the pavement 
 these words : " Warren's blacking is the best." 
 But the authorities forbade this; and so the work 
 had to be done by stealth. One day a famous 
 wit — I forget his name — was walking with a 
 friend when he saw upon the flags the legend 
 — left thus by one of the chalkers in the hurry 
 of flight from the powers that were — "War- 
 ren's B ." "The rest," said the wit, "is lack- 
 
 :^^ *> 
 mg. 
 
 It was for this firm, then, that Dickens worked ; 
 and attached to the staff were certain rhymsters. 
 It was from one of these camp-followers that 
 Dickens made his study of Mr. Slum. 
 
 I can conceive that the tribe of Slum was un- 
 savoury as any tribe of Bedouins. And yet, from 
 the above-quoted passage, it would seem that, bar- 
 ringan extra shade of dinginess and disreputable- 
 
 156 
 
THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 
 
 ness and shamelessness, its manners and habits 
 have changed but little in a hundred years. And 
 I speak as one having authority. I have sat in the 
 editorial chair. I have had to interview these gen- 
 try daily. I know their ways. And I aver that they 
 are Slum-like, some of them, to the core. They are 
 Slum-like in their airy playfulness, in their poor 
 pathetic pretence at having no definite business 
 on hand as they drift into your office, in their 
 gamesome approach to the point and purpose of 
 their visit, and in the jauntiness of their aspect 
 thinly veiling a haggard solicitude. Above all are 
 they akin in their lofty indifference to the sordid 
 details of barter, in their aptness at improving on 
 a price offered, in their prompt acceptance of the 
 agreed terms, their alacrity in clinching a bargain, 
 and their dilatoriness in fulfilling their part of it, 
 after you have fulfilled your part. Beyond this, 
 there is about Mr. Slum the unmistakable taint 
 of the greasy, frowsy Bohemian, all the civilised 
 world over, which endures even unto this day ; 
 and which testifies alike to the truth and the skill 
 of Dickens' solitary presentment of this type. 
 For, as a rule, he abstained from " shop " — even 
 the big "shop" of literature. But . . . one wonders 
 what he would have made of a novel in the vein 
 oiPendenniSy a Pendennis pitched a little lower in 
 the social scale, of course. 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 Of his sufferings during those dark years of his 
 boyhood in which he worked in the blacking fac- 
 tory Dickens has written thus feelingly in David 
 Copperjield : 
 
 No words can express the secret agony of my ' 
 soul as I sank into this companionship ; compared 
 these everyday associates with those of my hap-fl 
 pier childhood ; and felt my early hopes of grow- 
 ing up to be a learned and distinguished man 
 crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of 
 the sense I had of being utterly without hope! 
 now ; of the shame I felt in my position ; of the 
 misery it was to my young heart to believe that^i 
 day by day what I had learned and thought and | 
 delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emula- 
 tion up by, would pass away from me, little by 
 little, never to be brought back any more, cannot 
 be written. My whole nature was so penetrated 
 with the grief and humiliation of such consider- 
 ations that even now ... I often forget in my 
 dreams that ... I am a man, and wander deso- 
 lately back to that time of my life. . . . From 
 Monday morning until Saturday night I had no 
 advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no con- 
 solation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, 
 from anyone, that I can call to mind. ... I know 
 that I lounged about the streets insufficiently 
 and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that but for the 
 mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any 
 care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little 
 
 158 
 
THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 
 
 vagabond. . . . That I suffered in secret, and 
 that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but 
 I. How much I suffered, it is, as I have said 
 already, utterly beyond my power to tell. No 
 man's imagination can overstep the reality. But 
 I kept my own counsel, and I did my work. . . . 
 My rescue from this kind of existence I con- 
 sidered quite hopeless and abandoned as such 
 altogether ; though I am solemnly convinced 
 that I never, for one hour, was reconciled to it, or 
 was otherwise than miserably unhappy. 
 
 At first, he writes in a letter to Forster refer- 
 ring to the early days of his father's incarceration 
 in the Marshalsea, " my mother and my brothers 
 and sisters — excepting Fanny in the Royal Ac- 
 ademy of Music — were still encamped, with a 
 young servant-girl from Chatham Work-house, 
 in the two parlours in the emptied house in Gow- 
 er Street North." 
 
 There were some feeble attempts to come to 
 some arrangement with the creditors, which fail- 
 ed. Then the establishment in Gower Street 
 North was broken up, and the family, with the 
 exception of Charles, went to live with John 
 Dickens in the debtors' prison. Says Dickens : 
 
 The key of the house was sent back to the land- 
 lord, who was very glad to get it ; and I (small 
 Cain that I was, except that I had never done 
 harm to anyone) was handed over as a lodger to 
 a reduced old lady, long known to our family, in 
 159 
 
1 
 
 DOkf 
 
 THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 Little College Street, Camden Town, who took 
 children in to board. ... I felt keenly, how- 
 ever, the being so cut off from my parents, my 
 brothers, and sisters ; and, when my day's work 
 was done, going home to such a miserable blank; 
 and that^ I thought, might be corrected. One 
 Saturday night I remonstrated with my father 
 on this head, so pathetically and with so many 
 tears, that his kind nature gave way. He began 
 to think that it was not quite right, I do believe 
 he had never thought so before, or thought about 
 it. It was the first remonstrance I had ever made 
 about my lot, and perhaps it opened up a little 
 more than I intended. A back-attic was found ii 
 for me at the house of an insolvent court-agent, 
 who lived in Lant Street in the Borough. 
 
 Says Forster : ■ 
 
 What was to him (Charles) of course the great ' 
 pleasure of his paradise of a lodging was its bring- 
 ing him again, though after a fashion sorry en- 
 ough, within the circle of home. From this time 
 he used to breakfast "at home," in other words in 
 the Marshalsea; going to it as early as the gates 
 were open, and for the most part much earlier. 
 They had no want of bodily comforts there. His 
 father's income, still going on, was amply suffi- 
 cient for that; and in every respect indeed but 
 elbow-room, I have heard him say, the family 
 lived more comfortably in prison than they had 
 done for a long time out of it. They were waited 
 
 1 60 
 
THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 
 
 on still by the maid-of-all-work from Bayham 
 Street, the orphan girl from the Chatham Work- 
 house, from whose sharp little worldly and also 
 kindly ways he took his first impression of the 
 Marchioness in the Old Curiosity Shop. She too 
 had a lodging in the neighbourhood that she 
 might be early on the scene of her duties ; and 
 when Charles met her, as he would do occasion- 
 ally, in his lounging-place by London Bridge, he 
 would occupy the time before the gates opened 
 by telling her quite astonishing fictions about 
 the wharves and the Tower. " But I hope I be- 
 lieved them myself," he would say. Besides 
 breakfast, he had supper also in the prison; and 
 got to his lodging generally at nine o'clock. The 
 gates closed always at ten. 
 
 I must not omit (Forster goes on) what he told 
 
 me of the landlord of this little lodging. He was 
 
 a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman. He was 
 
 lame, and had a quiet old wife ; and he had a very 
 
 innocent, grown-up son, who was lame too. They 
 
 were all very kind to the boy. He (Charles) was 
 
 taken with one of his old attacks of spasm one 
 
 night, and the whole three of them were about 
 
 I his bed until morning. They were all dead when 
 
 : he told me this, but in another form they live still 
 
 J very pleasantly as the Garland family in the Old 
 
 ■ Curiosity Shop. 
 
 I So much and no more seems to be known of 
 J the Garlands and the Marchioness; but I have 
 t yielded to the temptation to include them in this 
 I i6i L 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 chapter, and to dwell (I hope at not undue length)) 
 upon the circumstances in which Dickens made' 
 their acquaintance, because I feel that, alongside' 
 the figure of the Poet Slum, they stand for a good 
 deal. They stand for the indomitable spirit ofl 
 Dickens which even in his boyhood lifted him 
 above the hardships and the uglinesses of life 
 and enabled him to mingle some laughter with 
 his tears. . . . For I cannot believe that his delight f 
 in these companions of that squalid time was 
 wholly retrospective. ii 
 
 In the same genre, but not nearly so closely re- 
 lated to life as the real heroine of The Old Curi- 
 osity Shop, is Little Dorrit. To believe in the 
 humanity of the Marchioness is easy ; but to be- 
 lieve in the humanity of Little Dorrit is to strain 
 one's faith a little. Yet Little Dorrit had also — 
 has still, we hope — a living prototype. 
 
 Her name is Mrs. Mary Ann Cooper. She was 
 the playmate and contemporary of Dickens, a re- 
 cipient of some of his youthful confidences, and 
 finally — her supreme achievement — the inspira- 
 tion of his Child of the Marshalsea. She lives 
 in the old-world village of Southgate, where, a 
 year and a half ago, she was discovered by a 
 journalist, and interviewed — to this effect : * 
 
 I marvelled at the facility with which this old 
 lady of ninety-eight set back the hands of time. 
 A short pause, a slight lifting of the forefinger, a 
 
 * Evening Times, November 26, 1910. 
 
 162 
 
THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 
 
 roll of the eyes, and a puckering of the brow were 
 all the external evidences of how the retrospect 
 was being prepared. Halfacentury was annihilat- 
 ed in this flash to the days of Dickens. She lived 
 again in the '30's and '40's, and was able to roll 
 out the drama of the past with a command of lan- 
 guage astonishing to one of a modern education. 
 
 Her story of Dickens — Mr. Dickens, as she in- 
 sists upon referring to the great novelist in com- 
 pany — dealt with events andincidentsofahomely 
 interest usually outside the scope of thebiograph- 
 er. She took me backto the days of imprisonment 
 for debt, and to scenes in the Marshalsea prison, 
 in which Dickens' father was lodging at the time 
 she became acquainted with the family. 
 
 Mrs. Cooper's family were farmers at Sun- 
 bury, but owing to the illness of her mother, 
 much of her youth was spent under the care of 
 a nurse at a farm in Somers Town. . . . 
 
 It was here . . . that the friendship with 
 Dickens was established, and here that she was 
 given the sobriquet of "Little Dorrit" long be- 
 fore the name was immortalised by the pen of 
 her companion. As is shown in the writings of 
 his biographers, Dickens had a fondness for 
 nicknames, some of which were created without 
 the slightest regard to relation or applicability. 
 What provoked the application of "Little Dor- 
 rit" to the then Mary Ann Mitton is a matter 
 of mystery to the lady herself. . . . 
 
 With what enthusiasm Mrs. Cooper told of the 
 163 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 days when Dickens, who was four or five years her 
 senior, used to visit her home at Sunbury for rest 
 and recuperation ! After hard work in the gallery 
 of the House of Commons or long hours of study 
 in the chambers which he shared with young Mit- 
 ton (Mary Ann Mitton's brother) he would rush 
 off each Saturday for the Sunbury coach, and 
 would spend a delightful week-end in ruraldom. 
 
 It was at such times that he gave full play to 
 the mischievous instincts of his boyhood. Bird- 
 nesting, egg-stealing, rabbit-hunting, and bird- 
 catching were mixed up with fishing, tramps 
 over the fields, and story-telling round the fire- 
 side. " Little Dorrit" was the co-partner in most 
 of his antics and was always ready to join in any 
 expedition of adventure. 
 
 "Little Dorrit" tells how Dickens used to per- 
 suade her to miss Sunday afternoon service at St. 
 Pancras Church, in order to visit places of interest 
 intheCity. He would always foreshadow some al- 
 luring treat in the way of a visit to the Tower, fun 
 with the beadles, or adventures in the parks. 
 
 Then (says the journalist) my Victorian hos- 
 tess took me to the days when fame and fortune 
 entered into the life of her hero, and with a touch 
 of insouciance, remarked that he began to move in 
 circles far away beyond the ken of asimple country 
 girl. Her own marriage was the beginning of the 
 severance in the long association, although the 
 intimate companionship between Dickens and 
 her brother was maintained throughout his life. 
 
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH 
 FAMILY PORTRAITS 
 
CHAPTER THE 
 
 EIGHTH FAMILY PORTRAITS 
 
 THE WORST THINGS THAT HAPPEN 
 to us are sometimes the best for us. 
 
 In the materialsenseitwasabadthingforDick- 
 ens to have a M icawber for a father, a M rs. N ickle- 
 by for a mother, and a pervasive atmosphere of 
 shabby-genteel vagabondage in which to grow 
 up. In the spiritual sense, however, it was a good 
 thing; because such parents and such an envir- 
 onment provided him with just the necessary in- 
 centives to initiative and enterprise. A father of 
 the Sir Austin Absworthy Bearne Feverel type 
 might have made of Charles precisely what that 
 gentleman of wealth and honour and a somewhat 
 lamentable history made of his son Richard : a 
 supercilious, cultured cad. He, like that unfortu- 
 nate youth, would have been nourished on aphor- 
 isms and moulded to a system which fitted him 
 about as well as the original egg-shell fits the full- 
 grown cockerel. Or, speaking more generally, he 
 might have come into a world newly cushioned 
 and upholstered and padded for his reception, in 
 which to tumble about at his pleasure ; and, never 
 having hurt himself in his tumbles, to lose alto- 
 gether at last the knack of maintaining his equili- 
 brium. 
 
 Almost any kind of father would have been 
 a better kind of father than John Dickens was: 
 that is to say, a better kind of father for an aver- 
 167 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 age child. But for the child who is not average, 
 for the child who is destined to be a genius, the 
 less parental control and guidance the better. I 
 think it is Mr. Zangwill who says, though I may- 
 be misquoting his exact words, that it takes a 
 man of a certain talent to sire a genius. If Mr. 
 Zangwill had said that it takes a man of an un- 
 certain talent — the sort of man who buries his 
 talent in a napkin, thus hiding it from the world, 
 and maybe from himself; and who, as a result 
 goes about the world fluking things instead of 
 doing them — if Mr. Zangwill had said that it 
 takes this kind of man to sire a genius I would be 
 the more inclined to agree with him. 
 
 A genius is the only free man. All other men 
 — one hates to have to use this kind oi cliche, but 
 in the present instance there seems to be no help 
 for it — all other men, then, are the slaves of their 
 heredity and environment, instead of being the' 
 masters thereof. And not a thousand Max Nor- 
 daus, nor a million of his disciples, shall convince 
 me that genius is ever decadent. On the con- 
 trary, genius is always the supreme expression of 
 some one or other among the highest aspirations 
 of which mankind is capable. And I am not now- 
 narrowing genius down to the genius of art or 
 literature or music, or even religion. There is a 
 genius of devotion, of self-sacrifice, of martyr- 
 dom. There is perhaps even that genius which 
 Carlyle comically defines as an infinite capacity 
 
 i68 
 
THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 
 
 for taking pains : that kind of genius which de- 
 votes a Hfetime to the study of (say) toxic alka- 
 loids, and thus adds one more good grain of mor- 
 tar to the Temple of Science. There are as many 
 kinds of genius as there are fields of activity still 
 left open for mankind to explore. 
 
 And there, it may be, you have the secret of 
 genius: the genius is an explorer, a pioneer. He 
 follows his bent to its logical conclusion, often- 
 times not knowing whither it will lead him, 
 but following it resolutely, unfalteringly, until it 
 brings him up against the mysterious Something 
 he has been searchinsf for. You know how the 
 natural, simple, straightforward, innocent child 
 will wander out into a wide field on tottering feet 
 in quest of it knows not what, and moon along 
 and re-discover all sorts of old things and exult 
 in them as new miracles. To such a child the 
 perpetual parental injunction: "Come back!" 
 " Don't go there ! " " You must not do that, say 
 that, touch that ! " is usually fatal. At first the 
 child rebels, pursues his course, and then . . . 
 is caught up and dragged away and perhaps 
 knocked about ... for its ultimate good, of 
 course. The child thereupon begins to realise 
 with a sort of weary bitter heart-sickness that 
 this is a world of forbidden things, a world of 
 prohibitions and denials. It is very annoying, 
 very stultifying, very unsatisfactory. But being 
 only a child he gives in at last to superior force 
 169 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 or for the sake of the loaves and fishes, acquiesces 
 languidly in an accepted order of things, and 
 gradually schools himself little by little to follow 
 the line of least resistance. He is less fortunate 
 than the child of the untutored savage who, being 
 flung headlong into a deep pool, must needs swim 
 by instinct for dear life. 
 
 Little Charles D ickens, cursed and blessed with 
 parents who had no guiding principles at all, who 
 drifted before the winds of circumstance like balls 
 of thistledown in a gale, was spared the iron hand || 
 of discipline, thwarting and crippling him. Some 
 rudimentary morality, of course ; some glimmer- 
 ings of a Most High; some conception of a co- 
 ordinated scheme of things in which each human 
 atom was cast to play its appointed part; some dim 
 perception of a vast abstraction, vaguely and var- 
 iously referred to as Civilisation, Decency, Re- ■ 
 spectability, Public Opinion, Right and Wrong, 
 and so on : some sense of all these queer social 
 anomalies was inevitably grafted upon his green 
 bourgeoning mind,andduly fulfilled their function 
 in colouring its tone and coarsening its texture. 
 But apart from these limitations of his natural 
 proclivities, he was mercifully exempt from those 
 deadly restraining influences under which chil- 
 dren more amenable to authority wilt into youth 
 and fade into manhood or womanhood. 
 
 Imagine Dickens as the only son of a Noncon- 
 formist parson, with a Quakeress for a mother. 
 
 170 
 
THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 
 
 Even then he would, no doubt, being a genius, 
 have achieved some measure of emancipation. 
 He would have moved more freely than his fel- 
 lows, but only within or only a little beyond their 
 limits. As the twig is bent so is the tree inclined ; 
 but the tree that stands alone stretches straight 
 up toward the sky. 
 
 " Pray, Mr. Dickens,"someone asked of Char- 
 les' father, " where was your son educated ? " 
 
 ** Why, indeed, sir — ha, ha ! — he may be said 
 to have educated himself," was the reply. 
 
 An apt rejoinder enough, in a way; but itwould 
 have been truer to say that " Life in her creak- 
 ing shoes," with her cruel birch, had been his real 
 schoolmistress. 
 
 John Dickens was one of those men who are 
 loved not for themselves, but for what they might 
 have been if they were other than they are. This 
 is not too clear, perhaps ; but I think it expresses 
 the cloudy fact, which is, that there are certain of 
 our fellow-creatures who seem to exhale a sort 
 of aura of goodwill and good-humour through 
 which it is well-nigh impossible to pierce to the 
 sorry reality of flesh and blood, heart and mind. 
 They not only deceive themselves, but in some 
 indefinable way succeed in deceiving others also. 
 They believe that they are wise ; and, though 
 they are foolish, the world shares their belief. 
 They believe that they are uniformlyunfortunate 
 171 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS - 
 
 in all that they undertake ; and, although their il 
 repeated failures are obviously due to their own 
 ineptitude the world sympathises with them, and 
 agrees with them, " They mean well," it is said; 
 and their good intentions count for more than 
 other men's good deeds. I think that John Dick- 
 ens was that kind of man. 
 
 At the time of Charles' birth he was a clerk, 
 under Government, in the navy-pay office sta- 
 tioned at Portsmouth. 
 
 When Charles was two years old the family re- 
 moved to Chatham. There they stayed for eight 
 years, and then, in 1822, John Dickens was re- 
 called to Somerset House. In the winter of that 
 year he departed by coach for London, accom- 
 panied by his wife and children, with the excep- 
 tion of Charles, who was left behind for a few 
 weeks longer in the care of a schoolmaster, Wil- 
 liam Giles. 
 
 It was during these few weeks of separation 
 from his parents and brothers and sisters that the 
 lonely little boy, probably in search of relief from 
 his loneliness, made his first intimate acquain- 
 tance with books. Says he : 
 
 My father had left a small collection of books in 
 a little room upstairs to which I had access (for it 
 adjoined my own), and which nobody else in our 
 house ever troubled. From that blessed little 
 room, Roderick Random^ Peregrine Pickle^ Hum- 
 
 172 
 
THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 
 
 phry Clinker, Tom J ones, The Vicar of Wakejieldy 
 Don Quixote, Gil Bias, diVid. Robinson Crusoe c^mQ 
 out, a glorious host, to keep me company. 
 
 But very soon — all too soon, perhaps, seeing 
 what new friends Charles had lately made — the 
 day arrived for him to follow the rest of the Dick- 
 ens family to London. It was in the early spring 
 of 1823 that Charles Dickens entered London 
 for the first time. His first impressions, how- 
 ever, were not of the brightest, he having (as he 
 afterwards observed) "exchanged everything 
 that had given his ailing little life its picturesque- 
 ness or sunshine " for the comparatively sordid 
 environment of a London suburb, and suffered 
 the deprivation of the companionship of his play- 
 fellows at Chatham to become a solitary lad under 
 circumstances that could not fail (says Mr. Kit- 
 ton) to make sorrowful the stoutest heart, not the 
 least depressing being his father's money involve- 
 ment with consequent poverty at home. John 
 Dickens, whose financial affairs demanded re- 
 trenchment, had rented "a mean small tenement" 
 in Bayham Street, Camden Town. 
 
 The misery and depression of spirits from 
 which Charles suffered whilst living here must 
 be attributed (Mr. Kitton goes on to say) to 
 family adversity and his own isolated condition 
 rather than to the character of his environment. 
 At this time his father's pecuniary resources 
 173 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 became so circumscribed as to compel the obser- 
 vance of the strictest domestic economy, and pre- 
 vented him from continuing his son's education. 
 " As I thought," said Dickens on one occasion 
 very bitterly, " in the little back-garret in Bay- 
 ham Street, of all I had lost in losing Chatham, 
 what would I have given — if I had had anything 
 to give — to have been sent back to any other 
 school, to have been taught something any- 
 where ! " 
 
 Instead of improvingthe elder Dickens' affairs 
 went from bad to worse, and all ordinary efforts 
 to propitiate his creditors having been exhausted, 
 Mrs. Dickens laudably resolved to attempt a so- 
 lution of the difficulty by means of a school for 
 young ladies. 
 
 Says Forster, of this desperate epoch : 
 
 The time was now come for her to exert herself, 
 she said; and she "must do something." The 
 godfather down at Limehouse was reported to 
 have an Indian connection. People in the East 
 Indies always sent their children home to be I 
 educated. She would set up a school. They ■ 
 would all grow rich by it. And then, thought the 
 sick boy, "perhaps even I might go to school my- 
 self." 
 
 A house wassoon foundat number four,Gower , 
 StreetNorth;abrass plate on the door announced f 
 
 174 
 
THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 
 
 Mrs. Dickens' Establishment; and the result 
 may be given in the exact words of the then small 
 actor in the comedy, whose hopes it had raised 
 so high. ** I left, at a great many doors, a great 
 many circulars calling attention to the merits of 
 the establishment. Yet nobody ever came to 
 school, nor do I recollect that anybody ever pro- 
 posed to come, or that the least preparation was 
 ever made to receive anybody. But I know that 
 we got on very badly with the butcher and the 
 baker ; that very often we had not too much for 
 dinner ; and that at last my father was arrested." 
 The interval between the sponging-house and 
 the prison was passed by the sorrowful lad in 
 running errands and carrying messages for the 
 prisoner, delivered with swollen eyes and through 
 shining tears ; and the last words said to him by 
 his father before he was finally carried to the 
 Marshalsea were to the effect that the sun had set 
 upon him for ever. " I really believed at the 
 time," said Dickens, "that they had broken my 
 heart." 
 
 Of Dickens' first visit to the Marshalsea he has 
 written thus in a letter that was afterwards turn- 
 ed to account in David Copperfield : 
 
 My father was waiting for me in the lodge, 
 and we went up to his room (on the top storey 
 but one) and cried very much. And he told me, 
 I remember, to take warning by the Marshalsea, 
 175 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a 
 year, and spent nineteen pounds, nineteen shill- 
 ings, and sixpence, he would be happy ; but that 
 a shilling spent the other way would make him 
 wretched. I see the fire we sat before, now; with 
 two bricks inside the rusted grate, one on each 
 side, to prevent its burning too many coals. Some 
 other debtor shared the room with him, who came 
 in by-and-by ; and as the dinner was a joint stock 
 repast, I was sent up to " Captain Porter " in the 
 room overhead, with Mr. Dickens' compliments, 
 and I was his son, and could he, Captain P., lend 
 me a knife and fork ? 
 
 Captain Porter lent the knife and fork, with his 
 compliments in return. There was a very dirty 
 lady in his little room ; and two wan girls, his 
 daughters, with shock heads of hair. I thought I 
 should not have liked to borrow Captain Porter's 
 comb. The Captain himself was in the last extre- 
 mity of shabbiness ; and if I could draw at all, I 
 would draw an accurate portrait of the old, old, 
 brown great-coat he wore, with no other coat be- 
 low it. His whiskers were large. I saw his bed 
 rolled up in a corner ; and I knew (God knows 
 how) that the two girls with the shock heads 
 were Captain Porter's natural children, and that 
 the dirty lady was not married to Captain P. 
 
 This Captain Porter was, obviously, the origi- 
 nal of Captain Hopkins in David Copperfield. 
 
 And then the luck turned, as luck always does 
 
 176 
 
THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 
 
 turn for men of the John Dickens type, though bet- 
 ter men starve. 
 
 A rather considerable legacy from a relative 
 accrued to John Dickens. This, in addition to the 
 official pension due for long service at Somerset 
 House, enabled him to meet his financial respon- 
 sibilities, with the result that the Marshalsea 
 knew him no more. 
 
 Charles, however, still remained in the black- 
 ing business, until, as the result of a quarrel be- 
 tween John Dickens and James Lamert, who had 
 obtained the post for the boy, the father declared 
 that his son should leave and go to school instead. 
 
 He went to school, at Wellington House Aca- 
 demy, in Granby Street, Hampstead Road. Wel- 
 lington House Academy, and its proprietor, Mr. 
 William Jones, are satirised as Salem House and 
 lAv.Qr&dtkX&mDavidCoppef'jfield. There Charles 
 remained for two years, "without achieving any 
 particular distinction as a pupil," which, in the 
 circumstances, was not remarkable. And that 
 was all the scholastic education Dickens ever re- 
 ceived. 
 
 On leaving school Charles was immediately 
 sent to work. He went as office-boy to a Mr. Mol- 
 loy, a solicitor. His father, however, presently 
 transferred him to another firm, with whom he 
 stayed for three or four years. 
 
 Meanwhile John Dickenshad learnt shorthand 
 and obtained an appointment as reporter on the 
 177 M 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 Morning Herald. In the profession of journal- 
 ism Charles followed him in 1828, and six years] 
 afterward achieved fame with Pickwick. 
 
 Two years later we find him journeying to 
 Exeter to make a new home for his prodigal 
 parents in that locality, and there they settled. 
 That he had done more than his duty by them is 
 apparent from one of his letters in which he de- 
 scribes the cottage he rented for them, and its 
 surroundings. "I do assure you," he says, writing] 
 to his friend, Mr. Thomas Mitton, "that I ami 
 charmed with the place and the beauty of the ' 
 country round about, though I have not seen it 
 under very favourable circumstances. ... It is j 
 really delightful, and when the house is to rights 
 and the furniture all in, I shall be quite sorry to! 
 leave it. . . . The situation is charming; meadows 
 in front; an orchard running parallel to the garden 
 hedge, richly wooded hills closing in the prospect 
 behind, and, away to the left, before a splendid 
 view of the hill on which Exeter is situated, the 
 cathedral towers rising up into the sky in the most: 
 picturesque manner possible. I don't think I ever 
 saw so cheerful and pleasant a spot." 
 
 Thus Mr. and Mrs. John Dickens rode safely 
 into harbour, and so remained at anchorage at 
 last — until 1851, when the father died. He was 
 buried in Highgate cemetery, and the tombstone 
 placed over him by his illustrious son offers tribute 
 
 178 
 
THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 
 
 to his " zealous, useful, cheerful spirit." His wife 
 survived him twelve years. 
 
 Such is the record of John Dickens, a typical 
 Englishman, with the typical English habit of 
 muddling along, of muddling through, somehow, 
 anyhow. He was, essentially, you know, rather a 
 rascal ; but a genial rascal, a rascal with a flourish 
 and an air. He swindled poor tradesmen out of 
 their store ; but he had a saving grace, which is 
 lacking from some others of his kidney, in that he 
 swindled them without at the same time patron- 
 ising and scorning them. I am pretty sure that he 
 addressed his infuriated bootmaker or tailor as 
 " My dear Mr. Snob ... or Snip," as the case 
 might be. I am pretty sure that when he called 
 to give a fresh order for wine he was careful to 
 be polite to the vintner's wife, paying her courtly 
 compliments, and to take kindly notice of the vint- 
 ner's children, patting them on the head, pinch- 
 ing their cheeks, and even scattering largess of 
 pennies among them. He was hail-fellow-well- 
 met with all classes alike. He would be that kind 
 of man. And there are many of his kind to be met 
 with, nowadays as thenadays, at the clubs and 
 elsewhere. But . . . the ugly doubt obtrudes : 
 Was there not something rather mean and shabby 
 and furtive beneath all this magnificence and 
 magniloquence .'* 
 
 It is to be borne in mind that he started life as 
 179 
 
1 
 
 THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 a clerk under Government : as one of that species 
 of superior being blessed above all that toil and 
 spin : a Civil Servant — and trebly blessed in those 
 days, when an influential friend and not a vulgar 
 competitive examination was the only Open Ses- 
 ame to a fine fat sinecure. If he had been some 
 poor devil of an artist or author, chopping his 
 brains into faggots to keep the domestic pot a- 
 boiling, there would have been some excuse for 
 his thriftlessness. But he married on an assured 
 income. He knew just exactly what his prospects | 
 were. He had a pension to look forward to. 
 Moreover he had given hostages to Fortune, 
 and it was his plain bounden duty to redeem his 
 pledge by so ordering his life as to balance equit- 
 ably his liabilities with his assets. Indeed he 
 seems to have been wantonly and even wickedly 
 reckless and improvident ; one suspects some 
 gross and callous self-indulgence somewhere. 
 He was " thoughtless," as we say, which, being 
 interpreted, means " heartless," more often than 
 not. He was one of those who can smile and 
 smile and be a villain with impunity, with credit 
 even. The base sordid fact of his being cravenly 
 incapable of facing the world and holding him- 
 self erect under the burden of his obligations he 
 cloaked within a rare embroidery of fine words 
 and swept aside with spacious gestures. His 
 little boy he cast with one of those gestures to 
 the winds of chance. And even when his fortunes 
 
 i8o 
 
THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 
 
 were retrieved, by no merit of his, he let his little 
 boy drudge on in menial servitude, uncared for 
 and alone, only withdrawing him from that de- 
 grading employment, in order to vindicate his 
 own flatulent dignity, after having had a tiff with 
 the brother-in-law who had befriended him in his 
 hour of need. For two years his sense of outraged 
 dignity sustained him in the performance of his 
 fatherly duty ; and then his child is once more 
 pitched neck and crop into the world, to work 
 again at the first sorry trade that offers : at any 
 trade, it matters not what, so long as it brings in 
 a few shillings a week, though by this time John 
 Dickens was drawing his pension and earning 
 other money besides by his reporting. Truly there 
 is a touch of colossal selfishness, almost criminal, 
 in this attitude of the improvident, indifferent fa- 
 ther towardthe eager, willing, loving childof light 
 whom he has begotten. 
 
 So, he runs — or rather saunters easily along — 
 his flower-strewn course ; accepts the blessings 
 that Fate in the person of his wonder-child drops 
 into his lap ; accepts them as the tardy reward of 
 hisvirtue,thecompensationfor his long-suffering; 
 and so dies at last in the patriarchal style, in an 
 odour of sanctity, and is buried under a tribute of 
 blind love and misguided devotion. 
 
 Some of the great Micawber's more eccentric 
 foibles were borrowed from the personality of a 
 queerliterarygent., named Thomas Powell, whom 
 i8i 
 
li 
 
 THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 Dickens met in America, and many of whose 
 strange idiosyncrasies were described at some 
 length in the Boston hidex some years ago. He 
 also was a man with a large family. He also could 
 be embarrassingly confidential on the smallest 
 possible provocation. He also had a mania for 
 writing letters in the flamboyant style; it is said 
 that he would write them to people who were 
 staying in the same hotel, the same house, and 
 even in the same room with him. But Mr. Powell 
 does not matter much, I think. The fact stands 
 that essentially Micawber was deliberately and 
 consciously founded on John Dickens by the one 
 man who knew him best and least, his son. 
 
 "The longer I live the better man I think 
 him," said Dickens toward the end of his career, 
 speaking of his father ; and at scattered intervals 
 throughout his life he bore testimony to the affec- 
 tionate esteem in which he held his father's mem- 
 ory, thus : 
 
 ' I know my father to be as kind-hearted and gener- 
 ous a man as ever lived in the world. Everything 
 that I can remember of his conduct to his wife 
 or children or friends, in sickness or affliction, is 
 beyond all praise. By me, as a sick child, he 
 has watched night and day,unweariedlyand pati- 
 ently, many nights and days. He never under- 
 took any business, charge, or trust, that he did 
 notzealously,conscientiously,punctually,honour- 
 
 182 
 
 
THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 
 
 ably discharge. His industry has always been un- 
 tiring. He was proud of me in his way, and had 
 a great admiration of my comic singing. But, in 
 the ease of his temper, and the straitness of his 
 means, he appeared to have utterly lost at this 
 time the idea of educating me at all, and to have 
 utterly put from him the notion that I had any 
 claim upon him, in that regard, whatever. So I 
 degenerated into cleaning his boots of a morn- 
 ing, and my own ; and making myself useful in 
 the work of the little house ; and looking after my 
 younger brothers and sisters (we were now six in 
 all) and going on such poor errands as arose out 
 of our poor way of living./ 
 
 That is in serious, these in lighter, vein : 
 
 If you should have an opportunity, pendente lite, 
 as my father would observe — indeed did on some 
 memorable ancient occasions when he informed 
 me that the ban-dogs would shortly have him at 
 bay. . . . 
 
 There has arrived a characteristic letter for Kate 
 from my father. He dates it Manchester, and says 
 he has reason to believe that he will be in town 
 with the pheasants, on or about the first of Oc- 
 tober. He has been with Fanny in the Isle of 
 Man for nearly two months ; finding there, as he 
 goes on to observe, troops of friends, and every 
 description of Continental luxury at a cheap 
 rate. . . . 
 183 
 
m 
 
 THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 I have a letter from my father lamenting the fine 
 weather, invoking congenial tempests, and in- 
 forming me that it will not be possible for him to 
 stay more than another year in Devonshire, as 
 he must then proceed to Paris to consolidate 
 Augustus's French. ... 
 
 Describing the departure from Genoa of an 
 English physician and acquaintance, he says : 
 
 We are very sorry to lose the benefit of his advice , 
 — or, as my father would say, to be deprived, to '| 
 £1 certain extent, of the concomitant advantages, 
 whatever they may be, resultingfromhis medical 
 skill, such as it is,and his professional attendance, 
 in so far as it may be so considered. 
 
 In the same way also it delighted Dickens to 
 recall that it was of one of his connections that 
 his father wrote this truly wonderful sentence : 
 
 And I must express my tendency to believe that 
 his longevity is. (to say the least of it) extremely 
 problematical. 
 
 It was to another connection, who had been in- 
 sisting somewhat obtrusively on dissenting and 
 nonconformist superiorities, that he addressed 
 the following : 11 
 
 The Supreme Being must be an entirely different 
 
 184 
 
MRS JOHN DICKENS 
 "Mrs Nickleby" 
 
THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 
 
 individual from what I have every reason to be- 
 lieve him to be, if he would care in the least for 
 the society of your relations. 
 
 Comic, indeed ! Quite in the style, apart from 
 its flashes of humour, of the most banal pomposi- 
 ties of " that pot of flat porter," Doctor Johnson! 
 But did not Dickens graft similar whimsicalities 
 on to some of his most abandoned scoundrels ? 
 
 And the wife of this unconscious humorist, 
 whose oddities made you laugh until the tears 
 came, distorting your vision, irradiating his out- 
 lines until they became a mere blur of brightness: 
 what of Mrs. Dickens, Charles Dickens' mother, 
 upon whom it is said that Mrs. Nickleby, the fool- 
 ish, vain, and flighty, frivolous and garrulous 
 and more than slightly selfish Mrs. Nickleby is 
 founded ? Dickens' only direct reference to his 
 mother is in relation to his emancipation from the 
 slavery of the blacking-factory. 
 
 My father said I should go back no more, and 
 should go to school. I do not write resentfully 
 or angrily, for I know how all these things have 
 worked together to make me what I am ; but I ne- 
 ver afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never 
 can forget, that my mother was warm for my be- 
 ing sent back. 
 185 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 In this brief allusion is matter forconsideration, 
 indeed ! First in Dickens' own frank acknow- 
 ledgment of the debt that his successful career 
 owed to his early experiences of hardship and 
 poverty and suffering ; and again in the revelation 
 it affords of the sort of woman his mother was. 
 
 Now there is extraordinarily little known of 
 the elder Mrs. Dickens. The many books written 
 around her son contain only the most cursory 
 mention of her name. But this fierce, bitter re- 
 ference to her (for Dickens' natural protest of 
 fealty may be ignored : he doth protest too much) 
 throws a vivid sidelight on her character. It ex- 
 plains a strange deficiency in all Dickens' books : 
 a deficiency in the sense that whereas most men 
 recall throughout their lives a feeling of intense 
 love and duty and gratitude toward their mothers* 
 memory, Dickens' work is strikingly free from 
 any expression, definite or implied, of this feel- 
 ing. There is not a real mother in all his crowded 
 gallery of immortal figures; David Copperfield's 
 mother is just an inane, pretty-pretty abstraction, U 
 and that is all. With two exceptions, in Nicholas ' 
 Nickleby and Barnaby Rudge, his heroes have i 
 all been bereft of their mothers in their infancy, j 
 The mother of Barnaby Rudge is a mere melo- j 
 dramatic figure. Remains, then, Mrs. Nickleby, } 
 who — we have the author's own word for it — | 
 was his own mother in disguise : an empty- 
 headed, foolish, vain gossip whom her children 
 
 i86 
 
 i 
 
THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 
 
 have to humour and coax at every turn with the 
 patient, long-suffering kindness that one shows 
 toward a naughty, intractable child. But we 
 have seen the kind of father Dickens had : a 
 very poor kind ; yet Dickens loved him dearly, 
 proving that he did not want in filial affection. 
 May it not be, then, since he was habitually so 
 reticent about his mother, and betrays in his 
 writings so poor a sense of the inestimable bless- 
 ing of a good mother, that he was unfortunate in 
 this parent ; and that to the lack of a wise and 
 worthy mother's influence is due one of the most 
 serious defects in his mental equipment : a de- 
 fect that manifests itself in his alternately maud- 
 lin or cheapening or flippant treatment of the 
 whole sex ? 
 
 The mother of a great man is always import- 
 ant. Her character cannot fail to have a vital 
 effect on the character of her son. One might 
 suggest, then, perhaps, that Dickens' always 
 slightly contemptuous attitude toward the things 
 he had not taken the trouble to understand was 
 in fact an hereditary trait directly derived from 
 his mother. The idea is put forward diffidently, 
 but in all seriousness, as a possible explanation 
 of Dickens' more obvious inconsistencies and 
 limitations. 
 
 " I know how all these things have worked to- 
 gether to make me what I am," says Dickens. 
 187 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 And there is a certain note of poignancy in 
 that utterance, a certain abrupt trenchancy and 
 depth of feeling, a warrant of acute perception, 
 an evidence of profound philosophy, which Dick- 1 
 ens is generally artist enough to keep out of his ■ 
 published work. You might read Dickens from 
 end to end, as one reads idle tales, and never 
 discover that he was a philosopher at all. Many 
 have. Many do. There are some who deny him 
 the possession of any cohesive philosophy ; be- 
 cause, forsooth, he is not as one of those inferior 
 flashy tradesmen who put all their wares in the 
 window and keep nothing in the shop. 
 
 But . . . there can be no philosophy without 
 suffering ; and equally is it true that no one who 
 has suffered and lived and come through can be 
 other than a philosopher. To suggest, as some 
 do, that Dickens, from first to last, maintained (as 
 he did) his divinely sane standpoint toward all 
 things of life and death and the Great Beyond by 
 a series of gorgeous flukes : this is merely to foam 
 at the mouth. 
 
 Thomas Carlyle could foam a little, at times; 
 but he was, after all, a keen judge of men, and af- 
 ter Dickens' death he wrote, in a letter of condol- 
 ence to his nearest and dearest : 
 
 " It is almost thirty years since my acquaint- 
 ance with him began ; and on my side, I may say, 
 every new meeting ripened it into more and more 
 
 i88 
 
THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 
 
 clear discernment of his rare and great worth as 
 a brother man: a most cordial, sincere, clear-sight- 
 ed, quietly decisive, just, and loving man: till at 
 length he had grown to such a recognition with 
 me as I have rarely had for any man of my time. 
 This I can tell you three, for it is true and will be 
 welcome to you: to others less concerned I had 
 as soon not speak on such a subject." To one other 
 less concerned he wrote : " I am profoundly sorry 
 foryozt, and indeed for myself, and for us all. It is 
 an event world-wide; a uniqtie of talents sudden- 
 ly extinct ; and has eclipsed, we two may say, ' the 
 harmless gaiety of nations.' No death since 1 866 
 has fallen on me with such a stroke. No literary 
 man's hitherto ever did. The good, the gentle, 
 high-gifted, ever-friendly, noble Dickens — every 
 inch of him an honest man." 
 
 I am a little impatient of thatlastflourish. "An 
 Honest Man " savours somewhat of condescen- 
 sion. It is beside the mark, too, as it affects the pub- 
 lic side of Dickens. Dickens was honest, of course. 
 But he was not blatantly, indecently honest: nor 
 did he flaunt his honesty in the face of his reader, 
 as I think Thackeray, for instance, did sometimes. 
 Dickens was not given to any overt form of self- 
 revelation. Indeed there was never an author of 
 his calibre whoso persistently andconsistentlyhid 
 himself behind his characters as Dickens did. 
 With the result that there are already almost as 
 189 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 many versions of the man Dickens as there are 
 people who remember him in the flesh. I have | 
 talked with some of his contemporaries and have 
 been amazed at the diversity of their varying im- 
 pressions of his personality. In a few more de- 
 cades I predict that he will be as much a mystery 
 as Edgar Allan Poe. In a century or so he will 
 have grown into the proportions of a myth. In 
 two or three hundred years it may be abundantly 
 proved that not only he, but George Eliot and 
 Thackeray and Charlotte Bronte also, were Geo- 
 rge Henry Lewes. 
 
 But, seriously speaking, all this points, I think, 
 to the truth that Dickens was essentially a self- 
 contained and self-sufficient man. Underneath 
 all that bubbling effervescence of his perennial 
 youth, his high spirits and his gay insouciance, 
 there was all the time the grave, sad, moody man 
 who peers forth at us from those later portraits of 
 him that photography has made the most familiar 
 to us. And these innate powers of stern reserve 
 and self-restraint which were never broken down j 
 in his moments of freest expansion, were fostered 
 in him in his childhood: in that wonderful child- 
 hood which he never quite outgrew: that child- 
 hood of precocious knowledge and wise inno- 
 cence, of incongruous kinship with the poor in- 
 articulate victims of social injustice, of whom 
 he too was one, in the dark days of his servi- 
 tude. 
 
 190 
 
 i 
 
THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 
 
 **I know how all these things have worked to- 
 gether to make me what I am." 
 
 Father, mother, the blacking-factory, the drud- 
 gery, the Marshalsea, the squalid lodgings and 
 mean makeshifts, the uncouth companions and 
 grotesque associates of his tender infancy : Mrs. 
 Pipchin, who was really Mrs. Roylance, the lady 
 of Little College Street who took children in to 
 board, Charles among them ; Captain Porter, 
 whom we have already glimpsed; and Mealy Po- 
 tatoes, Bob Fagin in the flesh, his chum and cham- 
 pion at Warren's, of whom he writes in David 
 Copperjield : 
 
 Mick Waller . . . informed me that our princi- 
 pal associate would be another boy whom he in- 
 troduced by the — to me — extraordinary name of 
 Mealy Potatoes. I discovered, however, that this 
 youth had not been christened by that name, but 
 that it had been bestowed upon him in the ware- 
 house, on account of his complexion, which was 
 pale or mealy. Mealy's father was a waterman, 
 who had the additional distinction of being a fire- 
 man, and was engaged as such at one of the large 
 theatres ; where some young relation of Mealy's 
 — I think his little sister — did Imps in the Panto- 
 mimes. 
 
 Of all that queer group there is only one who 
 seems to have been in any sense a congenial com- 
 191 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 panion for little Charles. That one notable excep- 
 tion was his sister Fanny. Of his other brothers 
 and sisters we know curiously little; but some 
 shadowylikenessof Fanny Dickens has been pre- 
 served, it is said, in the figure of Fanny Dorrit, 
 a vain, pretty, wilful, spoilt darling — first of mis- 
 fortune, and then of fortune. Fanny Dickens 
 seems to have been in some sort a fellow-spirit. 
 In Dickens' later youth she seems to have been 
 keenly interested in his theatrical ambitions, andli 
 to have aided and abetted his attempts to go 
 upon the stage as an actor. Charles had written 
 to Barclay, who was stage manager at Covent 
 Garden, telling him with the exquisite effrontery 
 of youth how old he was, and exactly what he 
 thought he could do : how that he believed he had 
 a strong perception of character and oddity, and 
 a natural power of reproducing in his own person 
 what he observed in others. There must have 
 been something in his letter that impressed the 
 authorities, for they wrote to him with an ap- 
 pointment, suggesting that he should do some- 
 thing of Mathews'. " My sister Fanny was in . 
 the secret (he writes) and was to go with me to 
 play the songs." But when the day of trial camehe , 
 was laid up with a terrible bad cold and inflamma- 
 tion of the face ; and so somehow that particular 
 ambition subsided. 
 
 But the incident is significant as suggesting 
 that Fanny Dickens had some glimmerings of 
 
 192 
 
THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 
 
 what I must call, for lack of a better phrase, the 
 artistic temperament. 
 
 Whilst he was still engaged at his drudgery 
 at the blacking-factory, she had been elected as 
 a pupil of the Royal Academy of Music ; and 
 he has told what a stab to his heart it was, think- 
 ing of his own disregarded condition, to see her 
 go away to begin her education, amid the tearful 
 good wishes of everybody in the house. 
 
 A year or two later she won one of the prizes 
 offered to the Academy pupils. Charles, still at 
 his drudgery, went to see her receive the prize, 
 and writes thus of his emotions at witnessing this 
 event : "I could not bear to think of myself — be- 
 yond the reach of all such honourable emulation 
 and success. The tears ran down my face. I felt 
 as if my heart were rent. I prayed, when I went 
 to bed that night, to be lifted out of the humilia- 
 tion and neglect in which I was. I never had 
 suffered so much before. There was no envy in 
 this." 
 
 '* There was little need that he should say so," 
 is Forster's comment. " Extreme enjoyment in 
 witnessing the exercise of her talents, the utmost 
 pride in every success obtained by them, he mani- 
 fested always to a degree otherwise quiteunusual 
 with him." 
 
 Soon afterward she married that Mr. Henry 
 Burnett whom Dickenssostrangelyidealised; and 
 with her marriage her serious career as an artist 
 193 N 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 may be said to have come to an end. Ultimately 
 her health began to break down, and an inevit- 
 abletragedy was foreshadowed. "There seems to 
 be no doubt whatever thatFanny is inaconsump- 
 tion," wrote Dickens in 1846. She had broken 
 down in an attempt to sing at a party in Man- 
 chester; and subsequent examination by a doctor 
 revealed the sad cause. In 1848 she died ; and her 
 death opened the floodgates of reminiscence in 
 her bereaved brother's heart. 
 
 He recalled fondly how he and she had been 
 used to wander at night, as children, in a grim old 
 churchyard near their house, looking up at the 
 stars, and talking in awed whispers about them. 
 Something of the fancies that their childish ima- 
 gination wove about the splendours of that glit- 
 tering host, under cover of the stillness and the 
 dark, Dickens afterward embodied in his "Child's 
 Dream of a Star." 
 
 This chapter may appropriately conclude, I 
 think, with a morsel of the dainty fabric of that tale, 
 since it seems to me that therein is expressed, more 
 frankly than anywhere else in Dickens' work, 
 something of the wistfulness and vain longing 
 that transformed the barren wilderness in which 
 he lived as a child into a fairy playground. 
 
 There was once a child, and he strolled about 
 a good deal, and thought of a number of things. 
 
 194 
 
THE FAMILY PORTRAITS 
 
 He had a sister, who was a child too, and his con- 
 stant companion. These two used to wonder all 
 day long. They wondered at the beauty of the 
 flowers; they wondered at the height and blue- 
 ness of the sky ; they wondered at the depth of 
 the bright water ; they wondered at the good- 
 ness and the power of God who made the lovely 
 world. 
 
 They used to say to one another, sometimes, 
 Supposing all the children upon earth were to die, 
 would the flowers, and the water, and the sky be 
 sorry. For, said they, the buds are the children 
 of the flowers, and the little playful streams that 
 gambol down the hillsides are the children of the 
 water ; and the smallest bright specks playing at 
 hide and seek in the sky all night, must surely be 
 the children of the stars ; and they would all be 
 grieved to see their playmates, the children of 
 men, no more. 
 
 There was one clear shining star that used to 
 come out in the sky beforethe rest, near the church 
 spire, above the graves. It was larger and more 
 beautiful, they thought, than all the others, and 
 every night they watched for it, standing hand in 
 hand at a window. Whoever saw it first cried out, 
 " I see the star ! " And often they cried out both 
 together, knowing so well when it would rise, and 
 where. So they grew to be such friends with it, 
 that, before lying down in their beds, they always 
 looked out once again, to bid it good-night ; and 
 195 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS f 
 
 when they were turning round to sleep they used ^ 
 to say, " God bless the star ! " 
 
 The sister of the story went to live in that star 
 whilst she was yet a child. The sister of flesh and 
 blood lived in it all her life, I think. 
 
CHAPTER THE NINTH 
 ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
I 
 
 
CHAPTER NINE 
 
 OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
 MR. GILBERT CHESTERTON, WHO IS 
 sometimes more dazzling than illuminative, says 
 of the least known of Dickens' books: "It is called 
 A Child's History of England, but the child is 
 the writer and not the reader." Here, it seems 
 to me, Mr. Chesterton speaks truth ; but it is not 
 the truth about Charles Dickens : it is the truth 
 about Gilbert Chesterton. Only once did Dick- 
 ens consciously and deliberately adopt the atti- 
 tude of the average adult toward children, and 
 that was when he wrote the Child's History. At 
 all other times he is the immortal child whose 
 genius makes children of all of us altogether. At 
 all other times he is the inspired boy telling fairy 
 tales to the grown-ups. His Child's History was 
 in some sort a fairy tale also ; but with this differ- 
 ence that it is not inspired. It was indeed a labour 
 of love, and the labour is very apparent ; in all 
 Dickens' other works — and they are every one 
 of them labours of love — it is the love and not 
 the labour that vivifies them. But Mr. Chester- 
 ton, being himself a child, refuses to be taken in 
 by grandfather's top-hat, frock-coat, and specta- 
 cles, even when worn by a grand father. H e knows 
 the trick of that himself. He has often practised 
 it himself, with huge success. He is in the posi- 
 tion of a conjuror watching the sleight of hand of 
 199 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 another conjuror. " You can't deceive me, Mr. 
 Dickens," he says, not realising that it is always 
 unnecessary to deceive those who are only too 
 eager to deceive themselves. 
 
 In A Child's History of England Dickens for 
 a time puts aside the child and definitely assumes 
 the man. That this is so Mr. Chesterton, having 
 made his point, admits when he says : 
 
 A collection of the works of Dickens would be 
 incomplete in an essential as well as a literal 
 sense without his Child's History of England. It 
 may not be important as a contribution to his- 
 tory, but it is important as a contribution to bio- 
 graphy ; as a contribution to the character and 
 the career of the man who wrote it, a typical man 
 of his time. That he had made no personal his- 
 torical researches, that he had no special histori- 
 cal learning, that he had not had, in truth, even 
 anything that could be called a good education, 
 all this accentuates not the merit but at least the 
 importance of the book. For here we may read 
 in plain popular language, written by a man 
 whose genius for popular exposition has never 
 been surpassed among men, a brief account of 
 the origin and meaning of England as it seemed 
 to the average Englishman of that age. 
 
 But the average Englishman of any age is ne- 
 ver a child. 
 
 200 
 
 \ 
 
THE CHILDREN OF CHARLES DICKENS 
 WITH "GRIP" THE RAVEN 
 
OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
 Writing of another of Dickens' adventures in 
 history, Mr. Chesterton is, however, irrefutably 
 right when he says : 
 
 He wrote a book about two cities, one of which 
 he understood ; the other he did not understand. 
 And his description of the city he did not know is 
 almost better than his description of the city he 
 did know. This is the entrance of the unques- 
 tionable thing about Dickens: the thing called 
 genius ; the thing which everyone has to talk ab- 
 out directly and distinctly because no one knows 
 what it is. . . . His actual ignorance of France 
 went with amazing intuitive perception of the 
 truth about it. It is here that he has most clearly 
 the plain mark of the man of genius ; that he can 
 understand what he does not understand. 
 
 Dickenswas inspired to the studyof the French 
 Revolution and to the writingr of a romance about 
 it by the example and influence of Carlyle. . . . 
 Carlyle had read a great deal about the French 
 Revolution. Dickens had read nothing at all, ex- 
 cept Carlyle. Carlyle was a man who collected 
 his ideas by the careful collation of documents 
 and the verification of references. Dickens was 
 a man who collected his ideas from loose hints in 
 the streets, and those always the same streets ; as 
 I have said, he was a citizen of one city. Carlyle 
 was in his way learned ; Dickens was in every 
 way ignorant. Dickens was an Englishman cut 
 
 201 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 off from France ; Carlyle was a Scotsman histori- 
 cally connected with France. And yet, when all 
 this is said and certified, Dickens is more right 
 than Carlyle. Dickens' French Revolution is 
 probably more like the real French Revolution 
 than Carlyle's. 
 
 *' It is difficult (Mr. Chesterton goes on), if 
 not impossible, to state the grounds of this strong 
 conviction." It is so difficult, if not impossible, 
 that I am glad to be able to quote Mr. Chester- 11 
 ton in this connection, though at the same time 
 sorry that I have been forestalled in expressing 
 a precisely identical view- 
 
 Dickens was so bountifully endowed with the 
 true historic sense — that sense which visualises 
 the public and divines the private life of a nation 
 at each phase of its development — that it seems 
 a pity he should have made his History a history 
 for children written by a man, instead of a history 
 for men written by a child. There never has been 
 an author more jealous for the dignity of his art 
 than Dickens. And yet, because his art was so 
 purely instinctive, because he was so truly inspir- 
 ed, because(in short) he was a genius who achiev 
 ed his effects as it were by a series of gorgeous I 
 flukes, Dickens mistrusted his highest powers' 
 when he was tempted to match them against the \ 
 Powers That Be in a new field of enterprise.} 
 Like all men who are uneasily conscious of gaps; 
 
 202 
 
OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
 and lesions in their armour of learning he hesi- 
 tated to usehis mighty weapons against thefeeble 
 weapons of those whose armour appeared sound. 
 He did not realise that, once he had knocked 
 these antagonists down, their armour would pre- 
 vent them from ever getting up again without as- 
 sistance. 
 
 In writing Pickwick Papers, Barnaby Rudge^ 
 and A Tale of Two Cities, he seems to have 
 been wholly unaware that he was writing his- 
 tory ; and having no misgivings born of any 
 more serious purpose than a desire to achieve 
 certain picturesque effects, he succeeded, where 
 the accredited historians had failed, in giving an 
 air of absolute authenticity to his description of 
 peoples and periods that he had no first-hand 
 knowledge of and had never studied academic- 
 ally. 
 
 As I have said elsewhere, Pickwick Papers is 
 in many respects the greatest of Dickens' novels, 
 a quite unique masterpiece : unique if only in its 
 blending together of the finest qualities of both 
 the picaresque romance and the novel of man- 
 ners ; in the evidences of unexampled high spirits 
 that irradiate its pages ; in its inexhaustible viv- 
 acity and stupendous comic force; its nimble wit 
 and inimitable drollery; its prodigality of inven- 
 tion in incident andcharacter ; but, above all, in its 
 fidelity to truth, which makes it perhaps the best 
 mirror of an age — an era — extant in any lan- 
 203 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 guage, the value of which, to history alone, is in- 
 calculable. In its portrayal of the manners and 
 customs, the speech and opinions and everyday 
 doings of the period and the people with which 
 it deals, it is beyond question or cavil one of the 
 most remarkable achievements in English litera- 
 ture. 
 
 It is all this, and yet it has to do with an epoch 
 that had almost passed away when Dickens was 
 quite a young man. But (it will be objected) 
 he could remember it all. And that is so : he 
 could remember it all — but only because he was 
 a genius, only because he remained a child all his 
 life. The average man, you and I : what do we 
 remember of the scenes and incidents, the com- 
 panions and the experiences, of our childhood ? 
 We remember many things, many people, that 
 never were or ever could be in this world. The 
 mists of time have distorted our vision so that, 
 looking back, we see nothing aright. Many of us 
 still think of our schoolmasters as men about nine 
 feet high. Our growth has been so gradual that 
 we do not seem to have grown at all. Thus we 
 have lost our sense of proportion, which is only 
 another name for that quality which makes one 
 man in a million great, and the lack of which 
 causes ninety-nine out of every hundred millions 
 to misunderstand the great man. It is our lack of 
 that sense which blinds us to the glory of Dick- 
 ens' achievement in re-creating the environment 
 
 204 
 
OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
 and the atmosphere of the days of his childhood, 
 as he did in every one of his books, but most 
 notably in the most carelessly written of them all, 
 Pickwick Papers. 
 
 Dickens would have been much surprised, as 
 perhaps the reader is surprised, if you had told 
 him that in writing Pickimck Pape7^s he was writ- 
 ing history. He would have replied that the book 
 was a purely imaginative account of the imagi- 
 nary doings and sayings of imaginary people. 
 And he would have been both right and wrong. 
 He would have been right in so far as the actual 
 adventures and adventurers were spun out of 
 the stuff of his dreams ; but he would have been 
 wrong in the implication that they were any less 
 real than sheer realities. They were more real 
 than any realities, because they were more pro- 
 bable, and because they gave form and unity to 
 a whole world : they expressed a world in minia- 
 ture. 
 
 Isolated scenes and characters, incidents and 
 utterances, though they be literal transcripts from 
 life, are never so true to life as typical things and 
 happenings. You will findmoretypical John Bulls 
 among the cab-drivers of Paris than throughout 
 the length and breadth of England, which is not 
 to say, however, that John Bull is a typical French- 
 man : John Bull still remains a truer type of the 
 Englishman than any individual English farmer. 
 205 
 
^ 
 
 THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 And in the same way, though you search London, 
 you shall not find a Cockney who is half such a 
 Cockney as Sam Weller . . . who never existed, 
 but who yet remains and will forever remain the 
 typical Cockney. 
 
 Dickens, in Pickwick Papers^ created a milieu 
 and set a group of puppets in the midst of it that 
 were more eloquent of the life and times of the 
 early nineteenth century than any collection of 
 real men and women in any real surroundings 
 could possibly have been. In that way he made 
 history dance to hispiping; inthat wayhe clothed 
 its dry bones with flesh and blood and breathed 
 into it the breath of life and made of it a living I 
 thing. He discovered, by happy accident, that ' 
 history, after all, should not be mainly a matter 
 of dates and a record of the lives of kings and 
 other exceptional people, but a survey of the 
 gradual evolution of a nation from its primitive 
 beginnings to its apogee. For just as a man is not 
 to be known by his official biography, as set forth 
 in the usual reference books, but by his home life, 
 so it is with a nation. After a day spent in a cot- 
 tage on the slopes of Plinlimmon, you will know 
 far more about the Welsh than after many years 
 spent in the British Museum. 
 
 Xvi Pickwick Papers Dickens wrote history — 
 but without knowing it — because he wrote about 
 the commonplaces of everyday existence : those 
 commonplaces which are more momentous than 
 
 206 
 
OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
 any wars and more significant than any changes 
 of dynasty. In Barnaby Rudge and in A Tale of 
 Two Cities Dickens wrote history — still without 
 knowing it — because he wrote about the little 
 people who make history and not about the big 
 people who are made or marred by it. 
 
 I f you set the real Lord George Gordon against 
 the figmentary Simon Tappertit, and Dennis the 
 hangman beside Hugh of the Maypole, and Fou- 
 lon beside theDefarges.you will find the figments 
 rather more alive than the realities, but all alike 
 are stamped with the unmistakable hall-mark of 
 the Dickens mintage. There was a poor unfortu- 
 nate lunatic named Lord George Gordon, there 
 was a hangman named Dennis, and there was a 
 real Foulon. These people were born and lived 
 and died. But there was never a Simon Tappertit 
 or a Maypole Hugh or a Monsieur or Madame 
 Defarge : that is to say, there were never any 
 persons bearing those names, perhaps ; but cer- 
 tainly there were countless hordes wearing their 
 bodies, thinking with their brains, suffering as 
 they suffered, feeling as they felt, moved by the 
 same heart-stirrings. And when the scholiasts, 
 like vultures, haddone picking at their dead flesh, 
 leaving only the dry skeletons ; and when the 
 skeletons, having been articulated by thepedants, 
 had crumbled into dust, then it was the turn of 
 genius, it was the heaven-appointed function of 
 genius, to re-animate that dust. 
 207 
 
1 
 
 hes I 
 
 THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 In an American edition oi A Tale of Two Cities 
 there is an editorial note in which it is said that 
 " one book for which Dickens is reputed to have 
 had a special liking, and of which he never tired, 
 was Carlyle's History of the French Revolution^ 
 and while working on the Tale of Two Cities he 
 asked Carlyle if he might see one of the works 
 referred to in the History, whereupon Carlyle 
 packed up and sent down to Gadshill all his re- 
 ference volumes, and Dickens read them faith- 
 fully and to profitable use." Did he ? I find no 
 warrant for the statement. It is probable that 
 Dickens read The French Revolution pretty 
 thoroughly. We know that he did at least dip 
 into Mercier's Tableau de Paris, and it is very 
 likely that he read a good deal of Rousseau. But 
 beyond those limits (I feel pretty sure) his study 
 of the period did not extend. For the rest he re- 
 lied on his natural powers of entering into and 
 visualising the life of any people at any period. 
 And why not ? I f he had set himself to write The 
 Last Days of Pompeii I have every reason to be- 
 lieve that it would have been a far better romance 
 than Bulwer Lytton's. 
 
 Those of Dickens' Adventures in History \ 
 which should, however, intrigue us most are con- 
 cerned with his presentment of certain authentic 
 historical figures, with Sir John Chester, who was 
 obviously founded on Lord Chesterfield, with 
 
 208 
 
 t 
 
OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
 Lord George Gordon, with Dennis, and in a les- 
 ser degree, Foulon. Grip the raven, Stry ver, and 
 Sydney Carton may also, for convenience' sake, 
 I think be allowed to come within the scope of this 
 chapter. 
 
 It has been said that Sydney Carton was 
 founded on another purely imaginary character, 
 Richard Wardour, the hero of Wilkie Collins' 
 play, The Frozen Deep, in which Dickens acted 
 with his friends and his children during the sum- 
 mer of 1857. Life is short, of making many books 
 there is no end, and so I have never read The 
 Frozen Deep. Nevertheless I scout the sugges- 
 tion that Dickens could ever have been indebted 
 to any other writer — or indeed anybody — for any 
 least part of his material. That the notion for the 
 book came to him whilst he was engaged in these 
 amateur theatricals Dickens himself admits, and 
 there was afterwards found this note in his manu- 
 script book : ** How as to a story in two periods 
 — with a lapse of time between, like a French 
 Drama? Titles for such a notion." Follows a long 
 list of titles. Then "The drunken? — dissipated? 
 — What? — Lion — and his Jackal and Primer, 
 stealing down to him at unwonted hours." And 
 then, foreshadowing Jerry Cruncher and his wife : 
 "A man, and his wife — or daughter — or niece. 
 The man, a reprobate and ruffian; the woman (or 
 girl) with good in her, and with compunctions. 
 He believes nothing, and defies everything ; yet 
 209 o 
 

 THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 has suspicions always that she is praying against 
 his evil schemes, and making them go wrong. 
 He isverymuch opposed to this, and is always an- 
 grily harping on it. * If she vtust pray, why can't 
 she pray in their favour, instead of going against 
 'em ? She's always ruining me — she always is — 
 and calls that Duty ! There's a religious person ! » 
 Calls it Duty to fly in my face! Calls it Duty to go 
 sneaking against me ! " 
 
 It is enough. One has only to bring these j 
 rumours into the light of day to find that they j 
 crumble into just a little dirt upon our hands. 
 
 Of Stryver, who is described as "a man of little 
 more than thirty but looking twenty years older 
 than he was, stout, loud, red, bluff, and free of any 
 drawback of delicacy . . . (he) had a pushing 
 way of shouldering himself (morally and physi- 
 cally) into companies and conversations, that ar- f 
 gued well for his shouldering his way up in life;" 
 of the prototype of Stryver Mr. Edmund Yates 
 affirms that he was drawn from a Mr. Edwin 
 James, a well-known legal functionary in his time. 
 Says Mr. Yates: "One day I took Dickens — 
 who had never seen Edwin James — to a consul- 
 tation. Mr. James laid himself out to be speci- 
 ally agreeable ; Dickens was quietly observant. 
 About four months after appeared the early num- 
 bers oiA Tale of Two Cities, in which a promi- 
 nent part was played by Mr. Stryver. After 
 reading the description I said to Dickens: *Stry- > 
 
 2IO 
 
OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
 ver is a good likeness!' He smiled. ' Not bad, 
 I think,' he said, ' especially after only one sit- 
 ting. 
 
 Between Mr. Stryver with his rusty robes and 
 lurid face, and Grip the raven with his rusty 
 plumage and lurid beak, I seem to discern a gro- 
 tesque likeness. Of Grip Dickens writes in his 
 Preface to Barnaby Rudge: 
 
 The late Mr. Waterton having, some time ago, 
 expressed his opinion that ravens are gradually 
 becoming extinct in England, I offered the few 
 following words about my experience of these 
 birds. 
 
 The raven in this story is a compound of two 
 great originals, of whom I was at different times 
 the proud possessor. The first was in the bloom 
 of his youth when he was discovered in a modest 
 retirement in London by a friend of mine, and 
 given to me. He had from the first, as Sir Hugh 
 Evans says of Anne Page, "good gifts," which he 
 improved by study and attention in a most ex- 
 emplary manner. He slept in a stable — generally 
 on horseback — and so terrified a Newfoundland 
 dog by his preternatural sagacity, that he has 
 been known, by the mere superiority of his 
 genius, to walk off unmolested with the dog's 
 dinner from before his face. He was rapidly ris- 
 ing in acquirements and virtues when in an evil 
 hour his stable was newly painted. He observed 
 
 211 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 the workmen closely, saw that they were careful 
 of the paint, and immediately burned to possess 
 it. On their going to dinnerhe ate up all they had 
 left behind, consisting of a pound or two of white 
 lead ; and this youthful indiscretion terminated 
 in death. 
 
 While I was yet inconsolable for his loss, an- 
 other friend of mine in Yorkshire discovered an 
 older and more gifted raven at a village public- 
 house, which he prevailed upon the landlord to 
 part with for a consideration, and sent up to me. 
 The first act of this sage was to administer to the 
 effects of his predecessor by disinterring all the 
 cheese and halfpence he had buried in the garden 
 — a work of immense labour and research, to 
 which he devoted all the energies of his mind. 
 When he had achieved his task, he applied him- 
 self to the acquisition of stable language, in which 
 he soon became such an adept that he would 
 perch outside my window and drive imaginary 
 horses with great skill, all day. Perhaps even I 
 never saw him at his best, for his former master 
 sent his duty with him, "and if I wished the bird 
 to come out very strong, would I be so good as to 
 show him a drunken man" — which I never did, 
 having (unfortunately) none but sober people at 
 hand. But I could hardly have respected him 
 more, whatever the stimulating influences of this 
 sight might have been. He had not the least re- 
 spect, I am sorry to say, for me in return, or for 
 
 212 
 
OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
 anybody but the cook, to whom he was attached 
 — but only, I fear, as a Policeman might have 
 been. Once I met him unexpectedly, about a 
 mile from my house, walking down the middle of 
 a public street, attended by a pretty large crowd, 
 and spontaneously exhibiting the whole of his 
 accomplishments. His gravity under these try- 
 ing circumstances I can never forget, nor the ex- 
 traordinary gallantry with which, refusing to be 
 brought home, he defended himself behind a 
 pump, until overpowered by numbers. It may 
 have been that he was too bright a genius to live 
 long, or it may have been that he took some 
 pernicious substance into his bill, and thence into 
 his maw — which is not improbable, seeing that 
 he new-pointed the greater part of the garden- 
 wall by digging out the mortar, broke countless 
 squares of glass by scraping away the putty all 
 round the frames, and tore up and swallowed, in 
 splinters, the greater part of a wooden staircase 
 of six steps and a landing — but after some three 
 years he too was taken ill, and died before the 
 kitchen fire. He kept his eyes to the last upon 
 the meat as it roasted, and suddenly turned over 
 on his back with a sepulchral cry of " Cuckoo ! " 
 Since then I have been ravenless. 
 
 In Barnaby Rtcdge, Lord George Gordon, and 
 in A Tale of Two Cities, Foulon, are drawn 
 directly from life. Let us contrast Carlyle's pre- 
 213 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 sentment of Foulon with that of Dickens'. First, 
 Carlyle : 
 
 This is that same Foulon named dme damnde 
 du P ar lenient ; a man grown grey in treachery, 
 in griping, projecting, intriguing, and iniquity: 
 who once when it was objected, to some finance 
 scheme of his, "What will the people do?" — 
 made answer, in the fire of discussion, "The 
 people may eat grass : " hasty words, which fly 
 abroad irrevocable, — and will send back tidings. 
 ... As for old Foulon, one learns that he is dead ; 
 at least " a sumptuous funeral " is going on; the 
 undertakers honouring him, if no other will . . . 
 but . . . hardly above a week since the Bastille 
 fell ... it suddenly appears that old Foulon is 
 alive ; nay, that he is here, in early morning, in 
 the streets of Paris : the extortioner, the plotter, 
 who would make the people eat grass, and was a 
 liar from the beginning ! — It is even so. The de- 
 ceptive " sumptuous funeral " (of some domestic 
 that died) ; the hiding-place at Vitry toward Fon- 
 tainebleau, have not availed that wretched old 
 man. Somelivingdomestic or dependant, for none 
 loves Foulon, has betrayed him to the Village. , 
 Merciless boors of Vitry unearth him ; pounce on ■ 
 him, like hell-hounds : Westward, old Infamy ; 
 to Paris, to be judged at the Hotel-de-Ville ! His 
 old head, which seventy-four years have bleach- 
 ed, is bare ; they have tied an emblematic bundle 
 
 214 
 
OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
 of grass on his back ; a garland of nettles and 
 thistles is round his neck : in this manner ; led with 
 ropes ; goaded on with curses and menaces must 
 he, with his old limbs, sprawl forward ; the piti- 
 ablest, most unpitied of all old men. 
 
 Sooty Saint-Antoine, and every street, mus- 
 ters its crowd as he passes ; — the Hall of the 
 Hotel-de-Ville, the Place de Greve itself, will 
 hardly hold his escort and him. Foulon must not 
 only be judged righteously, but judged there 
 where he stands, without any delay. Appoint sev- 
 en judges, ye Municipals, or seventy-and-seven ; 
 name them yourselves, or we will name them : 
 but judge him ! . . . " Friends," said " a person 
 in good clothes," stepping forward , "what is the 
 use of judging this man? Has he not been judg- 
 ed these thirty years?" With wild yells, Sanscu- 
 lottism clutches him in its hundred hands: he is 
 whirled acrossthe Place de Greve, to theZ^?^/^r«^, 
 Lamp-iron which there is at the corner of the Rue 
 de la Vannerie ; pleading bitterly for life — to the 
 deaf winds. Only with the third rope (for two 
 ropes break, and thequiveringvoice still pleaded) 
 can he be so much as got hanged ! His Body is 
 dragged through the streets ; his Head goes 
 aloft on a pike, the mouth filled with grass : amid 
 sounds as of Tophet, from a grass-eating people. 
 
 And now, Dickens, thus : 
 
 The men were terrible in the bloody-minded 
 215 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 anger with which they looked from windows, 
 caught up what arms they had, and came pour- 
 ing down into the streets ; but, the women were 
 a sight to chill the boldest. From such household 
 occupations as their bare poverty yielded, from 
 their children, from their aged and their sick 
 crouching on the bare ground famished and naked, 
 they ran out with streaming hair, urging one an- 
 other, and themselves, to madness with the wild- 
 est cries and actions. Villain Foulon taken, my 
 sister! Old Foulon taken, my brother! Miscreant 
 Foulon taken, my daughter ! Then, a score of 
 others ran into the midst of these, beating their 
 breasts, tearing their hair, and screaming, Foulon 
 alive ! Foulon who told the starving people they 
 might eat grass ! Foulon who told my old father 
 that he might eat grass, when I had no bread to 
 give him ! Foulon who told my baby that it might 
 suck grass, when these breasts were dry with 
 want ! Oh, mother of God, this Foulon ! Oh, 
 Heaven, our suffering ! Hear me, my dead baby 
 and my withered father: I swear on my knees, 
 on these stones, to avenge you on Foulon ! Hus- 
 bands and brothers and young men. Give us the 
 blood of Foulon, Give us the head of Foulon, 
 Give us the heart of Foulon, Give us the body 
 and soul of Foulon, Rend Foulon in pieces, and 
 dighiminto the ground, that grass may grow from 
 him ! With these cries, numbers of the women, 
 lashed into blind frenzy, whirled about, striking 
 
 216 
 
I'HI I.I I' DO KM IK s I,', \ HOPE, EARL OF CHEM (• Kt If. i u 
 "Sir fohn Chester" 
 
OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
 and tearing at their own friends until they dropp- 
 ed in a passionate swoon, and were only saved 
 by the men belonging to them from being tram- 
 pled under foot. 
 
 They march to the Hotel de Ville, where the 
 prisoner is on trial, and there wait impatiently, 
 " during two or three hours of drawl and the win- 
 nowing of many bushels of words," until 
 
 at length the sun rose so high that it struck a 
 kindly ray, as of hope or protection, directly down 
 upon the old prisoner's head. The favour was too 
 much to bear ; in an instant the barrier of dust 
 and chaff, that had stood surprisingly long, went 
 to the winds, and Saint Antoine had got him ! 
 
 It was known directly, to the furthest confines 
 of the crowd. Defarge had but sprung over a rail- 
 ing and a table, and folded the miserable wretch 
 in a deadly embrace — Madame Defarge had but 
 followed and turned her hand in one of the ropes 
 with which he was tied — The Vengeance and 
 Jacques Three were not yet up with them, and 
 the men at the windows had not yet swooped into 
 the hall, like birds of prey from their high perches 
 — when the cry seemed to go up, all over the city, 
 " Bring him out ! Bring him to the lamp ! " 
 
 Down, and up, and head foremost on the steps 
 of the building ; now on his knees ; now on his 
 feet ; now on his back ; dragged, and struck at, 
 217 
 
1 
 
 THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 and stifled by the bunches of grass and straw that 
 were thrust into his face by hundreds of hands ; 
 torn, bruised, panting, bleeding, yet always en- 
 treating and beseeching for mercy; now, full of ve- 
 hement agony of action, with a small clear space 
 about him as the people drew one another back 
 that they might see ; now, a log of dead wood 
 drawn through a forest of legs ; he was hauled to 
 the nearest street-corner where one of the fatal 
 lamps swung, and there Madame Defarge let 
 him go — as a cat might have done to a mouse — ^ | 
 and silently and composedly looked at him while ' 
 they made ready and while he besought her : the 
 women passionately screeching at him all the 
 time, and the men sternly calling out to have him 
 killed with grass in his mouth. Once he went 
 aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him, 
 shrieking ; twice he went aloft, and the rope 
 broke, and they caught him, shrieking ; then the 
 rope was merciful and held him, and his head was 
 soon upon a pike, with grass enough in the mouth 
 for all Saint Antoine to dance at the sight of. 
 
 Carlyle had dredged for his facts in all the 
 seven seas of literature that had been poured forth 
 on the subject of the French Revolution. He had 
 culled his knowledge of Foulon and the rest from 
 a hundred abstruse and recondite sources. Dick- 
 ens had read . . . only Carlyle, some fragments 
 of De Mercier, and perhaps Rousseau. Yet his 
 
 2J2 
 
OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
 pictures of that wild time are as full and complete 
 and vivid in their truth as if he had steeped him- 
 self in contemporary lore. 
 
 Carlyle may indeed be said to have introduced 
 the Spiritof the French Revolutionto the English 
 people ; but it was Dickens who raised its body 
 from the dead. 
 
 " No account of the Gordon Riots has been to 
 my knowledge introduced into any Work of Fic- 
 tion, and the subject presenting very extraordi- 
 nary and remarkable features, I was led to project 
 this Tale, "says Dickens in hisPre/aceio Barnaby 
 Rudge. 
 
 Of his description of the Riots Forster says, 
 very justly and aptly : 
 
 There are few things more masterly in any of 
 his books. From the first low mutterings of the 
 storm to its last terrible explosion, the frantic out- 
 break of popular ignorance and rage is depicted 
 with unabated power. The aimlessness of idle 
 mischief by which the ranks of the rioters are 
 swelled at the beginning; the recklessness induc- 
 ed by the monstrous impunity allowed to the ear- 
 ly excesses; the sudden spread of drunken guilt 
 into every haunt of poverty, ignorance, or mis- 
 chief in the wicked old city, in which such rich 
 materials of crime lie festering ; the wild action 
 of its poison on all, without scheme or plan of any 
 219 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 kind, who come within its reach ; the horrors that 
 are more bewildering for so complete an absence 
 of purpose in them ; and, when all is done, the 
 misery found to have been self-inflicted in every 
 cranny and corner of London, as if a plague had 
 swept over the streets ; these are features in the 
 picture of an actual occurrence, to which the man- 
 ner of the treatment gives extraordinary force and 
 meaning. 
 
 " Mr. Dennis the hangman (he adds) is a por- 
 trait that Hogarth would have painted with the 
 samewholesome severity of satireemployed upon 
 it in Barnaby RudgeT From which it would ap- 
 pear that Forster did not know, none of Dickens' 
 commentators seem to know, that there was in- 
 deed a real Dennis, a hangman of Newgate, who 
 was executed for his share in the Riots of 1780. 
 
 Of the unwitting instigator of those riots. Lord 
 George Gordon, Dickens gives this impression 
 which may be compared with the actual portrait 
 of that poor misguided maniac : 
 
 i 
 The lord, the great personage, who did the May- 
 pole so muchhonour, was about themiddleheight, 
 of a slender make, and sallow complexion, with 
 an aquiline nose, and longhair of a reddish brown, 
 combed perfectly straight and smooth about his 
 ears, and slightly powdered, but without the faint- 
 est vestige of a curl. He was attired, under his 
 
 220 
 
OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
 greatcoat, in a full suit of black, quite free from 
 any ornament, and of the most precise and sober 
 cut. The gravity of his dress, together with a 
 certain lankness of cheek and stiffness of deport- 
 ment, added nearly ten years to his age, but his 
 figure was that of one not yet past thirty. As he 
 stood musing in the red glow of the fire, it was 
 striking to observe his very bright large eye, 
 which betrayed a restlessness of thought and 
 purpose, singularly at variance with the studied 
 composure and sobriety of his mien, and with his 
 quaint and sad apparel. It had nothing harsh or 
 cruel inits expression; neither had his face, which 
 was thin and mild, and wore an air of melancholy ; 
 but it was suggestive of an air of indefinable un- 
 easiness, which infected those who looked upon 
 him, and filled them with a kind of pity for the 
 man : though why it did so, they would have been 
 at some trouble to explain. 
 
 A formal biography of the real Lord George 
 Gordon is set forth in Chambers' Encyclopcedia^ 
 thus : 
 
 He was born in London, 26th December, 1751, 
 the third son of the third Duke of Gordon. From 
 Eton he entered the Navy, and rose to be lieuten- 
 ant, but quitted the service during the American 
 War, after a dispute with the Admiralty. Elected 
 in 1774 M.P. for the pocket borough of Ludgers- 
 221 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 hall, Wiltshire, he presently attacked both sides 
 with such freedom as to give rise to the saying 
 that there "were three parties in parliament — 
 the ministry, the opposition, and Lord George 
 Gordon." Still he displayed considerable talent 
 in debate, and no deficiency of wit or argument. 
 A bill having, in 1778, passed the legislature for 
 the relief of Roman Catholics from certain penal- 
 ties and disabilities, the Protestant Association 
 of London was, among other societies, formed for 
 the purpose of procuring its repeal, and in No- 
 vember 1779 Lord George was elected its presi- 
 dent. On 2nd June, 1780, he headed a vast and 
 excited mob of 50,000 persons, who, decked with 
 blue cockades, marched in procession from St. 
 George's Fields to the House of Commons to 
 present a petition for the repeal of the measure. 
 Dreadful riots ensued in the metropolis, lasting 
 five days, in the course of which many Catholic 
 chapels and private dwelling-houses, Newgate 
 prison, and the mansion of the chief-justice, Lord | 
 Mansfield, were destroyed. The magistrates' 
 feared to read the Riot Act, but at length, on the 
 7th, when thirty-six fires were blazing at once, the 
 troops were called out by the king, and every- 
 where drove the rioters before them, 210 being 
 killed, 248 wounded, and 135 arrested, of whom 
 21 were afterwards executed. Property to the , 
 amount of 180,000 pounds had been destroyed in 
 the riots. . . . Lord George himself was tried for 
 
 222 
 
OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
 high treason ; but Erskine's defence got him off 
 on the ground of absence of treasonable design. 
 His subsequent conduct seemed that of a person 
 of unsound mind. Having, in 1786, refused to 
 come forward as a witness in a court of law, he 
 was excommunicated by the Archbishop of Can- 
 terbury for contempt. In i y^j he was convicted, 
 on two official informations, for a pamphlet re- 
 flecting on the laws and criminal justice of the 
 country, and for publishing a libel on Marie An- 
 toinette and the French Ambassador in London. 
 To evade sentence he retired to Holland, but was 
 sent back to England, and apprehended at Bir- 
 mingham. He died in Newgate of fever, ist No- 
 vember 1 793, having latterly become a proselyte 
 to Judaism. 
 
 In 1 795 \}ci^x^vi2iS2L.LifeofLordGeorge Gordon 
 published. It was written by one Dr. Robert 
 Watson, and some vindication of the hapless 
 peer's character was attempted in the work. It 
 does not seem likely that Dickens ever read this 
 book ; but certainly his own kindly treatment of 
 Lord George has long since superseded the more 
 elaborate apologia. 
 
 To mymind there is something almost eerie in 
 the power that Dickens displays in limning this 
 extraordinary figure of history. In hisPre/ace he 
 goes out of his way to declare that 
 
 It is unnecessary to say that those shameful tu- 
 223 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 mults, while they reflect indelible disgrace upon 
 the time in which they occurred, and all who had 
 act or part in them, teach a good lesson. That 
 what we falsely call a religious cry is easily raised 
 by men who have no religion, and who in their 
 daily practice set at naught the commonest prin- 
 ciples of right and wrong ; that it is begotten of 
 intolerance and persecution ; that it is senseless, 
 besotted, inveterate, and unmerciful, all History 
 teaches us. But perhaps we do not know it in our 
 hearts too well, to profit by even so humble an I 
 example as the "No Popery" riots of 1780. How- 
 ever imperfectly these disturbances are set forth 
 in the followingpages,they are impartially painted 
 by one who has no sympathy with the Romish 
 Church, though he acknowledges, as most men 
 do, some esteemed friends among the followers 
 of its creed. 
 
 I don't like that concluding sentence: it savours 
 of pragmatism; but Idolike, Idoadmire,and I do 
 marvel at the boundless sympathy which could em- 
 brace and understand and condone the strange 
 self-sacrificial madness of a poor deluded fanatic. 
 
 It would have been so fatally easy, you would 
 think, for Dickens to perpetrate the most ghastly 
 blunders inhis treatment of Lord George Gordon. 
 If, in my cynical youth, I had not already read 
 Barnaby Rudge, and yet happened to know its 
 theme, I believe I should have hesitated to read 
 
 224 
 
LORD MANSFIELD 
 Barnaby Rudge 
 
OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
 it. I should have been afraid of coming across yet 
 another repetition in another guise of that offence 
 which, in Pickwick Papers and The Old Curiosity 
 Shop, has caused so much pain to countless thou- 
 sands of splendid Puritans and for ever alienated 
 them from Dickens. I should have dreaded to 
 find him making hay of the most sacred and sol- 
 emn convictions of more than half the population 
 of Europe. A Father Melchizedec Howler, or a 
 Monsignor Stiggins, would have been such an 
 outrage upon an ancient, stately, and dignified 
 faith as might have shattered even my fealty to- 
 ward the greatest English novelist of any age. 
 Stiggins and Howler and Chadband : all these, 
 being new and raw, were fair butts for derision 
 and ridicule ; but a Roman Catholic priest . . . ! 
 I need have had no fears, however. I should have 
 no fears now. Dickens is sometimes alittle coarse 
 and even gross, but he is never — in spite of all 
 the New Criticisms — vulgar. His sense of hu- 
 mour fails him over and over again, most lament- 
 ably, but never his sense of decency. He is often 
 fierce and furious, wild and whirling ; but never 
 hysterical. He is often loud, but never lewd ; 
 often trite, but never banal. So, when he came to 
 grips with this silly infatuate peer, and had to 
 handle a type of mind with which his own essen- 
 tially healthy mind could not possibly have any- 
 thing whatever in common, it is his innate, in- 
 domitable sanity, it is his immutable perception 
 225 p 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 of the eternal fitness of things, that saves him, 
 that does more than save him, that uplifts him to 
 the level of the martyr on the cross and lends him 
 divine insight into the meaning of those supernal 
 dreams for the sake of which countless millions 
 have poured out their blood like water totheglory, 
 not so much of their gods, asof their owngod-like 
 souls. 
 
 History would try to persuade me that the 
 secretary of Lord George Gordon was not such a 
 man as Gashford ; that he was a man of probity 
 and courage and intellect, a sort of sublimation of 
 John Grueby, Lord George's sturdy henchman, 
 of whom we have all too little in Barnaby Rudge. 
 But this I steadfastly refuse to believe. I believe 
 in Dickens' Gashford, tall 
 
 . . . angularly made, high-shouldered, bony, 
 and ungraceful. His dress, in imitation of his 
 superior, was demure and staid in the extreme; 
 his manner formal and constrained. This gentle- 
 man had an overhanging brow, great hands and 
 feet and ears, and a pair of eyes that seemed to 
 have made an unnatural retreat into his head, 
 and to have dug themselves a cave to hide in. 
 His manner was smooth and humble, but very 
 sly and slinking. He wore the aspect of a man 
 who was always lying in wait for something that 
 wouldnH come to pass; but he looked patient — 
 very patient — and fawned like a spaniel dog. 
 
 226 
 
OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
 Even now, while he rubbed and warmed his 
 hands before the blaze, he had the air of one who 
 only presumed to enjoy it in his degree as a com- 
 moner ; and though he knew his lord was not re- 
 garding him, he looked into his face from time to 
 time, and with a meek and deferential manner, 
 smiled as if for practice. 
 
 That, or something akin to it, is the type that 
 does invariably attach itself to the poor profligate 
 and spendthrift, whoever he may be, and whether 
 he be prodigal of his money, or of his manhood, 
 of his faith, or of his unfaith. Gashford is a living 
 symbol of the evil genius that waits upon the 
 generous weakness of all good men who have 
 anything to lose. It is the slimy cunning of the 
 Gashfords of this world that exploits the folly and 
 the goodness of simpler, nobler natures, turns 
 their potential beneficence into active mischief, 
 covers their innocence with shame, and corrupts 
 their purity. Dickens never evinced a nicer ap- 
 preciation or a more acute perception of the sort 
 of combinations that do usually go to the mak- 
 ing of colossal ruin and disaster than in this strik- 
 ing juxtaposition of Gashford with Lord George. 
 History denies the truth of this presentment of 
 the secretary. That only proves that these Gash- 
 fords, as well as being consummate rascals, are 
 consummate hypocrites also. It is History that 
 has been deceived, not Dickens. 
 227 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 Remains to be consideredthe figureof Sir John 
 Chester, who is, transparently, Lord Chester- 
 field. 
 
 He was a staid, grave, placid gentleman, some- 
 thing past the prime of life, yet upright in his 
 carriage for all that, and slim as a greyhound. He 
 was well mounted upon a sturdy chestnut cob, 
 and had the graceful seat of an experienced horse- 
 man ; while his riding gear, though free from such 
 fopperies as were then in vogue, was handsome 
 and well chosen. He wore a ridingf-coat of a 
 somewhat brighter green than might have been 
 expected to suit the taste of a gentleman of his 
 years, with a short black velvet cape, and laced 
 pocket-holes and cuffs, all of a jaunty fashion ; il 
 his linen too was of the finest kind, worked in a 
 rich pattern at the wrists and throat, and scrupu- , 
 lously white. Although he seemed, judging from i{ 
 the mud he had picked up on the way, to have 
 come from London, his horse was as smooth and 
 cool as his ovvn iron-grey periwig and pigtail. 
 Neither man nor beast had turned a single hair ; 
 and savingfor his soiledskirts and spatterdashes, 
 this gentleman with his blooming face, white ' 
 teeth, exactly-ordered dress, and perfectcalmness, : 
 might have come from making an elaborate and 
 leisurely toilet, to sit for an equestrian portrait at 
 old John Willet's gate. 
 
 In the privacy of his apartments in the Temple 
 
 228; 
 
OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
 he muses upon the graces and the virtues of his 
 famous prototype. 
 
 " My Lord Chesterfield," he said ... " if I could 
 but have profited by your genius soon enough to 
 have formed my son on the model you have left 
 to all wise fathers, both he and I would have been 
 rich men. Shakespeare was undoubtedly very 
 fine in his way; Milton good, though prosy; Lord 
 Bacon, deep, and decidedly knowing ; but the 
 writer who should be his country's pride is my 
 Lord Chesterfield. . . . 
 
 " I thought I was tolerably accomplished as 
 a man of the world," he continued, " I flattered 
 myself that I was pretty well versed in all those 
 little arts and graces which distinguish men of 
 the world from boors and peasants, and separate 
 their character from those intensely vulgar sen- 
 timents which are called the national character. 
 Apart from any natural prepossession in my own 
 favour, I believed I was. Still, in every page of 
 this enlightened writer, I find some captivating 
 hypocrisy which has never occurred to me before, 
 or some superlative piece of selfishness to which 
 I was utterly a stranger. I should quite blush 
 for myself before this stupendous creature, if, re- 
 membering his precepts, one might blush at any- 
 thing. An amazing man ! a nobleman indeed •' 
 any King or Queen may make a Lord, but only 
 229 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 the Devil himself — and the Graces — can make 
 a Chesterfield." 
 
 Men (adds Dickens in a bitter commentary) 
 who are thoroughly false and hollow, seldom try 
 to hide these vices from themselves ; and yet, in 
 the very act of avowing them, they lay claim to 
 the virtues they feign most to despise. " For," 
 say they, " this is honesty, this is truth. All man- 
 kind are like us, but they have not the candour 
 to avow it." The more they affect to deny the 
 existence of any sincerity in the world, the more 
 they would be thought to possess it in its boldest 
 shape; and this is an unconscious compliment to 
 Truth on the part of these philosophers which 
 will turn the laugh against them to the Day of 
 Judgment. 
 
 Thereissomethinghereofthatnarrow-minded 
 intolerance which is very characteristic of a cer- 
 tain type of demagogue all the world over. And 
 Dickens belonged to that type. He had all the 
 average demagogue's cocksureness and impa- 
 tience of what he does not understand, together 
 with the good-humoured disdain born of self- 
 complacency that commonly accompanies it and 
 vents itself in vigorous ridicule. Yet he does suc- 
 ceed in getting Sir John Chester down on paper, 
 and the philosophy of the elegant man of fashion, 
 cynic, and wit is as appropriate to a certain mod- 
 ern type as it was, in a way, to its first exponent, 
 
 230 
 
OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
 Lord Chesterfield, on whom Sir John Chester is 
 reputably founded. 
 
 But . . . Dickens is so obsessed by a melo- 
 dramatic convention that he draws Lord Ches- 
 terfield — or Sir John Chester — as an extremely 
 handsome and debonair gentleman, ignoring the 
 fact (if he ever knew it) that the real Lord 
 Chesterfield, in spite of his courtly accomplish- 
 ments, was of unimposing presence and rather 
 distinctly plain-looking, a man whose career was 
 uniformly mediocre, and whose ambitions were 
 gratified neither by success in public life nor in 
 court society. He was, according to his contem- 
 poraries, an enlightened statesman, an orator, a 
 conspicuous wit, and a man of almost universal 
 talents ; and yet he is only remembered as the 
 author of the famous letters written to his natural 
 son, Philip Stanhope. Son of the third Earl of 
 Chesterfield, he studied at Cambridge, made the 
 grand tour, and sat in the House of Commons 
 as member for Saint Germans in Cornwall from 
 1716 to 1726, when he succeeded his father as 
 fourth earl. In 1 730 he was made Lord Steward 
 of the Household. Until then, as a Whig, he had 
 supported Walpole; but being ousted from office 
 for voting against an excise bill, he went over to 
 the opposition, and was one of Walpole's bitter- 
 est antagonists. He was above bribes, and, ac- 
 cording to his lights, an honest statesman and a 
 true patriot. He joined the Pelham Ministry in 
 231 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 1744 ; in 1745-6 was a judicious, able, and con- 
 ciliatory Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland ; and was in 
 1746 one of the principal Secretaries of State, but 
 in 1748 was compelled by ill-health and deaf- 
 ness to retire from public life. During the brief 
 period of his political power he was on terms of 
 some intimacy with Pope, Swift, and Bolingbroke, 
 and he patronised Colley Gibber and many other 
 men of letters. He died, a lonely, neglected, for- 
 gotten old man, in 1773. 
 
 But it was of course to be expected that Dick- 
 ens, knowing nothing of the class to which Lord 
 Chesterfield belonged, and being utterly incap- 
 able of appreciating the aristocraticpoint of view, 
 should have been taken in by Lord Chesterfield's 
 pose, should have accepted him at his own valua- 
 tion, and confounded the purely artificial writer 
 with the natural man. But that he did catch the 
 tone of his Letters I think may be established by 
 the following medley of original and parody : 
 
 Men who converse only with women are frivolous, 
 effeminate puppies ; and those who never con- 
 verse with them are bears. 
 
 The world is a lively place enough, in which we 
 must accommodate ourselves to circumstances, 
 sail with the stream as glibly as we can, be con- 
 tent to take froth for substance, the surface for the 
 depth, the counterfeit for the real coin. I wonder 
 
 232 
 
 t 
 
 I 
 
LORD GEORGE GORDON 
 
OF ADVENTURES IN HISTORY 
 
 that no philosopher has ever established that our 
 globe itself is hollow. It should be, if Nature is 
 consistent in her works. 
 
 Dissimulation to a certain degree is as necessary 
 in business as clothes are in the common inter- 
 course of life ; and a man would be as imprudent 
 who should exhibit his inside naked, as he would 
 be indecent if he produced his outside so. 
 
 All men are fortune-hunters, are they not ? The 
 law, the church, the court, the camp — see how 
 they are all crowded with fortune-hunters, jostling 
 each other in the pursuit. The Stock Exchange, 
 the pulpit, the counting-house, theroyal drawing- 
 room, the senate — what but fortune-hunters are 
 they filled with } 
 
 Advice is seldom welcome ; and those who want 
 it the most always like it the least. 
 
CHAPTER THE TENTH 
 CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 
 
CHAPTER THE . 
 
 TENTH CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 
 
 MR. ARNOLD BENNETT HAS SAID 
 somewhere that he never realised there was any- 
 thing picturesque about the Five Towns until he 
 read an impression of them in one of Mr. George 
 Moore's novels. And Mr. J.'M.Barrie was aston- 
 ished to find that anybody could be interested in 
 his native place, Kirriemuir. I n these confessions 
 both these authors are merely restating one of 
 those elusive truths that only artists seem to be 
 able to lay firm hold upon. A lover cannot tell^ 
 you what his sweetheart is like so that you would 
 recognise her in the street. He could as easily 
 describe his boots or his mother. The things with 
 which we are most familiar are always the hardest 
 to describe. The things we know best — the things 
 we cherish and believe in — our more intimate 
 hopes and fears and doubts — the emotions we 
 hold most sacred — the strongest passions that 
 actuate us — none of these can we translate quite 
 adequately into words. There would seem to be 
 an undiscovered language. It is perhaps the lan- 
 guage that all artists spendtheirlives in learning, 
 and die without mastering. 
 
 The other day I was arguing with a friend 
 about Mr. Harry Lauder. I had read, or been 
 told, that he was born in Lancashire. And my 
 friend, a Scotsman, said that that was manifestly 
 impossible. Only a Scotsman (said he) could 
 237 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS I 
 
 sing Scotch songs as Mr. Lauder sings them. 
 I asked, then, why Mr. Lauder had started hisi 
 career by singing Irish songs ? And from that I 
 got to considering why it was that a man has to 
 get away from a thing in order to see it properly, 
 as it actually is, in due proportion and perspec-i 
 tive. Mr. Lauder mayor may not have been born 
 in Scotland. But of one thing I am sure, which is 
 that, in either case, he spent some years of his' 
 childhood or youth in Scotland, that he then left 
 Scotland, and then, returning to it, saw Scotsmen 
 for the first time as they really are. If he had 
 lived in Scotland all his life he never would have 
 been able to impersonate Scotsmen as he does. 
 Many a Cockney can give an excellent imitation 
 of a yokel ; but never a Cockney could imperson- 
 ate a Cockney on the stage. The only good stage 
 Cockney I have ever seen, Mr. Albert Chevalier, 
 is half a Frenchman and, half a Welshman, I be- 
 lieve. And as in the art of acting, so it is in the 
 art of writing. It is not until you have got out of 
 the environment in which you were born that you 
 can depict that environment convincingly. 
 
 Dickens, in his two first books, Pickwick 
 Papers dind Oliver Twis^, writes of people and in- 
 cidents that had only come casually and superfi- 
 cially within his own experience, if at all. What t 
 did he know of country-house life."* of leisure- ii 
 ly travelling in England? of sport? He knew| 
 a great deal about country inns, stage-coaches 
 
THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 
 
 and stage-coach-drivers and inn-keepers and 
 waiters and ostlers and so on, and about Parlia- 
 mentary elections, and the processes of the law, 
 and lawyers and lawyers' clerks and all that entour- 
 age; he knew of these things because he had come 
 fresh to the study of them in his impression- 
 able youth or early manhood. He was familiar 
 with, and he could describe, a debtors' prison. 
 But, he had not got sufficiently far away from the 
 Marshalsea to be able to describe that. So, he 
 elected to describe the Fleet Prison, which he did 
 not know very intimately, rather than the Mar- 
 shalsea, which he did know very intimately in- 
 deed. 
 
 And in Oliver Twist, though he knew no more 
 than the average man about criminals and work- 
 houses, we find him choosing his chief characters 
 from among the criminal classes and from among 
 the inmates of a workhouse. 
 
 It was not until he was fairly launched on his 
 third book, Nicholas Nickleby, that he began to 
 deal faithfully with the kind of people he had 
 been brought up amongst ; and by that time his 
 fame and prosperity had lifted him high enough 
 out of his original environment to enable him to 
 perceive its artisticpossibilities. In the Kenwigs 
 group he gives us his first full-length portraits of 
 the kind of grotesques whom we most commonly 
 think of nowadays as Dickensy types. 
 
 Bill Sikes, the Artful Dodger, and Fagin are 
 239 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 all lay-figures : mere dummies that Dickens 
 somehow contrives to galvanise into horrible life. 
 I have said before that there never was a pro 
 fessional burglar who remotely resembled Bill 
 Sikes. Andnever was therean expert pickpocket 
 who remotely resembled the Artful Dodger. A 
 pickpocket whowore a suitofclothes several sizes 
 too large for him, with long sleeves clumsily 
 turned up at the cuffs so that they must have 
 hampered the free movement of his hands, and 
 whose whole appearance was conspicuous and 
 suspicious, never did or could or would attain to 
 any proficiency in his nefarious calling. Thieves 
 of all kinds have to look, if possible, more honest 
 than honest men if they are to achieve any suc- 
 cess. They must be, in all outward seeming, so 
 ordinary as never to attract a second glance from 
 any one ; least of all the policeman. 
 
 And Fagin the fence . . .? 
 
 Receivers of stolen property are more likely to 
 be found on view behind their counters all the 
 week, and in chapel on Sundays, than in foul 
 dens in evil neighbourhoods. Dickens, in Oliver 
 Twisty projected his den of thieves out of his in- 
 ner consciousness. Obviously he had no first- 
 hand knowledge whatever of any kindof criminal. 
 He knew nothing of their habits or manners or 
 customs. Even their speech he was unfamiliar 
 with, or he would never have made Sikes utter 
 such preposterous oaths as " Wolves tear your 
 
 240 
 
THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 
 
 throats ! " He had got his details all wrong ; and 
 yet had got his effects so marvellously right, 
 somehow, that his very blunders are more con- 
 vincing than all the meticulous accuracies of the 
 modern realist. 
 
 Fagin was, I think, founded on the personality 
 of a famous rogue named Ikey Solomons; and as 
 no other Dickens commentator seems to have 
 discovered the identity of this gentleman I pro- 
 pose to quote Major Arthur Griffiths — sometime 
 Governor of Newgate Prison — concerning his 
 career. 
 
 ■ At no period (says Major Griffiths^) could thieves 
 
 ' in London or elsewhere have prospered had they 
 been unable to dispose of their ill-gotten goods. 
 The trade of fence or receiver, therefore, is very 
 nearly as old as the crimes which it so obviously 
 fostered. One of the most notorious, and for a 
 time most successful practitioners in this illicit 
 trade, passed through Newgate in 1831. The 
 
 Tname of Ikey Solomons was long remembered 
 by thief and thief-taker. He began as an itine- 
 rant street vendor at eight, at ten he passed bad 
 money, at fourteen he was a pickpocket and a 
 "duffer," or a seller of sham goods. He early 
 
 ''saw the profits to be made out of purchasing 
 stolen goods, but could not embark in it at first 
 
 * Chivnicles of Newgate, 
 241 Q 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 for want of capital. He was taken up when still 
 in his teens for stealing a pocket-book, and was 
 sentenced to transportation, but did not get be- 
 yond the hulks at Chatham. On his release an 
 uncle, a slop-seller in Chatham, gave him a situa- 
 tion as " barker," or salesman, at which he real- 
 ised ^150 within a couple of years. With this 
 capital he returned to London and set up as a 
 fence. He had such great aptitude for business 
 and such a thorough knowledge of the real value 
 of goods, that he was soon admitted to be one of 
 the best judges known of all kinds of property, 
 from a glass bottle to a five hundredguinea chro- 
 nometer. But he never paid more than a fixed 
 price for all articles of the same class, whatever 
 their intrinsic value. Thus a watch was paid for as 
 a watch, whether it was of gold or silver ; a piece 
 of linen as such, whether the stuff was coarse or 
 fine. This rule of dealing with stolen goods con- 
 tinues to this day, and has made the fortune of 
 many since I key. 
 
 Solomons also established a system of pro- 
 vincial agency, by which stolen goods were 
 passed on from London to the seaports, and so 
 abroad. Jewels were re-set, diamonds re-faced ; 
 all marks by which other articles might be identi- 
 fied, the selvages of linen, the stamps on shoes, 
 the numbers and names on watches, were care- 
 fully removed or obliterated after the goods 
 passed out of his hands. On one occasion the 
 
 242 
 
THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 
 
 whole of the proceeds of a robbery from a boot- 
 shop was traced to Solomons ; the owner came 
 with the police, and was morally convinced that 
 it was his property, but could not positively 
 identify it, and I key defied them to remove a 
 single shoe. In the end the injured bootmaker 
 agreed to buy back his stolen stock at the price 
 Solomons had paid for it, and it cost him about 
 a hundred pounds to re-stock his shop with his 
 own goods. 
 
 As a general rule I key Solomons confined his 
 purchases to small articles, mostly of jewellery 
 and plate, which he kept concealed in a hiding- 
 place with a trap-door just under his bed. He 
 lived in Rosemary Lane, and sometimes had as 
 much as ^20,000 worth of goods secreted on the 
 premises. When his trade was busiest he set up 
 a second establishment, at the head of which, al- 
 though he was married, he put another lady, with 
 whom he was on intimate terms. The second 
 house was in Lower Queen Street, Islington, and 
 he used it for some time as a depot for valuables. 
 But it was eventually discovered by Mrs. Solo- 
 mons, a very jealous wife, and this, with the 
 danger arising from an extensive robbery of 
 watches in Cheapside, in which Ikey was impli- 
 cated as a receiver, led him to think seriously 
 of trying his fortunes in another land. He was 
 about to emigrate to New South Wales, when he 
 was arrested at Islington and committed to New- 
 243 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 gate on a charge of receiving stolen goods. 
 While thus incarcerated he managed to escape 
 from custody, but not actually from gaol, by an 
 ingenious contrivance which is worth mention- 
 ing. He claimed to be admitted to bail, and was 
 taken from Newgate on a writ of habeas before 
 one of the judges sitting at Westminster. He was ij 
 conveyed in a coach driven by a confederate, and 
 under the escort of a couple of turnkeys. Solo- 
 mons, while waiting to appear in court, persuaded 
 the turnkeys to take him to a public-house where I 
 all might " refresh." While there he was joined 
 by his wife and other friends. After a short ca- 
 rouse the prisoner went into Westminster, his 
 case was heard, bail refused, and he was ordered 
 back to Newgate. But he once more persuaded 
 the turnkeys to pause at the public-house, where 
 more liquor was consumed. When the journey 
 was resumed, Mrs. Solomons accompanied her 
 husband in the coach. Half-way to Newgate she 
 was taken with a fit. One turnkey was stupidly ► 
 drunk, and I key persuaded the other, who was 
 not much better, to let the coach change its route 
 to the gaol, and pass Petticoat Lane, where the 
 suffering woman might be handed over to her ^ 
 friends. On stopping at a door in this low street, | 
 Ikey jumped out and ran into the house, slam- 
 ming the door behind him. He passed through 
 and out at the back, and was soon beyond pur- 
 suit. By-and-by the turnkeys, sobered by their 
 
 244 
 
 ll 
 
THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 
 
 loss, returned to Newgate alone, and pleaded in 
 excuse that they had been drugged. 
 
 I key left no traces, and the police could hear 
 nothing of him. He had in fact gone out of the 
 country, to Copenhagen, whence he passed on to 
 New York. There he devoted himself to the cir- 
 culation of forged notes. He was also anxious to 
 do business in watches, and begged his wife to 
 send him over a consignment of cheap "right- 
 eous " watches, or such as had been honestly 
 obtained, and not "on the cross." But Mrs. Solo- 
 mons could not resist the temptation to dabble in 
 stolen goods, and she was found shipping watches 
 of the wrong category to New York. For this 
 she received a sentence of fourteen years' trans- 
 portation, and was sent to Van Diemen's Land. 
 I key joined her at Hobart Town, where they set 
 up a general shop, and soon began to prosper. 
 He was, however, recognised, and ere long an 
 order came out from home for his arrest and 
 transfer to England, which presently followed, 
 and he again found himself an inmate of New- 
 gate, waiting trial as a receiver and a prison- 
 breaker. He was indicted on eight charges, two 
 only of which were substantiated, but on each 
 of them he received a sentence of seven years' 
 transportation. At his own request he was re- 
 conveyed to Hobart Town, where his son had 
 been carrying on the business. Whether I key 
 was " assigned " to his own family is not re- 
 245 
 
n 
 
 THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 corded, but no doubt he succeeded to his own 
 property when the term of servitude had ex- 
 pired. 
 
 Dickens began Oliver Twist in 1 838, at a time 
 when the name of I key Solomons was no doubt 
 as well-known as that of Charles Peace a genera- 
 tion ago. The likeness between I key Solomons 
 and Fagin is not too apparent perhaps ; but it 
 happened that at the beginning of the nineteenth 
 century there seems to have been a very plague 
 of Jews engaged in receiving stolen property. 
 There was another Solomons who was not above 
 reproach, and an Abrahams, and Money Moses, 
 a publican, who kept the Black Lion in Vinegar 
 Yard, Drury Lane, where secretly he did busi- 
 ness as one of the most daring and successful 
 fences in London. Many of these fences are rum- 
 oured to have trained children in crime, not in 
 the preposterous way of Fagin that is presently 
 to be described, but not less efficiently. To quote 
 Major Griffiths again : 
 
 A peculiar feature in the criminal records of the 
 early part of the (nineteenth) century was the 
 general increase in juvenile depravity. This was 
 remarked and commented upon by all concerned 
 in the administration of justice ; magistrates of 
 all categories, police officers, gaolers, and philan- 
 thropists. It was borne out, moreover, by the 
 
 246 
 
THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 
 
 statistics of the times. There were in the various 
 London prisons, in the year 1 8 1 6, three thousand 
 inmates under twenty years of age. Nearly half 
 of this number were under seventeen, and a thou- 
 sand of these alone were convicted of felony. 
 Many of those sent to prison were indeed of 
 tender years. Some were barelynine or ten. Chil- 
 dren began to steal when they could scarcely 
 crawl. Cases were known of infants of barely six 
 charged in the courts with crimes. This deplor- 
 able depravity was attributable to various causes : 
 to the profligacy prevailing in the parish schools; 
 the cruel and culpable neglect of parents who de- 
 serted their offspring, leaving them in a state of 
 utter destitution, or were guilty of the no less dis- 
 graceful wickedness of usingthem as instruments 
 for their nefarious designs ; the artfulness of 
 astute villains — prototypes of old Fagin — who 
 trained the youthful idea in their own devious 
 ways. The last-named was a fruitful source of 
 juvenile crime. Children were long permitted to 
 commit small thefts with impunity. The offence 
 would have been death to those who used them 
 as catspaws ; for them capital punishment was 
 humanely nearly impossible. The education in 
 iniquity continued steadily. They went from bad 
 to worse, and ere long became regular inmates 
 of " flash houses," where both sexes mixed freely 
 with vicious companions of their own age, and 
 the most daring enjoyed the hero-worship of their 
 247 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 fellows. Whenthusassembled, they formed them- 
 selves into distinct parties or gangs, each choos- 
 ing one of their number as captain, and dividing 
 themselves into reliefs to work certain districts, 
 one by day and one by night. When they had 
 "collared their swag," they returned to divide 
 their plunder, having gained sometimes as much 
 as three or four hundred pounds. A list of these 
 horrible dens prepared about this date showed 
 that there were two hundred of them, frequented 
 by six thousand boys and girls, who lived solely 
 by this way, or were the associates of thieves. 
 These haunts were situated in St. Giles, Drury 
 Lane, Chick Lane, Saffron Hill, the Borough, and 
 Ratcliffe Highway. Others that were out of luck 
 crowded the booths of Covent Garden, where all 
 slept promiscuously amongst the rotting garbage 
 of the stalls. During the daytime all were either 
 actively engaged in thieving, or were revelling in 
 low amusements. Gambling was a passion with 
 them, indulged in without let or hindrance in the 
 open streets; and from tossing buttons there they 
 passed on to playing in the low public-houses at 
 such games as " put," or " the rocks of Scylla," 
 "bumble puppy," "tumble tumble," or "nine 
 holes." 
 
 These infamies, as a result of recent exposures, 
 were matters of general knowledge at the time 
 when Oliver Twist was written. What Dickens 
 
 248 
 
HRYAN WALLER PROCTER 
 
THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 
 
 knew about them he knew in common with most 
 other people. But he knew about them with a 
 difference. He knew about them as the small boy 
 knows about the black void behind the cellar- 
 door. His elders call it the coal-hole. He knows 
 that it is a cave of demons, the very porch of 
 Hell. When his elders open that door only coals 
 come out. But when he opens it — ^just an inch 
 or two — and peeps in, he sees ghastly, lowering 
 faces, grim and hideous, gibbering at him out of 
 the darkness. He passes that door on tiptoe, and 
 bears it in mind as he goes up to bed, and dreams 
 about it in his sleep. So did Dickens dream of 
 the mean squalor of the criminal haunts whose 
 secrets were daily castup on the bare bleak shores 
 of the police-office. So did he invest that squalor 
 and its denizens with a quality of picturesque 
 horror that lent them something of the hectic 
 effect of leering, grinning devils in red torment. 
 ■ Fagin, the arch-devil, though he is limned in 
 in the fewest possible words, stands forth lurid 
 and malignant as the figure of Satan in mediaeval 
 pageantry. He appears, like that typical mythi- 
 cal Satan, with his toasting-fork, and the firelight 
 playing over him. For the rest he is just " a very 
 old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and 
 repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of 
 matted red hair. He was dressed in a greasy 
 flannel gown, with his throat bare." Dickens 
 christens him " the old gentleman," " the pleas- 
 249 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 ant old gentleman," " the merry old gentleman." 
 Old Gentleman is still a euphemism for the devil 
 in the more select lower-class circles. I 
 
 When the breakfast was cleared away, the merry 
 old gentleman and the two boys played at a very 
 curious and uncommon game, which was per- 
 formed in this way. The merry old gentleman, 
 placing a snuff-box in one pocket of his trousers, 
 a note-case in the other, and a watch in his waist- 
 coat-pocket, with a guard-chain round his neck, 
 and sticking a mock-diamond pin in his shirt : 
 buttoned his coat tight round him, and putting 
 hisspectacle-caseandhandkerchief in his pockets, 
 trotted up and down the room with a stick, in 
 imitation of the manner in which old gentlemen 
 walk about the streets any hour in the day. 
 Sometimes he stopped at the fire-place, and 
 sometimes at the door, making believe that he 
 was staring with all his might into shop- windows. 
 At such times he would look constantly round 
 him, for fear of thieves, and would keep slapping 
 all his pockets in turn, to see that he hadn't lost 
 anything, in suchaveryfunnyand natural manner 
 that Oliver laughed till the tears ran down his 
 face. All this time the two boys followed him 
 closely about : getting out of his sight so nimbly 
 everytime he turned round that it was impossible 
 to follow their motions. At last the Dodger trod 
 upon his toe, or ran upon his boot accidentally, 
 
 250 
 
THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 
 
 while Charley Bates stumbled up against him be- 
 hind ; and in that one moment they took from 
 him, with the most extraordinary rapidity, snuff- 
 box, note- case, watch-guard, chain, shirt-pin, 
 pocket-handkerchief, even the spectacle-case. If 
 the old gentleman felt a hand in any one of his 
 pockets he cried out where it was ; and then the 
 game began all over again. 
 
 ' Throughout the book, until the final catas- 
 trophe, Fagin is usually presented as this kind of 
 horribly amusing person; he is like some frowsy, 
 obscene bird that seems to chuckle and mock in a 
 secret language of its own. He shares with the 
 rest of Dickens' really great villains that saving 
 grace of humour, that grace which saves them 
 from utter absurdity, utter unreality. The real 
 Jew fence of Dickens' early days: I key Solomons 
 or Money Moses : was probably a pale and 
 colourless creature of a familiar atavistic type : 
 dull-eyed, dull-witted, dull-spirited, slinking, 
 sheepish, sly, and furtive. Fagin, alike in that 
 first moment of his appearance on the lime-lit 
 stage, beating the boys, his victims, about the 
 shoulders with his toasting-fork, and in his last 
 moments of epileptic frenzy in the condemned 
 cell, is consistently theatrical and thrilling. He is 
 always (as actors say) getting the last ounce out 
 of his part. His final outcry is splendidly in keep- 
 ing with his character, as he laughs aloud in his 
 251 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 delirium of terror at the sad wistful ghost of 
 Oliver, and exclaims : " Oliver, too, ha ! ha ! ha ! 
 Oliver too — quite the gentleman now — quite the 
 — take that boy away to bed ! . . . Take him 
 away to bed ! " cried Fagin. " Do you hear me, 
 some of you ? He has been the — the — somehow 
 the cause of all this. It's worth the money to 
 bring him up to it — Bolter's throat. Bill ; never 
 mind the girl — Bolter's throat as deep as you can 
 cut. Sawhisheadoff ! " " Fagin," said the jailer. 
 " That's me I " cried the Jew, falling instantly 
 into the attitude of listening he had assumed 
 upon his trial. *' An old man, my lord ; a very 
 old, old man ! " 
 
 Old indeed I Old as the devil. As incredible 
 as the devil. And as immortal ! / 
 
 Dickens' books are full of violent criminals, 
 several murderers among them ; but all of them 
 accidental criminals, amateur rather than profes- 
 sional criminals. Oliver Twist was his first and 
 last excursus into that genre of the Underworld 
 among the people of the abyss. In Nicholas 
 Nickleby notably, but in each succeeding book 
 ever less and less insistently, he clings to the old 
 melodramatic conception of the villain as a per- 
 son manifestly villainous in every aspect and nu- 
 ance of his personality . . . until he is inspired 
 to draw a murderer or two from life ; and then 
 
 252 
 
THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 
 
 we get a Mademoiselle Hortense and a Julius 
 SHnkton. 
 
 Mademoiselle Hortense, lady's maid to Lady 
 Dedlock, is described in Bleak Hottse as 
 
 a Frenchwoman of two-and-thirty, from some- 
 where in the southern country about Avignon 
 and Marseilles — a large-eyed brown woman with 
 black hair ; who would be handsome but for a 
 certain feline mouth, and general uncomfortable 
 tightness of face, rendering the jaws too eager, 
 and the skull too prominent. There is something 
 indefinably keen and wan about her anatomy ; 
 and she has a watchful way of looking out of the 
 corners of her eyes without turning her head, 
 which could be pleasantly dispensed with — espe- 
 cially when she is in an ill-humour and near kni- 
 ves. Through all the good taste of her dress and 
 little adornments, these objections so express 
 themselves that she seems to go about like a very 
 neat She- wolf imperfectly tamed. Besides being 
 accomplished in all the knowledge appertaining 
 to her post, she is almost an Englishwoman in 
 her acquaintance with the language. 
 
 Mademoiselle Hortense was founded on the 
 notorious Mrs. Manning, who, with her husband, 
 suffered the penalty of death at Horsemonger 
 Lane Gaol in 1849. 
 253 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 The Mannings' victim was 
 
 'a man named Patrick O'Connor, a Custom- 
 House gauger, who had been a suitor of Marie 
 de Roux before she became Mrs. Manning. 
 Marie de Roux up to the time of her marriage 
 had been in service as lady's maid to Lady Blan- 
 tyre, daughter of the Duchess of Sutherland, and 
 Manning hoped to get some small Government 
 appointment through his wife's interest. He had 
 failed in this as well as in the business of a publi- 
 can which he had at one time adopted. After the 
 marriage a close intimacy was still maintained 
 between O'Connor and the Mannings. He lived 
 at Mile End, whence he walked often to call at 
 3 Miniver Place, Bermondsey, the residence of 
 his old love. O'Connor was a man of substance. 
 He had long followed the profitable trade of a 
 money-lender, and by dint of usurious interest 
 on small sums advanced to needy neighbours, 
 had amassed as much as ;^8ooo or £ 1 0,000. H is 
 wealth was well-known to " Maria," as he called 
 Mrs. Manning, who made several ineffectual 
 attempts to get money out of him. At last this 
 fiendish woman made up her mind to murder 
 O'Connor and appropriate all his possessions. 
 Her husband, to whom she coolly confided her 
 intentions, a heavy brutish fellow, was yet aghast 
 at his wife's resolve, and tried hard to dissuade 
 
 ' Chronicles of Newgate.^ by Major Arthur Griffiths. 
 
 254 
 
THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 
 
 her from her bad purpose. In his confession after 
 sentence he declared that she plied him well with 
 brandy at this period, and that during all the time 
 he was never in his right senses. Meanwhile the 
 woman, unflinching in her cold, bloody determi- 
 nation, carefully laid all her plans for the consum- 
 mation of the deed. 
 
 One fine afternoon in August, O'Connor was 
 met walking in the direction of Bermondsey. He 
 was dressed with particular care, as he was to 
 dine at the Mannings' and meet friends, one a 
 young lady. He was seen afterwards smoking 
 and talking with his hosts in their back-parlour 
 and never seen again alive. It came out in the 
 husband's confession that Mrs. Manning induced 
 O'Connor to go down to the kitchen to wash his 
 hands, that she followed him to the basement, 
 that she stood behind him as he stood near the 
 open grave she herself had dug for him, and 
 which he mistook for a drain, and that while he 
 was speaking to her she put the muzzle of a pistol 
 close to the back of his head and shot him down. 
 She ran upstairs, told her husband, made him go 
 down to look at her handiwork, and as O'Connor 
 was not quite dead. Manning gave the coup de 
 grace with a crowbar. After this Mrs. Manning 
 changed her dress and went off in a cab to O'Con- 
 nor's lodgings, which, having possessed herself 
 of the murdered man's keys, she rifled from end 
 to end. Returning to her own home, where Man- 
 255 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 ning meanwhile had been calmly smoking and 
 talking to the neighbours over the basement wall, 
 the corpse lying just inside the kitchen all the 
 while, the two set to work to strip the body and 
 hide it under the stones of the floor. This job was 
 not completed till the following day, as the hole 
 had to be enlarged, and the only tool they had 
 was a dust-shovel. A quantity of quicklime was 
 thrown in with the body to destroy all identifica- 
 tion. This was on a Thursday evening. For the 
 remainder of that week and part of the next the 
 murderers stayed in the house and occupied the 
 kitchen close to the remains of their victim. On 
 the Sunday Mrs. Manning roasted a goose at this 
 same kitchen fire and ate it with relish in the 
 afternoon. This cold-blooded indifference after 
 the event was only outdone by the premeditation 
 of this horrible murder. The holemust have been 
 excavated and the quicklime purchased quite 
 three weeks before O'Connor met his death, and 
 during that time he must frequently have stood 
 or sat over his own grave. 
 
 The murder was discovered. Mr. and Mrs. 
 Manning were arrested. 
 
 The prisoners were in due course transferred to 
 Newgate to be put upon their trial at the Central 
 Criminal Court. Agreat number of distinguished 
 people assembled as usual at the Old Bailey on 
 the day of the trial. The Mannings were ar- 
 
 256 
 
LORD GRENVILLE 
 
 Barnaby Rudge 
 
THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 
 
 raigned together : the husband standing at one 
 of the front corners of the dock, his wife at the 
 other end. . . . Mrs. Manning was not without 
 personal charms : her face was comely, she had 
 dark hair and good eyes, and was above the 
 middle height, yet inclined to be stout. She was 
 smartly dressed in a plaid shawl and a white lace 
 cap ; her hair was dressed in long bands. She 
 had lace ruffles at her wrists, and wore primrose- 
 coloured kid gloves. The case rested upon irre- 
 futable evidence, and was proved to the satisfac- 
 tion of the jury who brought in a verdict of guilty 
 . . . when sentence of death was passed . . . 
 Mrs. Manning, speaking with a foreign accent, 
 addressed the court with great fluency and vehe- 
 mence. She complained that she had had no jus- 
 tice ; there was no law for her ; she had found no 
 protection either from judges, the prosecutor, or 
 her husband. She had not been treated like a 
 Christian but like a wild beast of the forest. . . . 
 When the judge assumed the black cap Mrs. 
 Manning became still more violent, shouting, 
 " No, no, I will not stand it ! You ought to be 
 ashamed of yourselves ! " and would have left the 
 dock had not Mr. Cope, thegovernor of Newgate, 
 restrained her. After judgment was passed she 
 repeatedly cried out Shame ! and stretching out 
 her hand she gathered up a quantity of the rue 
 which, following ancient custom, dating from the 
 days of the gaol fever, was strewn in front of the 
 257 R 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 dock, and threw it towards the bench with a con- 
 temptuous gesture. 
 
 On being removed to Newgate from the Court 
 Mrs. Manning became perfectly furious. She 
 uttered loud imprecations, cursing judge, jury, 
 barristers, witnesses, and all who stood around. 
 Her favourite and most often-repeated expres- 
 sion was, " D — n seize you all." They had to 
 handcuff her by force against the most violent re- 
 sistance, and still she raged and stormed, shaking 
 her clenched and manacled hands in the officers' 
 faces. From Newgate the Mannings were taken 
 in separate cabs to Horsemonger Lane Gaol. 
 On this journey her manner changed completely. 
 She became flippant, joked with the officers, 
 asked how they liked her *' resolution " in the 
 dock, and expressed her utmost contempt for her 
 husband, whom she never intended to acknow- 
 ledge or speak to again. Later her mood changed 
 to abject despair. On reaching the condemned 
 cell she threw herself upon the floor and shrieked 
 in an hysterical agony of tears. After this until 
 the day of execution she recovered her spirits 
 and displayed reckless effrontery, mocking at the 
 chaplain, and turning a deaf ear to the counsels 
 of a benevolent lady who visited her. Now she 
 abused the jury, now called Manning a vaga- 
 bond, and through all ate heartily at every meal, 
 slept soundly at nights, and talked with cheerful- 
 ness on almost any subject. Nevertheless she 
 
 258 
 
THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 
 
 attempted to commit suicide by driving her nails, 
 purposely kept long, into her throat. She was 
 discovered just as she was getting black in the 
 face. 
 
 Charles Dickens, who witnessed the execution 
 of the Mannings, wrote to The Times saying that 
 he believed that "a sight so inconceivably awful 
 as the wickedness and levity of the immense 
 crowd collected at the execution this morning 
 could be imagined by no man, and presented by 
 no heathen land under the sun. The horrors of 
 the gibbet, and the crime which brought the 
 wretched murderers to it, faded in my mind be- 
 fore the atrocious bearing, looks and language of 
 the assembled spectators. When I came upon 
 the scene at midnight, the shrillness of the cries 
 and howls that were raised from time to time, de- 
 noting that they came from a concourse of boys 
 and girls already assembled in the best places, 
 made my blood run cold." 
 
 As a result of this passionate protest public 
 executions were abandoned in England. 
 
 The prototype of Julius Slinkton in Dickens' 
 short story Hunted Down was Thomas Griffiths 
 Wainewright, essayist, forger, and poisoner, who 
 was born at Chiswick in October, 1794. Left an 
 orphan he was brought up at Turnham Green by 
 his grandfather. Doctor Ralph Griffiths, the 
 259 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 founder of The Monthly Review^ and was edu- 
 cated under Charles Burney. He held a commis- 
 sion in the Guards when, about 1820 or earlier, 
 he took to writing tawdry art criticisms and mis- 
 cellaneous articles for the periodicals, especially 
 the London Magazine, under the pseudonym of 
 Janus Weathercock. He married on ;^200 a 
 year, and soon outrunning his means first com- 
 mitted a forgery, and then poisoned with strych- 
 nine his uncle, his mother-in-law, his sister-in- 
 law, and a Norfolk acquaintance at Boulogne. 
 The sister-in-law (Wainewright's wife was an ac- 
 complice in her murder) had been fraudulently 
 insured for ;^ 18,000, but two actions to enforce 
 payment failed ; and Wainewright, venturing 
 backfrom France to London in 1 837, was arrested 
 for his old forgery, and sentenced to life trans- 
 portation. Even in Newgate he bragged of still 
 holding " the position of a gentleman," and in 
 Van Diemen's Land canted about Art and the 
 Ideal. There he painted portraits, ate opium, and 
 at last died of apoplexy at HobartTownin 1852. 
 During his early manhood he exhibited fre- 
 quently at the Royal Academy, and also pub- 
 lished one book entitled Some Passages in the 
 Life of Egomet Bonmot, besides acting as editor 
 of the London Magazine for a time. 
 
 Indeed Wainewright did cut something of a 
 figure among the notabilities of his brief day ; 
 and does seem to have strangely interested, fav- 
 
 260 
 
THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 
 
 ourably or otherwise, many of his contemporaries. 
 Hazlitt, Lamb, Bryan Waller Procter (** Barry 
 Cornwall"), Lytton, and Dickens all wrote about 
 him. Lytton made him the central figure of his 
 forgotten novel, Lucretia, wherein, as Gabriel 
 Varney, he is more orless faithfully mirrored from 
 his childhood up. Lamb seems to have had a real 
 affection for him, refers to him as the kindly, 
 light-hearted Janus, and mentions him as having 
 wept at the false news of Elia's death. But Procter 
 describes him scathingly as " short and fattish, 
 with mincing steps and tremulous words, his hair 
 curled and full of unguents, and his cheeks painted 
 like those of a demirep." And there are passing 
 allusions to this horrible creature in Forster's 
 Life which tend to support Procter's view of his 
 character. 
 
 Forster and Dickens, in 1838 or 1839, made 
 a circuit of nearly all the London prisons ; " and 
 in coming to the prisoners under remand, while 
 going over Newgate, accompanied by Macready 
 (the actor) and Mr. Hablot Browne ('Phiz'), 
 were startled by a sudden tragic cry of * My God, 
 there's Wainewright ! ' In the shabby-genteel 
 creature, with sandy, disordered hair and dirty 
 moustache, who had turned quickly round with 
 a defiant stare at our entrance, looking at once 
 mean andfierce,andquite capable of the cowardly 
 murders he had committed, Macready had been 
 horrified to recognise a man familiarly known to 
 261 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 him in former years, and at whose table he had 
 dined." 
 
 We find Dickens' ultimate use of this poor 
 tawdry villain foreshadowed in the following note 
 from his manuscript book : " Devoted to the De- 
 struction of a man. Revenge built up on love. 
 The secretary in the Wainewright case, who had 
 fallen in love (or supposed he had) with the mur- 
 dered girl. . . . The man with his hair parted 
 straight up the front of his head, like an aggra- 
 vating gravel-walk. Always presenting it to you. 
 ' Up here, if you please. Neither to the right or 
 left. Take me exactly in this direction. Straight 
 up here. Come off the grass.' " 
 
 In Hunted Down this same character is pre- 
 sented as a man of " about forty or so, dark, ex- 
 ceedingly well dressed in black — being in mourn- 
 ing — and the hand he extended with a polite 
 air had a particularly well-fitting black kid glove 
 upon it. His hair, which was elaborately brushed 
 and oiled, was parted straight up the middle; and 
 he presented this parting to the clerk, exactly (to 
 my thinking) as if he said in so many words : 
 'You must take me, if you please, my friend, just 
 as I show myself. Come straight up here, follow 
 the gravel path, keep off the grass, I allow no 
 trespassing.' " 
 
 Hunted Down does not matter much, in a liter- 
 ary sense. It is, I think, the only real pot-boiler 
 Dickens ever wrote, a very poor story, utterly 
 
 262 
 
THE CRIMINAL PROTOTYPES 
 
 unworthy of its author ; but I cite it in this con- 
 nection as an apt illustration of the difference be- 
 tween Dickens' earliest and latest methods of 
 dealing with criminal types. Julius Slinkton is so 
 very much more probable than Fagin or Quilp 
 or Jonas Chuzzlewit — and so infinitely less con- 
 vincing. 
 

SAMUEL CARTER HALL 
 "Pecksniff" 
 
CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH 
 THE GREAT GROTESQUES 
 
CHAPTER THE 
 
 ELEVENTH GREAT GROTESQUES 
 
 IT SEEMS A PITY THAT MOST OF 
 
 Dickens' characters should have had no recog- 
 nisable prototypes in real life ; or, if they had 
 prototypes, that so little should be known about 
 them, and that that little should be so vague and 
 unsatisfactory. It seems all the more a pity be- 
 cause there is often plentiful information about 
 many of his minor characters ; and the sum of 
 that information is increasing almost daily. In 
 every issue of The Dickensian, and in every new 
 review of Dickens' life and work, there is gener- 
 ally to be found an item or so dealing with the 
 newly-discovered prototypes of this or that figure 
 from one or other of his novels, or touching on 
 some fresh fact concerning the old accepted pro- 
 totypes. 
 
 Thus it is that writing a book about Dickens 
 is like writing an encyclopaedia. As soon as you 
 think that you have definitely and finally settled 
 some matter relating to him some new develop- 
 ment of that matter crops up, and you find that 
 you are out of date almost before the ink has dried 
 on the paper. Dickens, like Shakespeare, is in- 
 exhaustible. The more you write or think about 
 him the more there is to think and write about. 
 Which is merely to say, perhaps, that he is like 
 life itself. 
 
 And just herethe NewCriticismgets its hackles 
 267 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 up. "Likelife!"saysthe New Criticism. "There 
 is nothing so unlike life as Dickens. His people 
 are preposterous. His incidents are incredible. 
 His pathos is a thing of gulps and snuffles like 
 a cold in the head. And his humour ... his 
 humour is no laughing matter." 
 
 But I have taken New Critics to see the late 
 Dan Leno. And they have laughed at him con- 
 sumedly. They did not know that Dan Leno was 
 just a character — not always the same character 
 — out of Dickens. He was a preposterous per- 
 son, if you like. The incidents he described were 
 usually incredible. H is voice was one of the most 
 pathetic voices I have ever heard : hoarse and 
 plaintive ; and his humour was so far from being 
 a laughing matter (to him) that he gave it forth 
 in a series of moans and sobs. I have seen Mr. 
 Bransby Williams in his impersonations of Dick- 
 ens characters, and though I respect and admire 
 his sincere conscientiousness and his obviously 
 deep feeling for Dickens I have never seen any- 
 thing less like any character out of Dickens than 
 Mr. Williams' interpretation of Dickens charac- 
 ters. I have seen Miss Lee as Poor Jo, and Mr. 
 Charles Wilmot as Chadband. I have seen Sir 
 Herbert Tree and his company in Oliver Twist ; 
 1 have seen Mr. Martin Harvey as Sydney Car- 
 ton in The Only Way^ and Mr. Cyril Maude as 
 Sairey Gamp. And they have all been hope- 
 
 268 
 
THE GREAT GROTESQUES 
 
 lessly out of the picture. But Mr. Dan Leno . . . 
 I feel, somehow, that if Dickens had only lived 
 long enough he would have been bound in the in- 
 evitable nature of things to create "Mrs. Kelly," 
 and The Proprietor of The Nineteenth Century 
 Stores, and The Shopwalker, and the Leader of 
 The Midnight March. For these preposterous 
 people that Dan Leno put upon the stage in his 
 own person, and the incredible tales that he told 
 about them ; these people with their sad humour 
 and their humorous pathos: these were in the very 
 vein of Dickens. And one had only to glance 
 round the house at the audience, to see their 
 laughing faces and to hear the thunder of their 
 mirth, to discover the secret of Dickens', popu- 
 larity. 
 
 The fact is that when any man says of litera- 
 ture or art that it presents a false picture of life 
 he is talking like a fool, not a nice silly fool, but 
 a conceited fool. He is arrogating to himself all 
 wisdom and all knowledge. He is claiming to 
 have plumbed and scaled all the depths and 
 heights of human nature. And obviously he has 
 to be very young or very ignorant, or both, to ad- 
 vance such a gigantic claim. Older, wiser folk 
 know that, in a manner of speaking, there are as 
 many different worlds as there are people in the 
 world. Things exist, not in themselves, but in the 
 eyes of the beholder. To all true women all 
 269 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 babies are beautiful, and to everybody else they 
 are ugly. The tragedy of the young man in the 
 new pair of trousers who is going to meet his 
 sweetheart, and who slips upon a piece of orange- 
 peel and sits down in a puddle, is the onlookers' 
 comedy. One man's humour is another man's 
 boredom, and a third man's exasperation. We 
 cannot all laugh at the same thing ; we must 
 laugh at one another, or, better still, at ourselves. 
 Dickens taught us to laugh at the whole human 
 race, villains and ourselves included ; and those 
 of us who don't — who can't or won't — laugh with 
 us, must expect to have the laughter turned 
 against them. There is nothing that so infuri- 
 ates the average man as the dolt who cannot see 
 his jokes. And the average man is quite right. 
 He who never sees a joke never sees anything ; 
 and he who never sees anything denies that any- 
 thing is there. 
 
 Dickens in himself provides the finest answer 
 to the critics who say that what does not seem 
 true to them must of necessity be false. Dickens 
 was a supreme type of the average man. He was 
 the average man grown to the proportions of a 
 giant. There never was any individual average 
 man in the least like Dickens ; and yet Dickens 
 expresses all average men. And in the same way 
 — and this is the point I would make — he ex- 
 presses all sorts of average people by investing 
 them with his own proportions, by drawing them 
 
 270 
 
THE GREAT GROTESQUES 
 
 to his own scale, and so sublimating them that 
 they become supreme types also. 
 
 The original of Mrs. Gamp was in reality a 
 person hired by a most distinguished friend of 
 Dickens, a lady, to take charge of an invalid very 
 dear to her ; and the common habit of this nurse 
 in the sick-room, among other Gampish peculi- 
 arities, was to rub her nose along the top of the 
 tall fender. From that trick of rubbing her nose 
 along the top of the fender Dickens built up one 
 of his most colossal figures. 
 
 " Mrs. Gamp (says Dickens in his Preface to 
 Martin Chuzzlewit) was, four-and-twenty years 
 ago, a fair representation of the hired attendant 
 on the poor in sickness. The Hospitals of London 
 were, in many respects, noble Institutions ; in 
 others, very defective. 1 think it not the least 
 among the instances of their mismanagement 
 that Mrs. Betsy Prig was a fair specimen of a 
 Hospital Nurse." 
 
 That is Dickens in judicial mood, when his 
 transports have died down, and the morning has 
 turned a cold eye upon the visions of the night. 
 But Dickens in that mood is seldom convincing. 
 Hitherto we have had no doubts whatever as to 
 the reality of Sairey Gamp and Betsy Prig ; but 
 now we have an uneasy conviction that we should 
 not find a Sairey Gamp at any lying-in or laying- 
 out, or a Betsy Prig in any of the hospitals, 
 though we searched London through. If we made 
 271 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 that search, however, I think, at the end of it, 
 we should bring home with us an impression of I 
 dozens of different hospital nurses that formed a 
 sort of composite portrait of Betsy Prig ; and we i 
 should bring home with us impressions of dozens f 
 of private nurses that, in bulk and being subtly 
 blent together, were somehow quite adequately 
 expressed in the personality of Mrs. Gamp. 
 
 The chief fault of the modern realist is that 
 he whittles away all eccentricities to get at the 
 normal type, instead of adding eccentricity to 
 eccentricity. He forgets that it is by a man's 
 eccentricities that we remember him and recog- 
 nise him again; and that as the vast majority of 
 men have some eccentricity or other, that man 
 cannot possibly be normal who has none. We 
 believe in Dickens' great grotesques because 
 they are so compact of eccentricities which re- 
 mind us of the eccentricities of our friends and 
 acquaintances. There were, in Dickens' day, fat 
 nurses, nurses with pimply faces, nurses with red 
 and swollen noses, nurses who smelt of spirits, 
 nurses who carried pattens, who carried a species 
 of gig umbrella, who had a husky voice, who had 
 a moist eye, who had a remarkable power of turn- 
 ing up that eye and showing only the white of 
 it, nurses with the strange idioms and turns of 
 speech that Mrs. Gamp affected. And though it 
 is extremely unlikely that you would have found 
 any one nurse with all these peculiarities, it is 
 
 272 
 
 I 
 
SIR ROBERT PEEL 
 A possible original of "Pecksniff' 
 
THE GREAT GROTESQUES 
 
 extremely likely that among them you would have 
 found them all. 
 
 In this way — in the way, I mean, by which he 
 achieved his effects — Dickens was a better real- 
 ist than Zola. In France I have met many men 
 and women who reminded me irresistibly at first 
 sight of people in Zola's books ; but very soon 
 I found that they all possessed some distinctive 
 quality or idiosyncrasy that made them quite dif- 
 ferent. Of course ; for there are no two of us 
 alike. The majority of Thomas Hardy's peas- 
 ants might conceivably change minds with one 
 another, and no one, not even themselves, be 
 any the wiser ; but the peasants of Dorsetshire 
 could not change minds with one another without 
 going mad. You could not say this of the char- 
 acters of Meredith, who was a contemporary and 
 a disciple of Dickens. Sir Willoughby Patterne 
 would be laughed out of Society; yet I find it 
 easier to believe in him than in all Mr. John 
 Galsworthy's Men of Property who somehow re- 
 fuse to sort themselves out in my mind, who lurk 
 in the background of my memory like shadows, 
 like the rows of people I never get a chance to 
 talk to in a crowded drawing-room, and whose 
 salient features are as hard for me to remember 
 as their names, which I have never heard. 
 
 Side by sidewith Mrs. Gamp, in the book called 
 Martin Ckuzzlewit, there is the hardly less strik- 
 273 s 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS I 
 
 ing figure of Pecksniff. By some (Forster among 
 them) Pecksniff is said to have been founded on 
 Sir Robert Peel ; by others, on Samuel Carter 
 Hall, who is best remembered as the husband of ■ 
 Mrs. Samuel Carter Hall. Mr. Hall, author and I 
 editor, was the fourth son of Colonel Robert 
 Hall. He was born at Geneva Barracks, County 
 Waterford, 9th May 1800. Coming to London 
 from Ireland in 1822, he studied law, and became 
 a gallery reporter for the New Times. He esta- 
 blished The Amulet in 1825, an annual which 
 he edited for several years ; succeeded the poet 
 Campbell as editor of the New Monthly Maga- 
 zine; was sub-editor of the John Bull; and did 
 other journalistic work before he founded and 
 edited the Art Journal m 1839, which has done 
 so much to create a public for art. He was a per- 
 tinacious and indefatigable worker and skilful 
 compiler, the joint works written and edited by 
 Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall exceeding five hundred 
 volumes. A testimonial of £ 1 600 was presented 
 to him by friends in 1874, and in 1880 he re- 
 ceived a civil list pension of ;^ 150 a year. He 
 died 1 6th March 1889. He went to lecture in the 
 United States at one period of his life, and was 
 invidiously heralded by some American papers 
 as "the original of Pecksniff." "Having heard 
 the novelist speak of this writer (says Mr. Fitz 
 gerald) I might be inclined to think the theory is 
 not so far-fetched." 
 
 274 
 
THE GREAT GROTESQUES 
 
 As to Sir Robert Peel we only know that 
 Dickens' description of Pecksniff, though bear- 
 ing some resemblance to the outward appear- 
 ance of the statesman, is not much like any de- 
 scription of him that his contemporaries have 
 preserved. Pecksniff was 
 
 a most exemplary man : fuller of virtuous pre- 
 cepts than a copy-book. Some people likened 
 him to a direction-post, which is always telling 
 the way to a place and never goes there : these 
 were his enemies; the shadows cast by his bright- 
 ness; that was all. His very throat was moral. 
 You saw a good deal of it. You looked over a 
 very low fence of white cravat (whereof no man 
 had ever beheld the tie, for he fastened it behind) 
 and there it lay, a valley between two jutting 
 heights of collar, serene and whiskerless before 
 you. It seemed to say, on the part of Mr. Peck- 
 sniff, "There is no deception, ladies and gentle- 
 men, all is peace, a holy calm pervades me." So 
 did his hair, just grizzled with an iron-grey, which 
 was all brushed off his forehead, and stood bolt 
 upright, or slightly drooped in kindred with his 
 heavy eyelids. So did his person, which was 
 sleek though free from corpulency. So did his 
 manner, which was soft and oily. In a word, even 
 his plain black suit, and state of widower, and 
 dangling double eyeglass, all tended to the same 
 purpose, and cried aloud, "Behold the moral 
 Pecksniff!" 
 275 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 But 
 
 Sir Robert Peel (says Mr. Justin M'Carthy in 
 A History of Our Own Times), the leader of the 
 opposition (in 1837), was by far the most power- 
 ful man in the House of Commons. Added to his 
 great qualities as an administrator and a Parlia- 
 mentary debater, he had the virtue, then very 
 rare among Conservatives, of being a sound and 
 clear financier, with a good grasp of the funda- 
 mental principles of political economy. His high 
 austere character made him respected by oppo- 
 nents as well as by friends. His temperament 
 was cold, or at least its heat was self-contained ; 
 he threw out no genial glow to those around him. 
 He was by nature a reserved and shy man, in 
 whose manners shyness took the form of pomp- 
 ousness and coldness. Something might be said 
 of him like that which Richter said of Schiller : 
 he was to strangers stony and like a precipice 
 from which it was their instinct to spring back. 
 It is certain that he had warm and generous feel- 
 ings, but his very sensitiveness only led him to 
 disguise them. The contrast between his emo- 
 tions and his lack of demonstrativeness created 
 in him a constant artificiality which often seemed 
 mere awkwardness. 
 
 No ; the more closely we compare Sir Robert 
 Peel with Pecksniff the more fantastic seems the 
 theory that there was any but a superficial resem- 
 blance between them. 
 
 276 
 
THE GREAT GROTESQUES 
 
 The notion of taking Pecksniff for a type of char- 
 acter (says Forster, writing of Martin Ckuzzle- 
 wit) was really the origin of the book ; the design 
 being to show, more or less by every person in- 
 troduced, the number and variety of humours and 
 vices that have their root in selfishness. 
 
 And never was any purpose more supremely 
 consummated. The Americans need not have 
 been so indignant against Dickens for what they 
 stigmatised as his gross libels upon them and 
 their country. 
 
 They had no Pecksniff, at any rate. Bred in a 
 more poisonous swamp than their Eden, of greatly 
 older standing and much harder to be drained, 
 Pecksniff was all our own. The confession is not 
 encouraging to national pride, but this character 
 is so far English that though our countrymen as a 
 rule are by no means Pecksniffs, the ruling weak- 
 ness is to countenance and encourage the race. 
 When people call the character exaggerated, and 
 protest that the lines are too broad to deceive 
 anyone, they only refuse, naturally enough, to 
 sanction in abook what half their lives is passed in 
 tolerating, if not worshipping. Dickens, illustrat- 
 ing his never-failing experience of being obliged 
 to subdue in his books what he knew to be real for 
 fear it should be deemed impossible, had already 
 made the remark in his Preface to Nickleby that 
 277 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 the world, which is so very credulous in what pro- 
 fesses to be true, is most incredulous in what pro- 
 fesses to be imaginary. Theyagree to be deceived 
 in a reality, and reward themselves by refusing to 
 be deceived in a fiction. That a great many people 
 who might have sat for Pecksniff should condemn 
 him for a grotesque impossibility, as Dickens av- 
 erred to be the case, was no more than might be 
 expected. A greater danger he has exposed more 
 usefully in showing the larger numbers who, de- 
 siring to be thought better than they are, support 
 eagerly pretensions that keep their own in coun- 
 tenance, and without being Pecksniffs, render 
 Pecksniffs possible. All impostures would have 
 something suspicious or too forbidding in their 
 look if we were not prepared to meet them half- 
 way. 
 
 And Pecksniffianism is still at the head of af- 
 fairs in many of our national institutions. The 
 intolerable cant of godliness that emanates from 
 our blood-sucking millionaires ; the pious horror 
 of our sleek prelates confronted with elemental 
 facts of human nature ; the lip-service that is 
 paid by our aristocracy to our plutocracy ; the 
 tender solicitude of the sweater, the usurer, and 
 the slum-owner for the poor and helpless, which 
 goes with uplifted hands and a roll of white eye- 
 balls ; the pestiferous hypocrisy of vote-catching 
 politicians ; the smug self-complacency of well- 
 paid charity-mongers : all these are unmistak- 
 
 278 
 
THE GREAT GROTESQUES 
 
 able manifestations of the true Pecksniffian spirit 
 that is as rife to-day as in Dickens' day. 
 
 Pecksniff, of course, like all the other great 
 grotesques, was merely another of the monsters 
 that Dickens created out of the sheer exuber- 
 ance of his immortal childhood. To the eyes of 
 children all things are exaggerated ; and being 
 exaggerated are more easily and clearly observed 
 in detail. To say that there never was such a man 
 as Pecksniff is no doubt true enough ; yet it is 
 equally true to say that there are thousands of 
 men like him. To say that there never was a man 
 so vile as Carker, or a man so innocent as Bofifin, 
 is merely to say that you have forgotten your 
 own childhood, when everyone was good or bad, 
 kind or unkind, beautiful or ugly — to you. There 
 is something Olympian, god-like, in the judg- 
 ments of childhood. Except ye become as little 
 children ye shall not enter into the kingdom of 
 Heaven. Dickens entered into his kingdom be- 
 cause he remained a child. 
 
 It was as a child of tender years that he saw 
 Mrs. Roy lance whom he afterwards turned into 
 Mrs. Pipchin. It was as a child that he saw Mary 
 Weller, who became the Peggotty oi David Cop- 
 perfield. But it was also with the eyes of a child, 
 though he had long since attained to manhood, 
 that he watched the goings-on of a certain un- 
 pleasant and rather mysterious individual with 
 279 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 largeprominent teeth, who wasconnected through 
 his father with an eminent engineering firm, and 
 who lived in the Oxford Road, and haunted that 
 neighbourhood o' nights, prowling about and og- 
 ling and frightening all the servant girls. This 
 man, probably a harmless neurotic maniac, was 
 a notorious character : notorious in Leamington 
 as well as in London ; but nobody seems to have 
 interfered with him — except Dickens. Dickens 
 interfered with him to the extent of christening 
 him " Carker," and following him to Leamington, ^j 
 and pestering him with gipsies, and playing the ' ' 
 very devil with him generally. To Dickens this 
 poor wretch was not a plain case for the hospi- 
 tal or the mad-house ; he was a highly-coloured 
 death's-head and skeleton masquerading as a man 
 and behaving like a fiend. 
 
 So with Boffin and Weggand Mr. Venus. Bof- 
 fin was founded on a Mr. Dodd, a dust contrac- 
 tor. A Mr. Braye,of the Kensington Vestry, who 
 knew him well, says of him : 
 
 As to the healthiness of the calling, I have the 
 authority of a gentleman descended from a long 
 line of dust contractors, and a near relation of Mr. 
 Boffin, immortalised by Dickens in Our Mutual 
 Friend3.s "The Golden Dustman." This gentle- 
 man, who is still slightly connected with the dust 
 business, I will call Boffin junior ; he was well 
 acquainted with the great novelist, made a for- 
 
 280 
 
MRS HAYES 
 
 ■ I^Ollv I i;i.d 
 
THE GREAT GROTESQUES 
 
 tune in the family business, devotes his time, and, 
 I should think, a considerable sum of money, to 
 the study of natural history — (his place is a sort 
 of zoological and botanic garden combined) ; — 
 and he is as conversant with Darwin and the 
 great men of science as he is with the best means 
 of making money out of dust-bin refuse. So, such 
 is the force of habit, that he has set aside a cor- 
 ner of his park for the neighbouring townsfolk 
 to shoot their dust. He says he likes the smell ; 
 it reminds him of old times. The story told by 
 Dickens is substantially correct. Mr. Boffin had 
 one daughter ; she was sought in marriage by 
 a gentleman of aristocratic connections. On the 
 wedding morn the Golden Dustman, instead of 
 coming down with a big cheque, to the dismay 
 of the gentleman, said the only present he could 
 make the bride would be one of his dust-heaps. 
 The bridegroom accepted, as he thought, a bad 
 bargain ; but he sold it to the brickmakers for 
 i^ 1 0,000. 
 
 Mr. Boffin lived in a corner house not far from 
 Cavendish Square, which was likely enough in 
 one of those long genteel streets — Wimpole 
 Street or Harley Street — which were Dickens' 
 pet aversion. Here the famous Silas Wegg had 
 his post. Denizens of the Pimlico district, who 
 dwell " not a hundred miles from Eccleston 
 Square," know well a sort of replica of this per- 
 sonage, one-legged also, who strangely, and of 
 281 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 course unconsciously, reproduced many traits of 
 the original. He is a perfect character — has his 
 privileges, his chair, in defiance of street regula- 
 tions, knows everyone in the street, and I dare- 
 say talks of "our house." Like his predecessor, 
 he at one time had literary tastes, and I recall his 
 showing me verses of a pious cast which he pro- 
 fessed to be of his own "engendure." . . . 
 
 The original of Mr. Venus was a Mr. J. Willis, 
 of 42 Saint Andrew's Street, Seven Dials, whom 
 Mr. Fitzgerald '(to whose admirable book Boz- 
 land I am indebted for the foregoing particulars) 
 discovered on his own account. He said to Dick- 
 ens: "I am convinced I have found the original 
 of Venus," and proceeded to describe Willis. 
 " You are right," said Dickens. 
 
 Mr. Venus's extraordinary establishment (Mr. 
 Fitzgerald goes on to say) where he pursued his 
 articulation of skeletons, &c., was fixed in Clerk- 
 enwell — where were the ** poorer shops of small 
 retail traders in commodities to eat and drink and 
 keep folks warm, and of Italian frame-makers, 
 and of barbers, and of brokers, and of dealers in 
 dogs and singing-birds. From these, in a narrow 
 and dirty street devoted to such callings, Mr. 
 Wegg selects one dark shop-window with a tal- 
 low candle dimly burning in it, surrounded by a 
 muddle of objects vaguely resembling pieces of 
 
 282 
 
THE GREAT GROTESQUES 
 
 leather and dry stick, but among which nothing 
 is resolvable into anything distinct, save the 
 candle itself in its old tin candlestick, and two 
 preserved frogs, fighting a small-sword duel." 
 
 I seize eagerly upon these last details of that 
 extraordinary establishment in Clerkenwell, be- 
 cause I believe I have seen it. But (Mr. Fitz- 
 gerald notwithstanding) I did not see it in Clerk- 
 enwell. I saw it, as a tiny boy, in Great Portland 
 Street, near the old Orthopaedic Hospital. I used 
 to gaze into that window with the eyes of Dick- 
 ens, for I was then the only kind of child I have 
 ever been — and that for only a few years ; but 
 Dickens was the same kind of child all his life. 
 He could go, at fifty-five years old, and see just 
 exactly what I saw at five years old. At five years 
 old I saw infinities of mystery and horror and 
 dark romance in that window ; now I should look 
 into it and see nothing. I should say : " It is so 
 badly lighted I can see nothing in it." At five it 
 was so badly lighted that I could see everything 
 in it. And so, at fifty-five, could Dickens. His 
 all-seeing eye was not so much an eye as a star, 
 a star that contained a whole world. His eyes 
 were the eyes of childhood, the clear bright eyes 
 of childhood that reflect the pure blue of a spring 
 sky, that reflect the floor of that kingdom of 
 Heaven into which we cannot enter except we 
 become as little children. 
 
CHAPTER THE TWELFTH 
 MINOR CHARACTERS 
 
I 
 
CHAPTER THE 
 
 TWELFTH MINOR CHARACTERS 
 
 THERE ARE VERY FEW MINOR 
 characters in Dickens. Many of his people whom 
 we only speak in passing we seem to know better 
 than we know the man next door, with whom we 
 have chatted over our garden-fence for seven 
 years past. There is, for example, Master Hum- 
 phrey, who also appears in The Old Curiosity 
 Shop as the Single Gentleman. Speaking for 
 himself Master Humphrey says : 
 
 I am not a churlish old man. Friendless I can 
 never be, for all mankind are my kindred, and I 
 am on ill terms with no one member of my great 
 family. But for many years I have led a lonely, 
 solitary life; — what wound I sought to heal, what 
 sorrow to forget, originally, matters not now ; it 
 is sufficient that retirement has become a habit 
 with me, and that I am unwilling to break the 
 spell which for so long a time has shed its quiet 
 influence upon my home and heart. 
 
 I live in a venerable suburb of London, in an 
 old house which in bygone days was a famous re- 
 sort for merry roysterers and peerless ladies, long 
 since departed. It is a silent, shady place, with a 
 paved courtyard so full of echoes, that sometimes 
 I am tempted to believe that faint responses to 
 the noises of old times linger there yet, and that 
 these ghosts of sound haunt my footsteps as I 
 287 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 pace it up and down. . . .Those who like to read 
 of brilliant rooms and gorgeous furniture would 
 derive but little pleasure from a minute descrip- 
 tion of my little dwelling. It is dear to me for the 
 same reason that they would hold it in slight 
 regard. Its worm-eaten doors, and low ceilings i 
 crossed by clumsy beams ; its walls of wainscot, 
 dark stairs, and gaping closets ; its small cham- 
 bers communicating with each other by winding 
 passages or narrow steps ; its many nooks, scarce i 
 larger than its corner-cupboards ; its very dust I 
 and dulness are all dear to me. The moth and f 
 spider are my constant tenants ; for in my house 
 the one basks in his long sleep, and the other 
 plies his busy loom secure and undisturbed. I 
 have a pleasure in thinking on a summer's day 
 how many butterflies have sprung for the first 
 time into light and sunshine from some dark 
 corner of these old walls. 
 
 When I first came to live here, which was 
 many years ago, the neighbours were curious to 
 know who I was, and whence I came, and why I 
 lived so much alone. As time went on and they 
 still remained unsatisfied on these points I be- 
 came the centre of a popular ferment, extending 
 for half a mile round, and in one direction for a 
 full mile. Various rumours were circulated to my 
 prejudice. I was a spy, an infidel, a conjurer, a 
 kidnapper of children, a refugee, a priest, a mon- 
 ster. . . . But when in course of time they found 
 
 288 
 
SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 
 
 I did no harm, but on the contrary inclined to- 
 wards them despite their unjust usage, they began 
 to relent. . . . And now I never walk abroad but 
 pleasant recognitions and smiling faces wait on 
 Master Humphrey. 
 
 Dickens got his first hint for the character of 
 Master Humphrey from seeing the name and 
 description " Humphreys, clockmaker," over a 
 shop-window in Barnard Castle, on his visit to 
 that town in search of information about the 
 Yorkshire schools. It was in that way that Dick- 
 ens got many of his best inspirations ; though 
 Master Humphrey can hardly be reckoned am- 
 ong his best, perhaps. And yet . . . there is in 
 Master Humphrey's ^^^^/"introduction of himself 
 something richly suggestive. " I have a pleasure 
 in thinking on a summer's day how many butter- 
 flies have sprung for the first time into light and 
 sunshine from some dark corner of these old 
 walls," says he. How many indeed that Dickens 
 started, that took wing, with him in hot boyish 
 pursuit, and at last soared into the empyrean and 
 were lost to view, leaving him gazing upward un- 
 til his eyes were tired, and then gazing around 
 him at the fairyland into which his pursuit had 
 led him. All his butterflies lured him into fairy- 
 land, as butterflies do lead boys over hedges and 
 through ditches, in and out of the copse, by the 
 side of twinkling, tinkling streams, across the 
 289 T 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 meadows, into a new strange territory that they 
 sit down contentedly to play in, and straightway 
 make their own. 
 
 Dickens always suggests to me a little child 
 playing all by himself: a child clear eyed and 
 smooth of brow, taking himself very seriously, 
 aping the grown-ups, putting all his heart and 
 soul into each fresh elaborate make-believe. He 
 is surrounded by the creatures of his imagination 
 that nevertheless bear a whimsical likeness to 
 people he has known and half forgotten until this 
 moment. 
 
 " Let me see," he seems to say at a certain 
 stage of the game, " I want a funny old learned 
 schoolmaster who was never young and yet is 
 rather childish. Come here — you and you and 
 you. 
 
 He summons the ghost of Dr. Everard, a 
 worthy pedagogue of Brighton (where Dickens 
 was at one time fond of spending week-ends), 
 whose celebrated seminary was locally known as 
 the ** Young House of Lords," because of the 
 aristocracy of its pupils. " You be Doctor Blim- 
 ber," says Dickens. " And you be Mrs. Blimber, 
 madam. And you, my dear young lady, if you 
 really don't mind, be Miss Cordelia." 
 
 At another stage of the same game he is in 
 urgent need of a nasty stiff proud man, and look- 
 ing round him, hails a friend. " You, Chapman, 
 be Mr. Dombey," says he. And forthwith Mr. 
 
 290 
 
SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 
 
 Thomas Chapman is Mr. Dombey. He is so 
 much like Mr. Dombey that Dickens had con- 
 siderable trouble with the Phiz pictures ; he was 
 so fearful of giving offence to his friend. That, of 
 course, was after the game was over. And it some- 
 how seems quite unnecessary for Forster to say 
 of such high-spirited fun that " few things more 
 absurd or unfounded have been invented, even 
 of Dickens, than that he found any part of the 
 original of Mr. Dombey in the nature, the ap- 
 pearance, or the manners of his excellent and 
 much-valued friend, Mr. Thomas Chapman, the 
 chairman of Lloyd's, with whom he held frequent 
 kindly intercourse . . . that . . . amiable and ex- 
 cellent city-merchant . . . might with the same 
 amount of justice or probability be supposed to 
 have oriofinated Coriolanus orTimon of Athens." 
 
 Of course he might ! In children's games the 
 most inappropriate persons are invariably cast 
 for the various parts, and it does not matter whe- 
 ther they play their parts well or ill, so long as a 
 child with the imagination and the verve of Dick- 
 ens directs and controls the revelry. 
 
 There was a Mrs. Campbell, also well-known 
 in Leamington, whom a local jeweller describes 
 as " laced up to the nines," and who bore such a 
 close resemblance to Dickens' famous character 
 that the jeweller once addressed her, absent- 
 mindedly, as " Mrs. Skewton." " I am not Mrs. 
 Skewton,"she is said to have replied indignantly. 
 291 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 She had a daughter, who was probably as unlike 
 the second Mrs. Dombey as only one beautiful 
 young woman can be unlike another beautiful 
 young woman. But Dickens said to her, in his 
 usual light-hearted irresponsible way : " I want 
 you. You must be Edith. And you, Mrs. Camp- 
 bell, must be the faded Cleopatra. . . . Advance 
 your shrivelled ear a little more this way, please. 
 Thank you." And it was so. 
 
 There was also a Mrs. Hayes, of Manchester, 
 who died only a few years ago, aged ninety. Her 
 maiden name was Littlefair ; and with such a 
 Dickensy name as that it seems inevitable that 
 in her youth she should have been a domestic 
 servant in the household of Mr. Henry Burnett, 
 Dickens' brother-in-law, whom he idealised as 
 Nicholas Nickleby. And this dear old lady, un- 
 like Mrs. Campbell of Leamington, always re- 
 called with delight " wot larx " she had had in her 
 girlhood with that there dreadful boy, Charles 
 Dickens, who himself had often reminded her 
 how he had used her for a character in more than 
 one of his books, but most notably as Mrs. Polly 
 Toodle, otherwise Richards, in Dombey and Son. 
 
 Three other pleasant people Dickens made to 
 play with him : Miss Strong, Mr. Jennings or | 
 Jennens, and Captain Morgan, who figures in A 
 Message from the Sea as Captain J organ, and 
 who in real life was an American sailor for whom 
 Dickens had conceived a great liking. 
 
 292 
 
SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 
 
 Miss Strong was allotted the "fat" part of Betsy 
 Trotwood, David Copperfield's delightful aunt. 
 
 Mr. Ashby Sterry has taken great pains to 
 identify Miss Trotwood's house at Dover, and 
 believes that he has done so. One is, however, 
 disinclined — though regretfully — to accept his 
 evidences. One is more inclined to accept those 
 of Mr. Kitton, who boldly affirms that the ori- 
 ginal of Betsy Trotwood lived at Broadstairs. 
 " She was a Miss Strong (says Mr. Kitton). She 
 occupied a double-fronted cottage in the middle 
 of Nuckell's Place, on the sea-front ; and like the 
 admirable Betsy, she was firmly convinced of her 
 right to stop the passage of donkeys along the 
 road opposite her door, deterring their proprie- 
 tors by means of hostile demonstrations with a 
 hearth-broom." 
 
 The original of Mr. Jarndyce was a Mr. Jenn- 
 ings or Jennens. 
 
 \xi Jarndyce v. Jarndyce^ as is well known, Dick- 
 ens had in view a monstrous Chancery suit re- 
 lating to the Jennings property, which had drag- 
 ged on in the Courts for years, and in the end 
 left nothing. The house was a deserted mansion 
 at Acton, in Suffolk, which belonged to a notor- 
 ious old miser Jennings or Jennens, who died 
 in 1798, when ninety-seven years old. He made 
 a will, but neither it nor executors could be found. 
 At last the heir-at-law was traced in the person 
 293 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 of the great-great-grandson of one C. Jennens, 
 of Gopsal, the eldest uncle of the deceased — and 
 who then entered into possession of the property. 
 So lately as the year 1878 the case was in the 
 Courts — ^just eighty years after the owner's death 
 (says Mr. Fitzgerald in Bozland). 
 
 But Dickens, as boys will, played a little care- 
 lessly and clumsily and roughly sometimes, some- 
 times even a little spitefully ; and then any girls 
 who happened to be playing with him were likely 
 to get hurt. In illustration of this there is, not- 
 ably, the sad case of Miss Mowcher, who was in- 
 troduced to David Copperfield by Steerforth,and 
 who is described as 
 
 a pursy dwarf, of about forty or forty-five, with 
 a very large head and face, a pair of roguish 
 grey eyes, and such extremely little arms that to 
 enable herself to lay her finger archly against her 
 snub nose as she ogled Steerforth, she was obliged 
 to meet the finger half-way and lay her nose 
 against it. Her chin, which was what is called 
 a double-chin, was so fat that it entirely swal- 
 lowed up the strings of her bonnet, bow and all. 
 Throat she had none ; waist she had none ; legs 
 she had none worth mentioning ; for though she 
 was more than full-sized down to where her waist 
 would have been, if she had had any, and though 
 she terminated, as human beings generally do, 
 
 294 
 
SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 
 
 in a pair of feet, she was so short that she stood 
 at a common-sized chair as at a table, resting a 
 bag she carried on the seat. This lady, dressed 
 in an off-hand easy style, bringing her nose and 
 her forefinger together with the difficulty I have 
 described ; standing with her head necessarily 
 on one side, and with one of her sharp eyes shut 
 up making an uncommonly knowing face, after 
 ogling Steerforth for a few moments, broke into 
 a torrent of words. 
 
 " What ! My flower ! " she pleasantly began, 
 shaking her large head at him. "You're there, 
 are you ! Oh, you naughty boy, fie for shame ! 
 what do you do so far away from home ? Up to 
 mischief, I'll be bound. Oh, you're a downy fel- 
 low, Steerforth, so you are, and I'm another, ain't 
 I ? Ha, ha, ha ! You'd have betted a hundred 
 pound to five now, that you wouldn't have seen 
 me here, wouldn't you? Bless you, man alive, I'm 
 everywhere. I'm here, and there, and where not, 
 like the conjurer's half-crown in the lady's hand- 
 kercher. Talking of handkerchers — and talking 
 of ladies — what a comfort you are to your blessed 
 mother, ain't you, my dear boy, over one of my 
 shoulders, and I don't say which ! " 
 
 That was the Miss Mowcher of Dickens' fic- 
 tion ; but there was also a real Miss Mowcher : her 
 namewasMrs. Seymour Hill; and Dickens writes 
 to Forster on 28th December 1849, whilst he was 
 295 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 still in the throes oi David Coppe7'fie Id : " I have 
 had the queerest adventure this morning, the re- 
 ceipt of the enclosed from Miss Mowcher ! It is i] 
 serio-comic, but there is no doubt one is wrong in f 
 being tempted to such a use of power." How like 
 the small boy, who having shown off his strength | 
 to the girls is stricken with compunction, and 
 says : " I didn't mean to hurt you, really." 
 
 Forster remarks upon this unfortunate inci- 
 dent : 
 
 Thinking a grotesque little oddity among his ac- 
 quaintance to be safe from recognition, he had 
 done what Smollett did sometimes, but never 
 Fielding, and given way, in the first outburst of 
 fun that had broken out around the fancy, to the 
 temptation of copying too closely peculiarities of 
 figure and face amounting in effect to deformity. 
 He was shocked at discovering the pain he had 
 given, and a copy is before me of the assurances 
 by way of reply which he at once sent to the com- 
 plainant. That he was grieved and surprised be- 
 yond measure. That he had not intended her 
 altogether. That all his characters, being made 
 up out of many people, were composite and never 
 individual. That the chair (for table) and other 
 matters were undoubtedlyfromher,but that other 
 traits were not hers at all ; and that in Miss 
 Mowcher's " Ain't I volatile " his friends had 
 quite correctly recognised the favourite utter- 
 
 296 
 
DETECTIVE FIELD 
 "Inspector Bucket" 
 
SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 
 
 ance of a different person. That he felt never- 
 theless he had done wrong, and would now do 
 anything to repair it. That he had intended to 
 employ the character in an unpleasant way, but 
 he would, whatever the risk or inconvenience, 
 change it all, so that nothing but an agreeable 
 impression should be left. 
 
 The other instance of a girl who might have 
 got very badly hurt whilst playing with Master 
 Dickens, but who apparently escaped by a mir- 
 acle of un-self-consciousness, was she who was 
 cast for the part of that most unpleasant young 
 lady, Miss Rosa Dartle. " There are (says For- 
 ster) some natural traits in her — which Dickens' 
 least lifelike people are never without ; and it 
 was from one of his lady friends, very familiar to 
 him indeed, that he copied her peculiarity of 
 never saying anything outright, but hinting it 
 merely, and making more of it that way." 
 
 Miss Rosa Dartle is described by David as 
 being 
 
 of a slight short figure, dark, and not agreeable 
 to look at, but with some appearance of good 
 looks too, who attracted my attention : perhaps 
 because I had not expected to see her : perhaps 
 because I found myself sitting opposite to her : 
 perhaps because of something really remarkable 
 in her. She had black hair and eager black eyes, 
 and was thin, and had a scar upon her lip. It was 
 297 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS *' 
 
 an old scar — I should rather call it seam, for it 
 was not discoloured and had healed years ago — 
 which had once cut through her mouth, down-| 
 ward towards the chin, but was now barely vis- 
 ible across the table, except above and on her 
 upper lip, the shape of which it had altered. I 
 concluded in my own mind that she was about 
 thirty years of age, and that she wished to be 
 married. She was a little dilapidated — like a 
 house — with having been so long to let ; yet had, 
 as I have said, an appearance of good looks. Her 
 thinness seemed to be the effect of some wasting 
 fire within her, which found a vent in her gaunt 
 eyes. 
 
 Now, do you know, whenever I read that de- 
 scription — that description barbed and tipped 
 with caustic — I always feel that Dickens had 
 some living person in his mind whom he viru- 
 lently disliked ; and I have always a sense of re- 
 lief at the thought that his lady friend, mentioned 
 by Forster, never realised how her own trivial 
 peculiarities of speech had been grafted on to this 
 object of Dickens' profound dislike. I am always 
 very glad to know that the lady did not know 
 how terribly near she was to getting very badly 
 hurt indeed. 
 
 Of the other characters which belong to this 
 chapter, and which (for convenience' sake) I have 
 
 298 
 
SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 
 
 dubbed " minor," though few of them are in any 
 sense " minor," I would mention, first, Gaffer 
 Hexam and Charlie Hexam, who exhibit in their 
 two personalities one of the most effective studies 
 in contrast that even Dickens conceived. And 
 they were derived from a mere passing glimpse 
 of two commonplace figures in the street. 
 
 " I must use somehow," says Dickens in one of 
 his letters to Forster, " the uneducated father in 
 fustian and the educated boy in spectacles whom 
 Leech and I saw at Chatham." 
 
 He did use them in Our Mutual Friend, used 
 them as the lever and the fulcrum upon which to 
 raise the whole weighty question of popular edu- 
 cation. Between the wild fierce man, with the 
 hooked nose, the bright glancing eyes, and the 
 ruffled head, that gave him a certain likeness to a 
 bird of prey : between that coarse ignorant man, 
 and that insufferable prig, his son, whose scholar- 
 ly attainments only served to afflict him with a 
 worse coarseness and a more grievous ignorance : 
 a coarseness of soul far worse than any coarse- 
 ness of fibre, a coarseness that blunted all his 
 finer feelings, and an ignorance of the heart far 
 worse than any ignorance of the mind, an ignor- 
 ance that left him in the outer darkness and lone- 
 liness of utter separation from his kin : between 
 these two there is a contrast struck, there is a 
 great gulf fixed, that all the Education Acts of 
 thelast fortyyears have beenpowerlessto bridge. 
 299 
 
1 
 
 THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 It needed the eyes of a prophet to see the signi- 
 ficance of those two figures of the uneducated 
 father in fustian and the educated boy in specta- 
 cles, already in his childhood taking short views 
 of life. Dickens did see the significance of that 
 queer unnatural and yet natural juxtaposition of 
 two alien minds in two bodies thatwere one flesh. 
 He had, when he saw this, grown up a little ; but 
 there was still enough of the immortal child left 
 in him to exaggerate these figures into gigantic 
 portents. One has not to go far to find the origi- 
 nals of Gaffer Hexam and his boy, Charlie ; the 
 Gaffer is in every slum, Charlie in every suburb. 
 It was from similar fleeting impressions of 
 small things involving great issues that Dickens 
 spun the filaments of the tangle oi Edwin Drood, 
 and created the atmosphere of such fine moral 
 tales as Tom Tiddlers Grou7td. Mr. Mopes the 
 Hermit was founded on a poor besotted wretch, 
 James Lucas, known as Mad Lucas, of Kneb- 
 worth, a miser who lived in the kitchen of his 
 house, Elmwood House, at Redcoats Green, near 
 Stevenage. James Lucas, " the Hertfordshire 
 Hermit," was really a well-educated and highly 
 intellectual man, who inherited the estate of his 
 father, a prosperous West India merchant, and it 
 is conjectured that his distress at the death of his 
 widowed mother (who lived with him) was pri- 
 marily the cause of that mental aberration which 
 assumed such an eccentric form. Heeven refused 
 
 300 
 
SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 
 
 to bury her corpse, so that the local authorities 
 were compelled to resort to a subterfuge in order 
 to perform themselves the last rites. He objected 
 to furnish his rooms, and, attired simply in a loose 
 blanket fastened with a skewer, preferred to eat 
 and sleep amidst the cinders and rubbish-heaps 
 (a sanctuary for rats) which accumulated in the 
 kitchen. Althouorh his diet consisted of bread- 
 and-cheese, red herrings, and gin, there were 
 choice wines available for friendly visitors, a spe- 
 cial vintage of sherry being reserved for ladies 
 who thus honoured him. The hermit' spenc/tan^ 
 for tramps attracted all the vagabonds in the 
 neighbourhood, so that it became necessary for 
 him to protect himself from insult by retaining 
 armed watchmen and barricading the house. 
 That he sat for Mr. Mopes is certain from the 
 fact that, on reading Tom Tiddler s Ground, he 
 expressed great indignation at what he consider- 
 ed to be a much exaggerated account of himself 
 and his environment. 
 
 Dickens describes him, and denounces his 
 cult, thus : 
 
 Mr. Traveller . . . betook himself towards the 
 ruined hermitage of Mr. Mopes the hermit. 
 
 For Mr. Mopes, by suffering everything about 
 him to go to ruin, and by dressing himself in a 
 blanket and skewer, and by steeping himself in 
 soot and grease and other nastiness,had acquired 
 301 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 great renown in all that countryside — far greater 
 renown than he could ever have won for him- 
 self, if his career had been that of any ordinary 
 Christian or decent Hottentot. He had even 
 blanketed and skewered and sooted and greased 
 himself into the London papers. And it was 
 curious to find, as Mr. Traveller found by stop- 
 ping for a new direction at this farmhouse or at 
 that cottage as he went along, with how much 
 accuracy the morbid Mopes had counted on the 
 weakness of his neighbours to embellish him. A 
 mist of home-brewed marvel and romance sur- 
 rounded Mopes, in which (as in all fogs) the real 
 proportions of the real object were extravagantly 
 heightened. . . . Even as to the easy facts of 
 how old he was, or how long he had held vermin- 
 ous occupation of his blanket and skewer, no 
 consistent information was to be got, from those 
 who must know if they would. He was repre- 
 sented as being all the ages between five-and- 
 twenty and sixty, and as having been a hermit 
 seven years, twelve, twenty, thirty, — though 
 twenty on the whole appeared to be the favourite 
 term. 
 
 "Well, well! "said Mr. Traveller. "At any rate 
 let us see what a real live hermit looks like." 
 So Mr. Traveller went on, and on, and on, until 
 he came to Tom Tiddler's Ground. 
 
 It was a nook in a rustic by-road, which the 
 genius of Mopes had laid waste, as if he had been 
 
 302 
 
SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 
 
 born an Emperor and a Conqueror. Its centre 
 object was a dwelling-house, sufficiently sub- 
 stantial, all the window-glass of which had been 
 long ago abolished by the surprising genius of 
 Mopes, and all the windows of which were barred 
 across with rough-split logs of trees nailed over 
 them on the outside. A rickyard, hip-high in 
 vegetable rankness and ruin, contained outbuild- 
 ings, from which the thatch had lightly fluttered 
 away, on all the winds of all the seasons of the 
 year, and from which the planks and beams had 
 heavily dropped and rotted. The frosts and 
 damps of winter, and the heats of summer, had 
 warped what wreck remained, so that not a post 
 or a board retained the position it was meant to 
 hold, but everything was twisted from its pur- 
 pose, like its owner, and degraded and debased. 
 In this homestead of the sluggard, behind the 
 ruined hedge, and sinking away among the 
 ruined grass and the nettles, were the last perish- 
 ing fragments of certain ricks: which had gradu- 
 ally mildewed and collapsed, until they looked 
 like mounds of rotten honeycomb, or dirty 
 sponge. Tom Tiddler's Ground could even show 
 its ruined water ; for there was a slimy pond into 
 which a tree or two had fallen — one soppy trunk 
 and branches lay across it then — which in its 
 accumulation of stagnant weed, and in its black 
 decomposition, and in all its foulness and filth, 
 was almost comforting, regarded as the only 
 303 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 water that could have reflected the shameful 
 placewithout seeming polluted by that low office. 
 
 The Traveller opens the outer gate of these 
 premises. 
 
 Swung upon its rusty hinges, it admitted him 
 into a yard in which there was nothing to be seen 
 but an outhouse attached to the ruined building, 
 with a barred window in it. As there were traces 
 of many recent footsteps under this window, and 
 as it was a low window, and unglazed, Mr. 
 Traveller made bold to peep within the bars. 
 And there to be sure he had a real live Hermit 
 before him, and could judge how the real dead 
 Hermits used to look. 
 
 He was lying on a bank of soot and cinders, on 
 the floor, in front of a rusty fireplace. There was I 
 nothing else in the dark little kitchen, or scullery, 
 or whatever else his den had been originally used 
 as, but a table with a litter of old bottles on it. A 
 rat made a clatter among these bottles, jumped 
 down, and ran over the real live hermit on his 
 way to his hole, or the man in his hole would not 
 have been so easily discernible. Tickled in the 
 face by the rat's tail, the owner of Tom Tiddler's 
 Ground opened his eyes, saw Mr. Traveller, 
 started up, and sprang to the window. 
 
 " Humph ! " thought Mr. Traveller, retiring a 
 pace or two from the bars. ** A compound of 
 Newgate, Bedlam, a Debtor's Prison in the worst 
 
 304 
 
SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 
 
 time, a chimney-sweep, a mudlark, and the Noble 
 Savage ! A nice old family, the Hermit family ! 
 Hah!" 
 
 Mr. Traveller thought this, as he silently con- 
 fronted the sooty object in the blanket and 
 skewer (in sober truth it wore nothing else), with 
 the matted hair and the staring eyes. Further, 
 Mr. Traveller thought, as the eyes surveyed him 
 with a very obvious curiosity in ascertaining the 
 effect they produced, " Vanity, vanity, vanity ! 
 Verily, all is vanity ! " 
 
 I have dwelt thus upon this study of Mr. 
 Mopes, because it seems to me to illustrate once 
 again, with profound truth and irresistible force, 
 Dickens' almost preternatural sense of the deep 
 significance of things that to the casual observer 
 seem merely crazy and unmeaning. Dickens re- 
 alised, when he saw Mr. Mopes — if he had never 
 realised it before — that there is a pride of sin and 
 silliness and sloth, filth and ugliness and beastli- 
 ness, as well as a pride of goodness and wisdom 
 and endeavour, beauty and cleanliness and god- 
 liness. That Dickens should exclaim : "Vanity! 
 Verily, all is vanity ! " on beholding the spect- 
 acle of this abandoned wretch's degradation, tes- 
 tifies to the penetrating quality of his genius as 
 perhaps no other passage in all his more impor- 
 tant work does. 
 
 From another side of his many-sided genius 
 305 u 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 he flashes a light upon the possibilities of ro- 
 mance that lie hidden from the eyes of us aver- 
 age folk amid the most squalid and revolting 
 surroundings. Froma glimpse into the interior of 
 an opium-den he drew inspiration for that shin- 
 ing chain of weird imaginings only a few links 
 of which he forged in the unsolved Mystery of 
 Edwin Drood. 
 
 The scene of John Jasper's horrible de-il 
 bauches was just beyond the churchyard of Saint 
 George's-in-the-East, at Stepney. The Rever- 
 end Harry Jones, rector from 1873 to 1882, men- 
 tions that the old crone was known as Lascar 
 Sal, and was living at the time he wrote, 1875. 
 " In a miserable court at night," writes Mr. James 
 T. Fields, who was Dickens' companion on the 
 occasion of his visit to this opium-den, " we found 
 a haggard old woman blowing at a kind of pipe 
 made of an old ink-bottle ; and the words that 
 Dickens puts into the mouth of this wretched 
 creature in Edwin Drood, we heard her croon as 
 we leaned over the tattered bed in which she was 
 lymg. 
 
 But it would be only too easy to multiply in- 
 stances from Dickens' books of great events 
 springing from the most trivial causes, of fine 1 
 effects achieved by dint of sheer imagination ap- ' 
 plied to the most commonplace incidents and 
 accidents of everyday life. 
 
 306 
 
SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 
 
 " Even the catastrophe in Little Dorrit is evi- 
 dently borrowed from the recent fall of houses 
 in Tottenham Court Road, which happens to 
 have appeared in the newspapers at a convenient 
 period," says the Edinburgh Revietv of August 
 1857. Could pompous inanity bray more discord- 
 antly, more flatulently? Even. . . . Here as- 
 suredly is a case of the fool that came to scoff 
 remaining — if not to pray — to pay the highest 
 possible tribute that ever egregious ignorance 
 and purblind superciliousness ever did pay to the 
 greatness that it was far too little to comprehend. 
 The crowning wonder and glory of Dickens lay 
 in his power of transmuting the commonest ma- 
 terial into purest gold. The news of the day, the 
 gossip of an hour, he laid under the spell to his 
 genius, and retold as a fairy tale. 
 
 He transmuted that most wooden and unmal- 
 leable of all English types, the policeman turned 
 detective, into an immortal, named him Bucket, 
 and — as it were in his stride — invented the whole 
 art and craft of detective-story-writing as it is 
 practised to-day. Inspector Bucket of the De- 
 tective was founded on Inspector Field, who also 
 figures as Detective Wield in Reprinted Pieces ^ 
 and is therein described as " a middle-aged man 
 of pordy presence, with a large, moist, knowing 
 eye, a husky voice, and a habit of emphasising his 
 conversation by the aid of a corpulent forefinger, 
 which is constantly in juxtaposition with his eyes 
 307 
 
1 
 
 yed| 
 
 THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 or nose," and in Bleak House as " a sharp-e 
 man — a quick keen man — who takes in every 
 body's look at him, all at once, individually and 
 collectively, in a manner that stamps him a re- 
 markable man. . . . Mr. Bucket and his fat 
 forefinger are much in consultation together. . . . 
 When Mr. Bucket has a matter of pressing in- 
 terest under his consideration, the fat forefinger 
 seems to rise to the dignity of a familiar demon. 
 He puts it to his ears, and it whispers informa- 
 tion ; he puts it to his lips, and it enjoins him to 
 secrecy ; he rubs it over his nose, and it sharpens 
 his scent ; he shakes it before a guilty man, and 
 it charms him to his destruction. The Augurs 
 of the Detective Temple invariably predict that 
 when Mr. Bucket and that finger are in much 
 conference, a terrible avenger will be heard of 
 before long." But all that Inspector Field pro- 
 vided was the clothes, which he doubtless wore 
 with the air of wearing a uniform ; it was Dickens 
 who filled those clothes with the concentrated es- 
 sence of that modern wonder-worker who bulks 
 so large in so many tales, and whom we know 
 most familiarly as Sherlock Holmes. 
 
 And then there is Gridley, the Man from 
 Shropshire, also, whose "case (says Dickens in 
 his preface to Bleak House) is in no essential 
 altered from one of actual occurrence, made pub- 
 lic by a disinterested person who was profession- 
 ally acquainted with the whole of the monstrous 
 
 308 
 
SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 
 
 wrong from beginning to end." He, like that 
 other obscure litigant Jennens, like the unedu- 
 cated father in fustian and the educated boy in 
 spectacles, like Mad Lucas of Knebworth and 
 that other nameless madman of the Oxford Road, 
 like Lascar Sal and Miss Strong and Mr. Willis ; 
 all these are as shadows or names : as shadows 
 on a blind, without colour or substance; as names 
 in a directory . . . until Dickens chances upon 
 them. And then his genius transforms them into 
 beings of more than flesh and blood, huge crea- 
 tures that fill the purview like a mountain and 
 touch the clouds, as the smoke that poured out 
 from the fisherman's pot, in the Arabian Nights^ 
 filled the air and darkened the sky, and then, im- 
 perceptibly, invested itself with the magic and 
 the charm of genius. 
 
CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH 
 DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES 
 
JUDGE TALFOURD 
 
 "Tommv Traddles" 
 
CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH 
 
 SOME DICKENS'CONTEMPORARIES 
 
 IT IS ODD THAT DICKENS, IN HIS 
 attempts to draw the portraits of some of his con- 
 temporaries, should have only succeeded (as it 
 were by inadvertence) in lampooning two men 
 whom he liked extremely, and have failed to 
 flatter a man whom he did not like nearly so well. 
 
 But before we approach the vexed question of 
 the identities of Leigh Hunt, Walter Savage 
 Landor, and John Forster, there are Miss Har- 
 riet Martineau, Judge Talfourd, and Sir Peter 
 Lawrie to be considered. Of Sir Peter Lawrie 
 it is enough to say that he was instantly recog- 
 nised as the original of Alderman Cute in The 
 Chimes, a magistrate who, like Sir Peter himself, 
 expressed a strong determination to put down 
 all offences in general, and suicide in particular, 
 by the most drastic methods. 
 
 In April 1844, writing to Tom Hood, whose 
 Song of the Shirt had appeared in the last Christ- 
 mas number of Punch, Dickens calls his atten- 
 tion to the case of an unfortunate sempstress 
 " making shirts at three-halfpence apiece," who, 
 being robbed of her wretched earnings, attempted 
 to drown herself, and was told from the bench, 
 among other cruel things, that she had " no hope 
 of mercy either in this world or in the world to 
 come." Very shortly afterward The Bridge of 
 Sighs was published in Hood's Magazine. 
 313 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 But — to take the next name on our list — it 
 would never have been assumed, I think, that 
 Miss Martineau had any least affinity with Mrs. 
 Jellyby if she had not gone out of her way to 
 attack Dickens for his satire upon the Borrio- 
 boola Gha type of philanthropy. Certainly be- 
 tween the plucky, afflicted, learned, and inde- 
 fatigable author of so many and such various 
 works as Deerbrook, The Hour and the Man, 
 The Peasant and the Prince, Eastern Life, Past 
 and Present, and countless other volumes of fic- 
 tion, theology, history, criticism, and philosophy, 
 which poured from her untiring pen, there is little 
 apparent resemblance to the "pretty, very dimi- 
 nutive, plump woman, of from forty to fifty, with 
 handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit 
 of seeming to look a long way off. As if . . . 
 they could see nothing nearer than Africa ! . . . 
 Mrs. Jellyby had very good hair, but was too 
 much occupied with her African duties to brush 
 it. The shawl in which she had been loosely 
 muffled, dropped on to her chair . . . and as she 
 turned to resume her seat, we could not help 
 noticing that her dress didn't nearly meet up the 
 back, and that the open space was railed across 
 with a lattice-work of staylace — like a summer- 
 house." 
 
 It really was something of an outrage to com- 
 pare the neat, prim, patient, and rather severe 
 Miss Martineau with this little, fat, comely, smil- 
 
 314 
 
DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES 
 
 ing, placid, preoccupied, good-natured mother of 
 a swarming progeny in which she took no least in- 
 terest. 
 
 In Tommy Traddles, however, Dickens did in- 
 dicate something of the fine pathetic quality of 
 his friend, Judge Talfourd. His public tribute to 
 the memory of his friend may be quoted in this 
 connection, quite appropriately, I think. 
 
 This upright judge and good man died suddenly 
 at Stafford in the discharge of his duties. Merci- 
 fully spared protracted pain and mental decay, he 
 passed away in a moment, with words of Chris- 
 tian eloquence, of brotherly tenderness and kind- 
 ness towards all men, yet unfinished on his lips. 
 
 As he died he had always lived. So amiable 
 a man, so gentle, so sweet-tempered, of such a 
 noble simplicity, so perfectly unspoiled by his 
 labours and their rewards, is very rare indeed 
 upon this earth. . . . 
 
 The chief delight of his life was to give delight 
 to others. His nature was so exquisitely kind 
 that to be kind was its highest happiness. Those 
 who had the privilege of seeing him in his own 
 home when his public successes were greatest — 
 so modest, so contented with little things, so in- 
 terested in humble persons and humble efforts, 
 so surrounded by children and young people, so 
 adored in remembrance of a domestic generosity 
 315 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 and greatness of heart too sacred to be unveiled 
 here, can never forget the pleasure of that 
 
 sight. 
 
 The hand that lays this poor flower on his grave 
 was a mere boy's when he first clasped it — 
 newly come from the work in which he himself 
 began life — little used to the plough it has follow- 
 ed since — obscure enough, with much to correct 
 and learn. Each of its successive tasks through 
 many intervening years has been cheered by his 
 warmest interest, and the friendship then begun 
 has ripened to maturity in the passage of time ; 
 but there was no more self-assertion or conde- 
 scension in his winning goodness at first than at 
 last. The success of other men made as little 
 change in him as his own. 
 
 But we do seem to get a glimpse of Traddles 
 in the more comic and sincere, loyal and lovable 
 Talfourd, in the Talfourd whom Forster de- 
 scribes in his more prosaic fashion as "facile and 
 fluent of kindliest speech," and as assuming 
 nothing with the ermine but the privilege of 
 more frequent intercourse with the tastes and 
 friends he loved, but continuing to be the most 
 joyous and least affected of companions. " Such 
 small oddities or foibles as he had (says Forster) 
 made him secretly only dearer to Dickens, who 
 had no friend he was more attached to ; and the 
 many happy nights made happier by the voice so 
 
 316 
 
 I 
 
DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES 
 
 affluent in generous words, and the face so bright 
 with ardent sensibility, come back to me sorrow- 
 fully now." 
 
 It was in 1844 that Talfourd assisted Dickens 
 to put an end to the piracy of his writings, every 
 one of which had been reproduced with merely 
 such colourable changes of titles, incidents and 
 names of characters, as were believed to be suf- 
 ficient to evade the law, and adapt them to 
 "penny" purchasers. So shamelessly had this 
 been going on ever since the days oi Pickwick, in 
 so many outrageous ways and with all but im- 
 punity, that a course repeatedly urged by Tal- 
 fourd and Forster was at last taken in this year 
 with the Christmas Carol and the Chuzzlewit 
 pirates. Upon a case of such peculiar flagrancy, 
 however, that the vice-chancellor would not even 
 hear Dickens' counsel; and what it cost our dear 
 friend Talfourd (says Forster) to suppress his 
 speech exceeded by very much the labour and 
 pains with which he had prepared it. "The 
 pirates," wrote Dickens. . "are beaten flat. They 
 are bruised, bloody, battered, smashed,squelched, 
 and utterly undone. Knight Bruce wouldnot hear 
 Talfourd, but instantly gave judgment. He had 
 interrupted Anderton constantly by asking him 
 to produce a passage which was not an expanded 
 or contracted idea from my book. And at every 
 successive passage he cried out, 'That is Mr. Dic- 
 kens' case. Find another ! Oh, the agony of Tal- 
 
 317 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 fourdat Knight Bruce's not hearing him! He had 
 sat up till three in the morning, he says, prepar- 
 ing his speech." 
 
 There were few finer characters in real life 
 than Judge Talfourd, as there are few finer char- 
 acters in Dickens than Tommy Traddles. 
 
 Poor Traddles! In a tight sky-blue suit that 
 made his arms and legs like German sausages, or 
 roly-poly puddings, he was the merriest and most 
 miserable of all the boys. He was always being 
 caned . . . and was always going to write to his 
 uncle about it, and never did. After laying his 
 head on the desk for a little while, he would cheer 
 up somehow, begin to laugh again, and draw 
 skeletons all over his slate, before his eyes were 
 dry. I used at first to wonder what comfort 
 Traddles found in drawing skeletons; and for 
 some time looked upon him as a sort of hermit, 
 who reminded himself by those symbols of mor- 
 tality that caning couldn't last for ever. But I be- 
 lieve he only did it because they were easy, and 
 didn't want any features. 
 
 He was very honourable, Traddles was, and 
 held it as a solemn duty in the boys to stand 
 by one another. He suffered for this on several 
 occasions ; and particularly once, when Steer- 
 forth laughed in church and the Beadle thought 
 it was Traddles, and took him out. I see him now, 
 going away in custody, despised by the congrega- 
 
 318 
 
DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES 
 
 tion. He never said who was the real offender, 
 though he smarted for it next day, and was im- 
 prisoned so many hours that he came forth with 
 a whole churchyardful of skeletons swarming all 
 over his Latin dictionary. "But he had his re- 
 ward," says Dickens. 
 
 Ay, verily, he had his reward! 
 
 '* Mis-ter and Mis-sis Podsnap!" 
 
 " My dear," says Mr. Veneeringto Mrs. Veneer- 
 ing, with an air of much friendly interest, while 
 the door stands open, "the Podsnaps." 
 
 A too, too smiling large man, with a fatal fresh- 
 ness on him, appearing with his wife, instantly de- 
 serts his wife and darts at Twemlow with : 
 
 " How do you do ? So glad to know you. Char- 
 ming house you have here. I hope we are not late. 
 So glad of this opportunity, I am sure." 
 
 When the first shock fell upon him, Twemlow 
 twice skipped back in his neat little shoes and his 
 neat little silk stockings of a bygone fashion, as 
 if impelled to leap over a sofa behind him; but 
 the large man closed with him and proved too 
 stronof. 
 
 " Let me," says the large man, trying to attract 
 the attention of his wife in the distance, " have 
 the pleasure of presenting Mrs. Podsnap to her 
 host. She will be," in his fatal freshness he seems 
 to find perpetual verdure and eternal youth in the 
 319 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 phrase, "she will be so glad of this opportunity, 
 I am sure ! " 
 
 . . . In this complicated dilemma, Mr. Veneer- 
 ing approaches the large man with extended 
 hand, and smilingly assures that incorrigible per- 
 sonage that he is delighted to see him : who in 
 his fatal freshness instantly replies : 
 
 " Thank you. I am ashamed to say that I can- 
 not at this moment recall where we met, but I am 
 so glad of this opportunity, I am sure ! " . . . 
 
 The orreat lookingf-o-lass above the sideboard 
 reflects . . . Podsnap, preposterously feeding, two 
 little light-coloured, wiry wings, one on either 
 side of his else bald head, looking as like his hair- 
 brushes as his hair, dissolving view of red beads 
 on his forehead, large allowance of shirt-collar up 
 behind. . . . 
 
 Mr. Podsnap was well-to-do, and stood very 
 high in Mr. Podsnap's opinion. Beginning with 
 a ofood inheritance, he had married a o-ood inherit- 
 ance, and had thriven exceedingly in the Marine 
 Insurance way, and was quite satisfied. He never 
 could make out why everybody was not quite 
 satisfied, and he felt conscious that he set a 
 brilliant social example in being particularly well 
 satisfied with most things, and above all other 
 things, with himself. 
 
 Thus happily acquainted with his own merit and 
 importance, Mr. Podsnap settled that whatever 
 he put behind him he put out of existence. There 
 
 320 
 
 I 
 
DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES 
 
 was a dignified conclusiveness — not to say a 
 grand convenience — in this way of getting rid 
 of disagreeables, which had done much towards 
 establishing Mr. Podsnap in his lofty place in 
 Mr. Podsnap's satisfaction. " I don't want to 
 know about it ; I don't choose to discuss it ; I 
 don't admit it ! " Mr. Podsnap had even acquired 
 a peculiar flourish of his right arm in often clear- 
 ing the world of its most difficult problems by 
 sweeping them behind him (and consequently 
 sheer away) with those words and a flushed face. 
 For they affronted him, 
 
 Mr. Podsnap's world was not a very large world, 
 morally; no, nor even geographically: seeingthat 
 although his business was sustained upon com- 
 merce with other countries, he considered other 
 countries, with that important reservation, a mis- 
 take, and of their manners and customs would 
 conclusively observe, "Not English!" when, 
 Presto ! with a flourish of the arm, and a flush 
 of the face, they were swept away. . . . 
 
 As a so eminently respectable man, Mr. Podsnap 
 was sensible of its being required of him to take 
 Providence under his protection. Consequently 
 he always knew exactly what Providence meant. 
 Inferior and less respectable men might fall short 
 of that mark, but Mr. Podsnap was always up to 
 it. And it was very remarkable (and must have 
 been very comfortable) that what Providence 
 meant was invariably what Mr. Podsnap meant. 
 321 X 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 A really repellent monster, this Podsnap. And 
 yet . . . intimates recognised in this ugly pic- 
 ture a portrait of Dickens' chosen friend, close 
 confidant, and official biographer, John Forster 
 himself. 
 
 To his friend, John Forster (says Mr. Fitz- 
 gerald, who was pretty well acquainted with both 
 Forster and Dickens) was submitted everything 
 he wrote, who conscientiously exercised his 
 office of reviser and suggester of improvements 
 during a long course of years — a troublesome 
 and laborious task when thoroughly carried out. 
 Forster had often a substantial share in directing 
 the course of the stories, and we find passages 
 omitted and phrases altered at his suggestion. 1 1 
 was a bold thing, therefore, under such condi- 
 tions, to introduce his friend in a shape that was 
 recognisable. It may be thought that this was 
 hardly a " correct " thing, but I really believe 
 Dickens was helpless in the matter, and was all 
 but compelled by the pressure of his story, and 
 its situations, to introduce such a character. It 
 was a general type, of which Forster's was the 
 species. A professional observer as he was, he 
 relished any of the specially humorous traits of 
 his friend with the keenest enjoyment ; and these 
 certainly belonged to the highest form of comedy. 
 
 Forster, it would appear, was not very popu- 
 lar among his contemporaries ; and if he did 
 
 322 
 
DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES 
 
 indeed resemble Podsnap — or Doctor Johnson, 
 whom he is said also to have resembled — one 
 cannot wonder at his unpopularity. Whatever 
 else he may have been, however, he was a con- 
 stant and devoted friend to Dickens ; and if my 
 opinion counts for anything in this connection, I 
 think that his biography stands as a monument 
 of staunch, deep, and discerning friendship. 
 When he died it was said by The Times that, al- 
 though many were disposed at first sight to think 
 him obstinate and overbearing, they were bound 
 in the long run to confess that they had in reality 
 found him to be one of the tenderest and most 
 generous of men. I am well satisfied to let The 
 Times have the last word. 
 
 But . . . therearesome who say that in depict- 
 ing Podsnap Dickens was unconsciously depict- 
 ing himself, as he was in the latter part of his life. 
 I don't think it really matters; but certainly some 
 of Dickens' public utterances might have been 
 put into the mouth of Podsnap without any glar- 
 ing incongruity. Though this is merely to state 
 the obvious, after all, since there must always 
 be something of the author in every one of his 
 characters. 
 
 I think it most unlikely that Dickens had any 
 thought of his friend Forster in his mind when he 
 projected Podsnap. But I do think it most likely 
 that he had Leigh Hunt in his mind when he pro- 
 323 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 jected Harold Skimpole ; and that he lampooned 
 Leigh Hunt, as it were in his own despite. 
 
 But Dickens himself, writing in All the Year 
 Round on the Christmas Eve of 1859, and in a 
 letter to Leigh Hunt himself, has said all that 
 needs to be said on this point. 
 
 Four or five years ago, the writer of these lines 
 was much pained by accidentally encountering 
 a printed statement, " that Mr. Leigh Hunt was 11 
 the original of Harold SkAm^oX^m Bleak House." || 
 The statement came from America. Itisnodis- ' 
 respect to that country, in which the writer has 
 perhaps as many friends and as true an interest ij 
 as any man that lives, good-humouredly to state 
 the fact that he has now and then been the sub- 
 ject of paragraphs in Transatlantic newspapers, 
 more surprisingly destitute of all foundation in 
 truth than the wildest delusions of the wildest 
 lunatics. For reasons born of this experience, he 
 let the thing go by. 
 
 But since Mr. Leigh Hunt's death the statement 
 has been revived in England. The delicacy and 
 generosity evinced in its revival arefor the rather 
 late consideration of its revivers. The fact is this : 
 Exactly those graces and charms of manner 
 which are remembered . . . were remembered by 
 theauthor of the workof fiction in question, when 
 he drew the character in question. Above all 
 other things, that sort of gay and ostentatious 
 
 324 
 
DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES 
 
 wilfulness in the humouring of a subject, which 
 had many a time delighted him, and impressed 
 him as being unspeakably whimsical and attrac- 
 tive, was the airy quality he wanted for the man 
 he invented. Partly for this reason, and partly 
 (he has since often grieved to think) for the plea- 
 sure it afforded him to find that deliehtful manner 
 reproducing itself under his hand, he yielded to 
 the temptation of too often making the character 
 speak like his old friend. He no more thought, 
 God forgive him ! that the admired original would 
 ever be charged with the imaginary vices of the 
 fictitious creature, than he has himself ever 
 thought of charging the blood of Desdemonaand 
 Othello, on the innocent Academy model who sat 
 for lago's leg in the picture. Even as to the mere 
 occasional manner, he meant to be so cautious 
 and conscientious, that he privately referred the 
 proof sheets of the first number of that book to 
 two intimate literary friends of Leigh Hunt (both 
 still living), and altered the whole of that part of 
 the text on their discovering too strong a resem- 
 blance to his " way." 
 
 H is letter to Leigh H unt himself is as follows : 
 
 Separate in your own mind what you see of your- 
 self from what other people tell you that they see. 
 As it has given you so much pain, I take it at its 
 worst, and say I am deeply sorry, and that I feel 
 I did wrong in doing it. I should otherwise have 
 325 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 taken it at its best, and ridden off upon what I 
 strongly feel to be the truth, that there is nothing 
 in it that should have given you pain. Every one 
 in writing must speak from points of his experi- 
 ence, and so I of mine with you : but when I have 
 felt it was going too close I stopped myself, and 
 the most blotted parts of my MSS. are those in 
 which I have been striving hard to make the im- 
 pression I was writing from unlike you. The 
 diary writing I took from Hay don, not from you. 
 I now first learn from yourself that you ever set 
 anything to music, and I could not have copied 
 that from you. The character is not you, for there 
 are traits in it common to fifty thousand people 
 besides, and I did not fancy you would ever re- 
 cognise it. Under similar disguises my own fa- 
 ther and mother are in my books, and you might 
 as well see your likeness in Micawber. 
 
 This chapter begins by saying it is odd that 
 Dickens, in his attempts to draw the portraits of 
 some of his contemporaries, should have only 
 succeeded (as it were by inadvertence) in lam- 
 pooning two men whom he liked extremely, and 
 have failed to flatter a man whom he did not like 
 so well. The man last referred to is Walter Sav- 
 age Landor. 
 
 I have already said that I think it is often too 
 lightly assumed that Dickens was very ill-ac- 
 quainted with the work of his immediate prede- 
 
 326 
 
DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES 
 
 cessors and contemporaries in the higher walks 
 of Hterature; though, beyond question, there was 
 never anything of the mere bookman about him 
 at any time. And that probably, in his early days, 
 he knew surprisingly little of the great poets who 
 had attained their apogee when he was only just 
 emerging from his swaddling-clothes. But we do 
 know that he was intimate with Walter Savage 
 Landor during the latter part of his life, and liked 
 him. At the same time it cannot be gainsaid that 
 his liking was tinctured with a feeling of some- 
 thing perilously akin to good-natured tolerance. 
 In one of his letters to Forster this significant 
 reference occurs : " As Landor would say, ' most 
 woonderful'"; and somehow that seems to sug- 
 gest rather a keen sense of the humour of the 
 personal friend's peculiarities and mannerisms 
 than any very adequate appreciation of the great 
 poet and satirist's superb qualities of mind. 
 
 Now Landor was a born rebel. Because of his 
 outspoken sympathies with the French Revolu- 
 tionaries he had been known at Oxford as the 
 " mad Jacobin," and eventually rusticated there- 
 from. All his life he had held the most hetero- 
 dox views on every conceivable subject — among 
 others, that Napoleon was a ridiculously over- 
 rated man. He was indeed as much an insurgent 
 in temperament as either Shelley or Byron, 
 whose unpopular views on politics and religion 
 he shared and espoused. But it is plain that 
 327 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 Dickens miraculously escaped these influences 
 which so deeply affected other young men of his 
 age and time. He could hardly have been entire- 
 ly ignorant of the existence of these turbulent 
 spirits ; but presumably he was not attracted by 
 their mutinous methods, and did not trouble to 
 investigate for himself their claims to a fair and 
 impartial hearing. In short, it is most likely that 
 if he considered them at all, he adopted the con- 
 ventional thin attitude toward them of scornful 
 indifference, shot with bewilderment and horror. 
 Thus he was never in sympathy with Landor ; 
 he could not understand him ; and so he failed 
 woefully in his attempt to draw a flattering por- 
 trait of him as Lawrence Boythorn. He failed 
 to make Lawrence Boythorn live. You don't 
 really believe in Boythorn. He is too harshly col- 
 oured, too flat, too opaque, too loud, too crude 
 altogether. You feel that you don't know Boy- 
 thorn, and don't very much want to know him : 
 certainly he never comes within leagues of in- 
 teresting you as Skimpole does. For he does not 
 seem to be himself at all. He seems to be all the 
 time trying to impersonate some one else. He is 
 as much 2iposeurm his way as Major Bagstock. 
 At least that is how he appears to one reader of 
 Dickens. And I am encouraged in this view by 
 Dickens' own words when he says : " He was 
 one of the few men of whom you might always 
 know the whole : of whom you might always 
 
 328 
 
JOHN FORSTER 
 Dowet," "Podsnap' 
 
DICKENS' CONTEMPORARIES 
 
 know the worst, as well as the best. He had no 
 reservations or duplicities. ' No, by Heaven ! ' 
 he would say (with unimaginable energy) if any 
 good adjective were coupled with him which he 
 did not deserve : * I am nothingf of the kind. I 
 wish I were ; but I don't deserve the attribute, 
 and I never did, and I never shall ! ' His intense 
 consciousness of himself never led to his poorly 
 excusing himself, and seldom to his violently as- 
 serting himself." 
 
 But it was precisely because Dickens accepted 
 Landor at his face value that he deceived him- 
 self about Landor. Landor was a man of infinite 
 subtlety. Only a man of infinite subtlety could 
 have written the dialogues between Bossuet and 
 the Duchess de Fontanges, and Peter the Great 
 and his son, in which the pungent irony stings 
 upon the palate like strong wine. Only a man 
 of infinite subtlety could, with such adroit art and 
 consummate mastery of his means, have belittled 
 Plato and extolled Alfieri as the greatest man of 
 his time. His Imaginary Conversations stand as 
 the product of thoughts as intricate and delicate 
 as the convolutions of the human brain itself. 
 Dickens respected Landor for the qualities that 
 they shared in common : for his " noble scorn of 
 all littleness, all cruelty, oppression, fraud, and 
 false pretence." It was on the score of those quali- 
 ties that Dickens tried to glorify Landor in Bleak 
 House. But these were merely the qualities that 
 329 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 made Landor a gentleman. The qualities that 
 made him a genius Dickens did not understand. 
 Thus it is that Landor, as Boythorn, seems to be 
 something of a gentleman, certainly ; but at the 
 same time rather an old fool. 
 
CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH 
 DICKENS HIMSELF 
 
CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH 
 
 OF CHARLES DICKENS HIMSELF 
 
 THAT LIVELY PERCEPTION OF THE 
 
 ludicrous which we all possess in greater or smal- 
 ler measure, has been very rightly called the sav- 
 ing sense of humour. It saves our souls alive. It 
 saves our hearts from breaking. It saves us from 
 all manner of folly and wickedness and sorrow 
 and despair. In effect, it saves us from our worst 
 enemy, who is oftenest ourself. 
 
 But the humour sense manifests itself in vastly 
 dissimilar ways. There are many kinds and de- 
 grees of the sense. It varies in different climes 
 and in different ages. It waxes and wanes with 
 our growth and decline, and assumes as many 
 colours and forms in the course of a life as the 
 procession of the seasons assumes in the course 
 of a year. It is raw and crude in our infancy, 
 full-blooded and flamboyant and boisterous in 
 the hot summer of our lusty youth, ripe and mel- 
 low and kindly in our autumnal prime, and cold 
 and bleak and comfortless in the wintry cynicism 
 of old age. 
 
 It has been asserted that most men would 
 rather plead guilty to every crime in the Deca- 
 logue than to a lack of humour. " A man without 
 humour in himself," Shakespeare might have 
 said, just as aptly, if he had thought of it, "is 
 only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils ; let 
 333 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 no such man be trusted." And Emerson does say 
 that "a man alive to the ludicrous is still con- 
 vertible," and further that "when that sense is 
 lost his fellow-men can do little for him." Against 
 this latter saying, however, I can foresee that 
 some one may set the authentic quotation from 
 Hamlet to the effect that "one may smile and 
 smile, and be a villain." And so one may. But 
 then one might as easily smile, and smile, and be 
 a hero, and still have as little sense of humour 
 as a sane man can have. For to be devoid of all 
 sense of humour is to be mad. The simple truth 
 seems to be that the humour sense has nothing 
 whatever to do with a man's capacity for laugh- 
 ter, or for making other people laugh. I dare say 
 Dickens has caused as much mirth as any other 
 author, and yet his sense of humour was curi- 
 ously defective. It seems to have played hardly 
 any part in his private life. Certainly, it did not 
 save him from taking himself far too seriously at 
 times, or from occasionallymaking himself rather 
 absurd, as a fuller sense of humour would. He 
 had exuberant animal spirits, and that fondness 
 for practical joking and buffoonery which one 
 usually associates with that least humorous of 
 young animals, the schoolboy ; but he had not, 
 as Thackeray had, that faculty of self-criticism 
 and self-restraint, and that half-sad, half-whim- 
 sical attitude toward life-in-the-large which be- 
 tokens a richer and profounder sense of humour, 
 
 334 
 
CHARLES DICKENS HIMSELF 
 
 and which is, indeed, more rarely found in the 
 professional funny man than in the man of the 
 world. 
 
 The humour sense is at once a stultifying and 
 an enlarging sense. Its possession would have 
 stultified Napoleon by enabling him to realise his 
 physical insignificance and the magnificent fatuity 
 of his ambitions. 1 1 would have helped the Little 
 Corporal to see himself as his comrades saw him, 
 and then he could not have gone on. Later, it 
 would have forced him to consider, in their due 
 proportions, the value of his victories as com- 
 pared with the worthlessness of his crown. Fin- 
 ally, after Elba, it would have saved him from 
 St. Helena. But to such men as Shakespeare and 
 Meredith — to cite the Alpha and Omega of Eng- 
 lish philosophy — it was an enlarging sense in that 
 it prevented them from ever becoming ridicu- 
 lous in their quest after the sublime, and showed 
 them how to be god-like without sloughing their 
 humanity, how to be dignified without pompo- 
 sity or bombast. 
 
 Dickens' many limitations are mainly attribut- 
 able to his lack of this saving sense; but then his 
 many triumphs are due to his lack of it, too. 
 
 My point is that because Dickens, until he ap- 
 proached middle age, lacked that particular re- 
 finement of the humour sense, he was always too 
 much himself, he was always too much bound up 
 335 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 in himself, to get outside himself and see himself 
 as he really was. 
 
 Thus, in the autobiography of David Copper- 
 field, wherein he figures as David, he gives an 
 ever less clear and convincing presentment of 
 David as he finds David becoming more and 
 more a contemporary of Charles Dickens. As 
 child, boy, youth, and young man, David is ex- 
 cellent. We know him. We believe in him. We 
 recognise ourselves in him. And we love him. 
 Then, somehow, David begins to fade into a 
 mere shadow of his former self. He becomes 
 rather like Dickens' other woodenly impossible 
 heroes: like Harry Maylie, Nicholas Nickleby, 
 Edward Haredale, and the rest. And as the flesh- 
 and-blood reality of the child, the boy, the youth, 
 the young man, melt away into the filmy inde- 
 terminate outlines of the maturer David, we are 
 sensible of losing all interest in him. The first 
 part of David C opperfie Id mi^r^sis us because of 
 David. The last part barely succeeds in interest- 
 ing us in spite of him, as a moving record of the 
 doings and sayings of other folk than David, 
 
 Until Steerforth betrays Little Em'ly and dis- 
 appears from the story, David is an ever fresh 
 and diverting companion. After that, he becomes 
 rather wearisome. We feel, somehow, that in the 
 character of Steerforth, who, it is said, was found- 
 ed on a certain George Stroughill, brother of 
 Miss Lucy Stroughill, a winsome, golden-haired 
 
 336 
 
CHARLES DICKENS HIMSELF 
 
 maiden, who lived in the same street at Chatham 
 in which the Dickens family lived when Charles 
 was a tiny boy, whom Charles made childish love 
 to, and who figures as Golden Lucy in The Wreck 
 of the Golden Mary : in Steerforth we seem to 
 feel that we have just that human heroic quality 
 which David is so unnaturally deficient in. We 
 are even fain to wonder whether, if David instead 
 of Steerforth had betrayed Little Em'ly, weshould 
 not have been more interested in him, have even 
 loved him a little better for the passion and the 
 sin, the rapture and the agony, which Dickens 
 might have been inspired to describe instead of 
 the pretty-prettinesses of Dora and the insipid 
 domesticities of Agnes. 
 
 But Dickens never would have been inspired 
 to any such artistic purpose, because of just that 
 lack of the saving sense of humour which con- 
 strained him to gloze and sublimate the facts of 
 life, and to idealise all men, even himself 
 
 In Great Expectations he gives us again a pic- 
 ture of himself as the love-lorn Pip ; and again he 
 baulks himself on the verge of a grand passion, 
 again he pauses upon the edge of a great gulf into 
 which he might have flung himself, and so re- 
 mained with us for ever in the glittering simili- 
 tude of a fallen angel hurtling down from Heaven 
 into Hell. (Even to suggest the image is to pro- 
 voke a smile.) 
 
 He might have done that . . . if he had been 
 337 Y 
 
CHARLES DICKENS HIMSELF 
 
 an altogether different type of man. But he was, 
 emphatically, the type of man that would never 
 dream of perpetrating romance in his own per- 
 son. He was always acutely, nervously conscious 
 that in David and in Pip he had revealed the 
 child he used to be ; and that that child was 
 henceforth himself, to be taken very seriously, 
 very solemnly, to be kept apart and held invio- 
 late from the common temptations, the sins and 
 the lusts of the flesh, that poor average human- 
 ity is heir to. Dickens' muse bore a strange like- 
 ness to Mrs. Grundy. 
 
 He was, however, far enough off from his 
 childhood to tell us exactly what he was like as 
 a child, what he, as a child, thought and felt and 
 did and suffered. He was still far enough off from 
 his boyhood to make David and Pip very human 
 boys; and still not so close to his own youth as to 
 be afraid to give a very accurate impression of 
 the wild dreams and desires and aspirations and 
 vain longings of youth. But he was a good deal 
 too close to the young man he had been not so 
 many years ago : he was still a young man when 
 he ^xol^DavidCopperfield: to be too frank about 
 that part of his life. He seizes on its humours, its 
 comic misgivings and doubts and ecstasies, and 
 makes the most of them and the best of them, in 
 default of anything better. 
 
 Then . . . the young man is himself, Charles 
 Dickens ; and he veils himself in mystery. 
 338 
 
THE DICKENS ORIGINALS 
 
 A change took place in Dickens after he had 
 written David Copperfield. I have a suspicion 
 that David Copperfield introduced him to him- 
 self. Anyway, in all his later books he is far more 
 worldly-wise. He seems to be developing a per- 
 sonal sense of humour at last. There is more 
 light and shade in his later character-drawing. 
 William Dorrit,the Father of the Marshalsea, for 
 instance, always seems to me to present a far more 
 likely portrait of his own father, John Dickens, 
 than Micawber — though I infinitely prefer Mi- 
 ca wber, of course. But all his characters, with a 
 few noble exceptions, are more probable. And 
 this (I believe) because Dickens had come to a 
 better understanding of himself, had sunk a little 
 of the magician in the man of the world ; and so 
 set up a new standard by which 
 to judge his fellow-men. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Y2 
 
i 
 
 I 
 
INDEX 
 
 Agnes, 68, 74. 
 Ainsworth, Harrison, 130. 
 All the Year Round, 324. 
 Arabin, 93- 
 
 Artful Dodger, 19, 128, 239, 240, 
 250. 
 
 Bagstock, Major, 328. 
 
 Barnaby Kudge, 33, 186, 203, 207, 
 
 211, 213, 219, 220, 224. 
 Barrie, J. M., 8, 147, 237. 
 Bastille, 11. 
 Bates, Charley, 251. 
 Beadnell, Maria, 25, 28, 29, 31, t^i, 
 
 36,42,43. 44.45. 46, 52. 
 Bennett, Arnold, 237. 
 Blackmore, Mr. (of Blackmore & 
 
 Ellis), 114, 140. 
 Blimbers, The, 2Q0. 
 Bleak House, 3, 7, 75. 253. 3o8, 
 
 329- 
 Boffin, Mr., 279, 280, 281. 
 Bompas, Serjeant, 93. 
 Boot, Alfred, 131. 
 Borough, 160. 
 Bounderby, 1 37. 
 Boythorn, 7, 19, 328, 330. 
 Brass, Sally, 7. 
 Sampson, 7. 
 Bray, Madeline, 24, 68. 
 Bronte, Charlotte, 190. 
 Brougham, Lord, 97, 98. 
 Browdie, John, 137, 142. 
 Browne, HablotK., 103,261, 291. 
 Brownlow, Mr., in, 112, 113. 
 Bucket, Inspector, 307, 308. 
 Budden, James, 97. 
 Bumble, 124. 
 Burnett, Henry, 76, 78, 79, 193, 
 
 292 
 Buzfuz, Serjeant, 93, 95. 
 Byron, Lord, 327. 
 
 Caine, Hall, 108. 
 
 Camden Town, 160, 161, 173, 174. 
 Campbell, Mrs., 291, 292. 
 Carker, 7, 68, 279, 280. 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 102, 168, 188, 
 201, 202, 208, 214, 218, 219. 
 Carton, Sydney, 209, 268. 
 Casby, 46. 
 
 343 
 
 Chadband, Rev., 225, 268. 
 Chapman & Hall, Messrs., 83, 84. 
 
 Thomas, 290, 291. 
 Chatham, 159, 161, 172, 173, 174- 
 Cheeryble, Bros., 128, 129, 130, 
 
 131, 132, 136. 
 Chester, Edward, 24, 25, 16. 
 
 Sir John, 208, 228, 230, 231. 
 Chesterfield, Lord, 208, 228, 229, 
 
 230, 231, 232. 
 Chesterton, Gilbert K., 199, 200, 
 
 201, 202. 
 Chevalier, Albert, 238. 
 Child s History of England, A, 199, 
 
 200, 202. 
 Chimes, The, 313. 
 Chivery, Young Mr., 19. 
 Christ vias Carol, The, 317. 
 Chuzzlewit, Jonas, 263. 
 Chuzzlewit, Martin, 25, 271, 273, 
 
 Clare, Ada, 68, 75. 
 
 Claypole, Noah, 128. 
 
 Clennam, Arthur, 46, 48. 
 
 Collins, Wilkie, 209. 
 
 Cook, Lady. See Mrs. Leo Hunter. 
 
 Cooper, Mrs. Mary Ann, 162, 163. 
 
 Copperjield, David. See David 
 
 Copperfield. 
 Corelli, Marie, 108. 
 Corney, Mrs., 124. 
 Cornwall, Barry, 261. 
 Creakle, Mr., 177- 
 Crockett, W. S., 19. 
 Cruncher, Jerry, 209. 
 Cute, Alderman, 313. 
 
 Darlle, Rosa, 297. 
 
 David, " the apoplectic butler," 131. 
 
 David Copperfield, 3,6, 30, 31, 32, 
 
 36, 74,79, 158,175,176,177, 
 
 186, 191, 294, 296, 333, 335, 
 
 336. 
 Darwin, 281. 
 
 Defarges, The, 207, 217, 218. 
 Dennis the Hangman, 207, 209, 220. 
 Dickens, Fanny, 76, 78, I59, 183, 
 
 192, 193, 194- 
 John,i34, 159, 167, 171,172,173. 
 
 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 
 
 182,183, 185, 339. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Dickens, Mrs. John, 174, 175, 185, 
 186. 
 
 Mrs. Charles (n^e Miss Ho- 
 garth), 142. 
 Dickensian, The, 267. 
 Dodd, Mr., 280. 
 
 Dodger, Artful. See Artful Dodger. 
 Dodson & Fogg, 114. 
 Dolly Varden, 34, 35- S*^, 54- 
 Dombey ^ Son, 63, 292. 
 Dombey, Edith, 292. 
 
 Florence, 24, 68. 
 
 Mr., 290, 291. 
 Dora, 31, 33, 36,37.38,39,40,41, 
 
 42, 54. 
 Dorrit, Little. See Little Dorrit. 
 
 William, 339. 
 Dotheboys Hall, 103, 104, 108 
 Dowler, 96. 
 
 Drood, Edwin, 25, 298, 304. 
 Drummond, Miss Rose Emma, 142. 
 Dumas, Alexandre, 147, 148, 
 
 Edinburgh, 4. 
 
 Edinburgh Review, 305. 
 
 Edwin Drood. See Drood, Edwin. 
 
 Eliot, George, 190, 
 
 Elliott, Rev. Hume, 131. 
 
 Ellis, Mr. (of Messrs. Blackmore & 
 
 Ellis), 96, 140. 
 Emerson, 334. 
 
 Em'ly, Little. See Little Em'ly. 
 Estella, 51, 52, 53. 
 Evefard, Dr., 290. 
 
 Fagin, 7, 125, 239, 240, 241, 246, 
 247, 249,251,252, 263. 
 Bob, 191. 
 Fang, Mr., 109, no, ili, 112, 
 
 113- 
 Fat Boy, The, 97, 126. 
 Field, Inspector, 308. 
 Fields, James T., 306. 
 Fitzgerald, Percy, 72, 94, 132, 135, 
 
 274, 282, 283, 294, 322. 
 Fleet Prison, 239. 
 Flora, 33, 46, 47, 48, 49. 
 rorster,John, 5,31,78,84, 96, loi, 
 
 130, 160, 161, 174, 193, 261, 
 
 291, 295, 298, 299,313, 316, 
 
 317, 322, 323, 327. 
 Foster, John, 84. 
 
 Foulon, 207, 209, 213, 214, 215, 
 
 216, 218. 
 French Revolution, The, 201, 202, 
 
 208, 218. 
 
 Gadshill, 208. 
 
 Galsworthy, John, 273. 
 
 Gamfield, 124. 
 
 Gamp, Mrs. Sairey, 268, 271, 272. 
 
 273. 
 Garlands, The, 71, 161. 
 Gashford, 226, 227. 
 Gay, Walter, 24, 25, 76. • 
 
 Gazalee, Mr. Justice, 95. 
 Golden Lucy, 337. 
 Golden Mary, The Wreck of the, HJ. 
 Gordon, Lord George, 207,209, 213, 
 
 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226, 227. 
 Gradgrind, 137. 
 Graham, Mary, 68. 
 Grant, Brothers, 130, 131, 132, 133, 
 
 134, 13s, 136, 137- 
 Great Expectations, 51, 89, 337. 
 Gridley, 308. 
 
 Griffiths, Major Arthur, 241, 246. 
 Grimaldi, Life of, 85. 
 Grip the Raven, 209, 211. 
 Grueby, John, 226. 
 
 Hall, Mr. & Mrs. Samuel Carter, 
 
 274. 
 Hard Times, 3. 
 Hardy, Thomas, 273. 
 Haredale, Emma, 24, 68. 
 Harmon, John, 25, 55. 
 Harvey, Martin, 268. 
 Hayes, Mrs., 292. 
 Hazlitt, William, 261. 
 Heep, Uriah, 7. 
 Hexams, The, 299, 300. 
 Hill, Mrs. Seymour, 295. 
 History of Our Own Times, A, gy, 
 
 276. 
 Hogarth, Georgina, 74. 
 
 Mary, 59, 60. 61 , 62, 63, 64, 65, 
 
 67. 71- 73- 74. 75- 
 
 Mr., 60. 
 
 Mrs., 59, 60, 62. 
 Hood, Tom, 313. 
 Hopkins, Captain, 176. 
 Hortense, Mademoiselle, 253. 
 Howler, Rev. Mclchizedec, 225. 
 
 344 
 
INDEX 
 
 Hugh of the "Maypole," 207. 
 Humphrey, Master, 287, 289. 
 Hunt, Leigh, 6, 19, 313, 32?, 324, 
 
 325- 
 Hunter, Mrs. Leo, 96. 
 Hunted Down, 259, 262. 
 
 James, Edwin, 210. 
 
 Jarley, Mrs., 152, 154, 155. 
 
 Jarndyce, Mr., 293. 
 
 Jasper, John, 306. 
 
 Jellyby, Mrs., 314. 
 
 Jennings or Jennens, Mr., 292, 293, 
 
 294, 309. 
 Jo, Poor, 268. 
 Johnson, Dr., 185, 323. 
 Jones, William, 177. 
 Jorgan, Captain, 292. 
 
 Kenwigs, The, 239. 
 
 Kit, 7i- 
 
 Kitton, F. G., Mr,, 85, 130, 143, 
 
 173. 293- 
 Knott, Newman, 140, 152. 
 Kolle, Henry, 29, 43, 44, 45. 
 Krook, 14. 
 
 La Creevy, Miss, 137, 141, 142. 
 
 Laing, Mr., no, 113. 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 261. 
 
 Lamert, Dr., 96. 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage, 19, 313, 
 
 326, 327, 328, 329, 330. 
 Lant Street. See Borough. 
 Lascar Sal, 306, 309. 
 Lauder, Harry, 237, 238. 
 Lawrie, Sir Peter, 313. 
 Lee, Miss Jenny, 268. 
 Leno, Dan, 268, 269. 
 Lewes, George Henry, 190. 
 Limbkins, Mr., 124. 
 Little Dorrit, 3, 46, 51, 162, 163, 
 
 164, 307. 
 Little Em'ly, 336. 
 Little Nell, 68, 73, 74. 
 Littlefair. See Hayes. 
 Linkinwater, Tim, 141. 
 Linton, Mrs. Lynn, 91. 
 Longfellow, 88. 
 
 Lucas, (" Mad ") James, 300, 309. 
 Lytton, Bulwer, 90, 208, 261. 
 
 345 
 
 McCarthy, Justin, 97, 276, 
 Maclise, 5. 
 Macready, 261. 
 Manette, Lucy, 68, 75. 
 Mannings, The, 253, 254, 255, 
 
 256, 257, 258, 259. 
 Marshalsea, The, 160, 162, 175, 
 
 177, 191,239, 339- 
 Marchioness, The, 161, 162. 
 Martin Chuzzlewit. See Chuzzle- 
 
 wit, Martin. 
 Maude, Cyril, 268. 
 Martineau, Harriet, 313, 314. 
 Maylie, Harry, 24, 76. 336. 
 
 Rose, 24, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74. 
 Mealy Potatoes, 191. 
 Mercier, 208, 218. 
 Merdle, Mr., 137. 
 Meredith, George, 273, 335. 
 Micawber, Mr., 7, 18, 19, 134, 
 
 167, 181, 182, 326, 339. 
 MoUoy, Mr., 114, 177. 
 Moncitton, Hon. Miss. See Mrs. 
 
 Leo Hunter, and Lady Cook. 
 Moore, George, 237. 
 Mopes the Hermit, 300, 301, 302, 
 
 303,305- 
 Morgan, Captain, 292. 
 Morning Herald, 178. 
 Mowcher, Miss, 294, 296. 
 
 Nancy, 23, 126, 128. 
 
 Napoleon, 327, 335. 
 
 Nell, Little. See Little Nell. 
 
 Newgate, 1 1 . 
 
 Nickleby, Kate, 28,68, 139, 140. 
 
 Mrs., 19. 167, 185, l86, 187. 
 Nickleby, Nicholas, 2^, 76, 103, 
 
 104, 105, 108, !o9, 128, 130, 
 
 133. 137, 142, 147, 186, 239, 
 
 252, 277, 292, 336. 
 Nickleby, Ralph, 26. 
 Noggs, Newman, 137, 138, I39. 
 
 140, 141, 151, 152. 
 Nordau, Max, 168. 
 
 Old Curiosity Shop, The, 73, 148, 
 152, 161, 162, 225, 287, 
 
 Oliver Twist, 59, 109, no, 123, 
 124, 125, 126, 128, 238, 239, 
 240, 246, 248, 252, 268. 
 
 Only Way, The, 268. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Our Mtitual Friend, 54, 280, 299. 
 
 Peace, Charles, 246. 
 
 Pecksniff, 7, 17, 274, 275, 277, 
 278, 279. 
 
 Peel, Sir Robert, 274, 275, 276. 
 
 Peggotty, 279. 
 
 Pendennis, 156. 
 
 Perker, Mr. , 96. 
 
 Phiz. See Browne, Hablol K. 
 
 Pickwick, Mr., 83, 84, 85, 91, 92. 
 
 Pickwick Papers, 3, 59, 85, 88, 89, 
 91. 93. 96, 97, loi. 103, 124, 
 178. 203, 205, 206, 225, 238, 
 
 317. 
 Pinch. Tom, 18, 76. 
 Pip, 51, 52, 53, 334, 337. 
 Pipchin, Mrs., 191, 279. 
 Podsnaps, The, 319, 320, 321, 322, 
 
 323- 
 Poe, Edgar Allan, 190. 
 Porter, Captain, 176, 191. 
 Portsmouth, 172. 
 Pott, Mr., 97,98. 
 Powell, Thomas, 182. 
 Prig, Betsy, 271, 272. 
 Procter, Bryan Waller. See Barry 
 
 Cornwall. 
 
 Quilp, 7, 18, 23, 263. 
 
 Reprinted Pieces, 307. 
 Rochester, 105. 
 Rokesmith, John, 25. 
 Roylance, Mrs. See Pipchin, Mrs. 
 Rousseau, 208, 218. 
 Rudge, Barnaby. See Barnaby 
 Rudge. 
 
 Sadleir, John. 6'£^ Merdle. 
 
 Sal, Lascar. See Lascar Sal. 
 
 Salem House, 177. 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 19, 87. 
 
 Seymour, 83, 84. 
 
 Shakespeare, 3, 17, 90, 267, 333. 
 
 Shaw, William, 103, 104, 105, 106, 
 
 107, 108. 
 Shelley, 327. 
 
 Sherlock Holmes, 18, 308. 
 Sikes, Bill, 23, 125, 126, 239, 240. 
 Sketches by Boz, 83. 
 Skewton, Mrs. ("Cleopatra"), 291. 
 
 Skimpin, Serjeant, 93. 
 Skimpole, 7, 18, 19, 324, 328. 
 Slammer, Dr., 96. 
 Slinkton, Julius, 253, 259, 263. 
 Slum, Mr., 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 
 
 162. 
 Smike, 137, 142, 143. 
 Smith, Sydney, 137. 
 Snubbin, Serjeant, 93, 94. 
 Solomons, Ikey, 125, 241, 242, 243, 
 
 244, 245, 246, 251. 
 Sowerberry, Mr., 124. 
 Squeers, 7, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 
 
 108, 125, 128. 
 Stareleigh, Mr. Justice, 95, 96. 
 Steerforth, 294, 295, 318, 336, 337. 
 Sterry, J. Ashby, 293. 
 Stiggins, 225. 
 Strachey, J. St. Loe, 151. 
 Strong, Miss, 292, 293, 309. 
 Stroughill, George, 336. 
 
 Lucy, 336. 
 Stryver, 209, 210, 211. 
 Swiveller, Dick, 151, 152. 
 
 Tale of Two Cities, A, 26, 51, 75, 
 203, 207, 208, 210, 213. 
 
 Talfourd, Judge, 3i3> 3i5, 3i6, 317, 
 318. 
 
 Tapley, Mark, 18. 
 
 Tappertit, Sim, 34, 207. 
 
 Thackeray, 189, 190, 334. 
 
 Tom Tiddler's Ground, 300, 301, 
 302. 
 
 Toodle, Polly, 292. 
 
 Traddles, Tommy, 315, 318. 
 
 Tree, Sir Herbert, 268. 
 
 Trotwood, Betsy, 293. 
 
 Tulkinghorn, Mr., 114. 
 
 Twemlow, Mr., 319. 
 
 Vale, Sam, 86, 87, 88,91. 
 Varden, Dolly. See Dolly Varden. 
 Veneerings, The, 137, 319. 
 Venus, Mr., 280, 282. 
 
 Wainewright, Thomas Griffiths, 259, 
 
 260, 261. 
 Waller, Mick, 191. 
 Wardle, Mrs., 126. 
 Waterton, Mr., 211. 
 Wegg, Silas, 280, 281, 282. 
 
VVeller, Mary, 87, 279. 
 
 Sam, 18, 87, 91, 92, 206. 
 
 Tony, 91, 92, 93. 
 Wield, Detective, 307. 
 Wilfer, Bella, 55. 
 Wilkins, 93. 
 Willett, Joe, 34, 35, 36. 
 Williams, Bransby, 26S. 
 Willis, J., 282, 309. 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Wilmot, Charles, 268. 
 Winkle, Mr., 84. 
 
 Winter, Mrs. Henry. See Maria 
 Beadnell. 
 
 Yates, Edmund, 210. 
 
 Zangwill, Israel, 168. 
 Zola, 273. 
 
31^77-4^ 
 
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