Charles Dickens (Gissing, 1898)/Chapter 2

Needless to recount in detail the biography of Charles Dickens. Living, he was regarded with a warmth of personal interest such as no other English writer ever inspired; all the facts of his life which could rightly become public property (and some with which the public had no concern) were known to every contemporary reader; and as yet they seem in no risk of being forgotten.

By accident he was not born a Londoner, but his life in London began while he was yet a child. His earliest impressions, however, were received at Rochester and Chatham, where he went to what was called a school, and in the time at his own disposal began to educate himself in his own way by reading the eighteenth-century novelists. A happy thing for Dickens, and for us, that he was permitted to pass these few years of opening life elsewhere than in London. He speaks of himself as "not a very robust child sitting in byeplaces near Roches​ter Castle, with a head full of Partridge, Strap, Tom Pipes, and Sancho Panza;" better, from every point of view, than if he had gained his first knowledge of English fiction amid the brick walls of Camden Town. Dickens always had a true love of the country, especially of that which is near to picturesque old towns of historic interest; and this most precious characteristic, to which we owe some of the sweetest, freshest pages in his work, might never have developed in him but for the early years at Rochester. Very closely has he linked his memory with that district of Kent,—nowadays, of course, like every other district, easily accessible from London, all but robbed of the old charm. At Rochester begin the adventurous travels of Mr. Pickwick; near Rochester stands the house of Gadshill; and it was Rochester that he chose for the scene of his last story, the unfinished Edwin Drood.

With London began unhappiness. David Copperfield has made universally familiar that figure of the poor little lad slaving at ignoble tasks in some by-way near the River Thames. David works for a wine-merchant, cleaning bottles; his original had for taskmasters a firm of blacking-makers. We know how sorely this memory rankled in the mind of the suc​cessful author; he kept the fact from his wife till long after marriage, and, we are told, could never bear to speak to his children of that and the like endurances. This I have seen mentioned as a proof of sensitiveness verging on snobbery; but surely it is nothing of the kind. Dickens would not, like his pet aversion, Josiah Bounderby in Hard Times, proclaim from the house-tops that he had been a poor boy toiling for a few shillings a week, and most certainly he would have preferred to look back upon a childhood like to that of his friends and neighbours; but the true reason for his shrinking from this recollection lay in the fact that it involved a grave censure upon his parents. "It is wonderful to me," he writes, in the fragment of autobiography preserved by Forster (Life, Book I. 2), "how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me—a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally—to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could ​hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a Grammar School, and going to Cambridge." In this passage the tone of feeling is unmistakeable; as the boy had suffered from a sense of undeserved humiliation, so did the man feel hurt in his deepest sensibilities whenever he reflected on that evil time. His silence regarding it was the most natural reserve.

In middle age we find Dickens saying about his father that the longer he lived, the better man he thought him. To us the elder Dickens is inevitably Mr. Micawber, and who shall say that he has no affection for that type of genial impecuniosity? To his father, no doubt, the novelist owed the happy temperament which had so large a part in his success; plainly, he owed little more. Of his mother, only one significant fact is recorded, viz. that when at length an opportunity offered for the boy's escape from his drudgery in the blacking warehouse, Mrs. Dickens strongly objected to any such change. An unpleasant topic; enough to recognize, in passing, that this incident certainly was not without its permanent effect on the son's mind.

The two years of childish hardship in London (1822-1824), which have resulted in one of the most picturesque and pathetic ​chapters that English literature can show, were of supreme importance in the growth of the novelist. Recollections of that time supplied him with a store of literary material upon which he drew through all the years of his best activity. In the only possible way he learnt the life of obscure London; himself a part of it, struggling and suffering in its sordid welter, at an age when the strongest impressions are received. It did not last long enough to corrupt the natural sweetness of his mind. Imagine Charles Dickens kept in the blacking warehouse for ten years; picture him striving vainly to find utterance for the thoughts that were in him, refused the society of any but boors and rascals, making, perhaps, a futile attempt to succeed as an actor, and in full manhood measuring the abyss which sundered him from all he had hoped; it is only too easy, knowing the character of the man so well, to conceive what would have resulted. But at twelve years old he was sent to school, and from that day never lost a step on the path of worldly success. In spite of all, he was one of fortune's favourites, what he had undergone turned to his ultimate advantage, and the man who at twenty-four found himself the most popular author of his time and country, might well be encouraged to see ​things on the cheery side, and to laugh with his multitudinous public.

Dickens's biographer makes a fanciful suggestion that the fact of his having observed low life at so tender an age (from ten to twelve) accounts for the purity of tone with which that life is treated in the novelist's works. In its proper place, I shall take a different view of Dickens's method in this matter; it is not to be supposed for a moment that the boy, familiar with London on its grimiest side, working in cellars, inhabiting garrets, eating in cookshops, visiting a debtors' prison (his father was there detained in the Marshalsea), escaped the contamination of his surroundings. London in all its foulness was stamped on the lad's memory. He escaped in time, that was all, and his most fortunate endowment did the rest.

The year 1825, then, saw him at a day-school in North London; the ordinary day-school of that time, which is as much as to say that it was just better than no school at all. One cannot discover that he learnt anything here, or from any other professed teacher, beyond the very elements of common knowledge. And here again is a point on which, throughout his life, Dickens felt a certain soreness; he wished to be thought, wished to be, ​a well-educated man, yet was well aware that, in several directions, he could never make up for early defects of training. In those days it was socially more important than now to have received a "classical education," and with the classics he had no acquaintance. There is no mistaking the personal note in those passages of his books which treat of, or allude to, Greek and Latin studies in a satirical spirit. True, it is just as impossible to deny that, in this particular field of English life, every sort of insincerity was rampant. Carlyle (who, by the by, was no Grecian) threw scorn upon "gerund-grinding," and with justice; Dickens delighted in showing classical teachers as dreary humbugs, and in hinting that they were such by the mere necessity of the case. Mr. Feeder, B.A., grinds, with his Greek or Latin stop on, for the edification of Toots. Dr. Blimber snuffles at dinner-time, "It is remarkable that the Romans—", and every terrified boy assumes an air of impossible interest: even Copperfield's worthy friend, Dr. Strong, potters in an imbecile fashion over a Greek dictionary which there is plainly not the slightest hope of his ever completing. Numerous are the side-hits at this educational idol of wealthy England. For all that, remember David's self-congratulation when, his schooldays at an end, he feels ​that he is "well-taught;" in other words, that he is possessed of the results of Dr. Strong's mooning over dead languages. Dickens had far too much sense and honesty to proclaim a loud contempt where he knew himself ignorant. For an example of the sort of thing impossible to him, see the passage in an early volume of the Goncourts' Diary, where the egregious brothers report a quarrel with St. Victor, a defender of the Ancients; they, in their monumental fatuity, ending the debate by a declaration that a French novel called Adolphe was from every point of view preferable to Homer. Dickens knew better than this; but, having real ground for satire in the educational follies of the day, indulged that personal pique of which I spoke in the first chapter, and doubtless reflected that he, at all events, had not greatly missed the help of the old heathens in his battle of life. When his own boys had passed through the approved curriculum of Public School and University, he viewed the question more liberally. One of the most pleasing characters in his later work, Mr. Crisparkle in Edwin Drood, is a classical tutor, and without shadow of humbug; indeed, he is perhaps the only figure in all Dickens presenting a fair resemblance to the modern type of English gentleman.

​There is no use in discussing what a man might have done had he been in important respects another man than he was. That his lack of education meant a serious personal defect in Dickens appears only too plainly throughout the story of his life; that it shows from time to time as a disadvantage in his books there is no denying. I am not concerned with criticism such as Macaulay's disgust at Hard Times, on the ground that it showed a hopeless misconception of the problems and methods of Political Economy; it seems to me that Dickens here produced a book quite unworthy of him, and this wholly apart from the question of its economic teaching. At the same time, I feel that the faults of such a book as Hard Times must, in some measure, be attributed to Dickens's lack of acquaintance with various kinds of literature, with various modes of thought. The theme, undoubtedly, is admirable, but the manner of its presentment betrays an extraordinary naïveté, plainly due to untrained intellect, a mind insufficiently stored. His work offers several such instances. And whilst on this point, it is as well to remember that Dickens's contemporaries did not join unanimously in the chorus of delighted praise which greeted each new book; now and then he met with severe criti​cism from the graver literary organs, and in most cases such censure directed itself against precisely this weakness. It was held that Dickens set himself to treat of questions beyond his scope, and made known his views with an acrimony altogether unjustified in one who had only prejudice, or, at best, humane sentiment, to go upon. Some of his letters prove how keenly he felt this kind of criticism, which of course had no effect but to confirm him in his own judgments and habits of utterance. In truth, though there were numbers of persons who could point out Dickens's shortcomings as a thinker, only one man could produce literature such as his, enriching a large part of the human race with inestimable gifts of joy and kindness. He went his way in spite of critics, and did the work appointed him.

Of the results of his neglected boyhood as they appear in the details of his life, something will be said hereafter. It would have been wonderful if from such beginnings there had developed, by its own force, a well-balanced character. In balance, in moderation, Dickens was conspicuously lacking, whether as man or artist. Something more of education, even in the common sense of the word, would assuredly have helped to subdue this fault in one so largely endowed with the genial virtues. He ​need not have lost his originality of mind. We can well enough conceive Charles Dickens ripening to the degree of wisdom which would have assured him a more quietly happy, and therefore a longer, life. But to that end other masters are needed than such as pretended to, and such as really did, instruct the unregarded son of the navy pay-officer.

If one asks (as well one may) how it came to pass that an uneducated man produced at the age of three-and-twenty a book so original in subject and treatment, so wonderfully true in observation, and on the whole so well written as Sketches by Boz, there is of course but one answer: the man had genius. But even genius is not independent of external aid. "Pray, sir," asked someone of the elder Dickens, "where was your son educated?" And the parent replied, "Why, indeed, sir—ha! ha!—he may be said to have educated himself!" How early this self-instruction began we have already had a hint in that glimpse of the child sitting by Rochester Castle "with a head full of Partridge, Strap and Tom Pipes and Sancho Panza." Sancho Panza, it may be presumed, is known even to the present generation; but who were those others? Indeed, who knows anything nowadays of the great writers who nourished the young ​mind of Dickens? Smollett, Fielding—perhaps, after all, it is as well that these authors do not supply the amusement of our young people. When eight or nine years old, Charles Dickens read them rapturously, all but got them by heart, and he asserts, what may be readily believed, that they did him no jot of harm. But these old novelists are strong food; a boy who is to enrich the literature of the world may well be nourished upon them; other boys, perchance, had better grow up on milder nutriment!

The catalogue of his early reading is most important; let it be given here, as Dickens gives it in David Copperfield, with additions elsewhere supplied. Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights, and Tales of the Genii; also volumes of Essayists; The Tatler, The Spectator, The Idler, The Citizen of the World, and a Collection of Farces edited by Mrs. Inchbald. These the child had found in his father's house near Rochester; he carried them with him in his head to London, and there found them his solace through the two years of bitter bondage. The importance of this list lies not merely in the fact that it certifies Dickens's earliest reading; it remained ​throughout his whole life (with very few exceptions) the sum of books dear to his memory and to his imagination. Those which he read first were practically the only books which influenced Dickens as an author. We must add the Bible (with special emphasis, the New Testament), Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Sterne; among his own contemporaries, Scott and Carlyle. Therewith we may close this tale of authors whom he notably followed through his youth of study and his career as man of letters. After success came to him (and it came so early) he never had much time for reading, and probably never any great inclination. We are told that he especially enjoyed books of travel, but they served merely as recreation. His own travels in Europe supplied him with no new authors (one hears of his trying to read some French novelist, and finding the dialogue intolerably dull), nor with any new mental pursuit. He learned to speak in French and Italian, but made very little use of the attainment. Few really great men can have had so narrow an intellectual scope. Turn to his practical interests, and there indeed we have another picture; I speak at present only of the book-lore which shaped his mind, and helped to direct his pen.

To this early familiarity with English classics ​is due the remarkable command of language shown even in his first sketches. When I come to speak of Dickens's style, it will be time enough to touch upon faults which are obvious; vulgarisms occur in his apprentice work, but the wonder is that they were not more frequent; assuredly they must have been, but for the literary part of that self-education which good fortune had permitted him. A thorough acquaintance with the books above mentioned made him master of that racy tongue which was demanded by his subject, and by his way of regarding it. Destined to a place in the list of writers characteristically English, he found in the works of his predecessors a natural inheritance, and without need of studious reflection came equipped to his task.

No, they are not read nowadays, the old masters of the English novel; yet they must needs be read by anyone who would understand the English people. To the boy Dickens, they presented pictures of life as it was still going on about him; not much had altered; when he himself began to write fiction, his scenes, his characters made a natural continuance of the stories told by Smollett, Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith. To us, at the end of the nineteenth century, Nicholas Nickleby tells of a social life as far away as that ​described in Roderick Random; yet in another respect these books are nearer to us, of more familiar spirit, than the novel—whatever it may be—newest from the press and in greatest vogue. They are a part of our nationality; in both of them runs our very life-blood. However great the changes on the surface of life, England remains, and is likely to remain, the same at heart with the England of our eighteenth-century novelists. By communing with them, one breaks through the disguises of modern fashion, gauges the importance of "progress," and learns to recognize the historically essential. Before the end of this essay, I shall have often insisted on the value of Dickens's work as an expression of national life and sentiment. Born, of course, with the aptitude for such utterance, he could not have had better schooling than in the lumber-room library at Rochester. There he first heard the voice of his own thoughts. And to those books we also must turn, if the fury of to-day's existence leave us any inclination or leisure for a study of the conditions which produced Charles Dickens.

His choice of a pseudonym for the title-page of his Sketches is significant, for, as he tells us himself, "Boz" was simply a facetious nasal contraction, used in his family, of the nickname ​Moses, the original Moses being no other than the son of Dr. Primrose in the Vicar of Wakefield. There is a peculiar happiness in this close link between Goldsmith and Dickens, spirits so much akin in tender humanity. Indeed, Dickens had a special affection for the Vicar of Wakefield. When thinking of his first Christmas book (and who could more have delighted in the Carol than Oliver Goldsmith?), he says that he wishes to write a story of about the same length as The Vicar. One could easily draw a parallel between the two authors; and it is certain that among the influences which made Dickens, none had more importance than the example of Goldsmith's fiction.

A word is called for by the two books, among those mentioned above, which are least connected with English traditions and English thought. The Arabian Nights and Tales of the Genii were certainly more read in Dickens's day than in ours; probably most children at present would know nothing of Eastern romance but for the Christmas pantomime. Oddly enough, Dickens seems to make more allusions throughout his work to the Arabian Nights than to any other book or author. He is not given to quoting, or making literary references; but those fairy tales of the East supply him with a good number of illustra​tions, and not only in his early novels. Is it merely fanciful to see in this interest, not of course an explanation, but a circumstance illustrative of that habit of mind which led him to discover infinite romance in the obscurer life of London? Where the ordinary man sees nothing but everyday habit, Dickens is filled with the perception of marvellous possibilities. Again and again he has put the spirit of the Arabian Nights into his pictures of life by the River Thames. Some person annoyed him once by speaking of his books as "romances," and his annoyance is quite intelligible, for a "romance" in the proper sense of the word he never wrote; yet the turn of his mind was very different from that exhibited by a modern pursuer of veracity in fiction. He sought for wonders amid the dreary life of common streets; and perhaps in this direction also his intellect was encouraged when he made acquaintance with the dazzling Eastern fables, and took them alternately with that more solid nutriment of the eighteenth-century novel.

The Essayists must have done much for the refining of his intelligence; probably his reading of Addison and Steele came nearer to education, specially understood, than anything else with which he was occupied in boy​hood. Long afterwards, when he had thought of a periodical publication (which was to become Household Words), he wrote about it to Forster: "I strongly incline to the notion of a kind of Spectator (Addison's)—very cheap and pretty frequent." How strange it sounds to our ears! What editor would nowadays dream of taking Addison as his model? But Dickens was so much nearer to the age of graceful leisure, and, on one side of his personality, had profited so well by its teaching.

Of Sir Walter Scott, I believe, he never speaks with any special enthusiasm, and, as regards the purely Scottish novels, this is easily understood; they could make no strong appeal to the mind of Dickens. But it seems to me that Scott's influence is not to be mistaken in the narrative of Barnaby Rudge.

One artist there was, an artist with the brush and an engraver, of whom it may be said that Dickens assuredly learnt, though I cannot see the possibility of comparing their work, of which Forster and others make so much. The genius of Hogarth differed widely from that of the author of Pickwick, but it was inevitable that such profound studies of life and character should attract, even fascinate, a mind absorbed in contem​plation of poverty and all its concomitants. Added thereto was the peculiar interest in the artist's name, which resulted to Dickens from his marriage at the age of twenty-four with Miss Hogarth, this lady claiming descent from her great namesake. Both men were strenuous moralists, but it would be hard to show any other point of resemblance in their methods of presenting fact. As to their humour, I am unable to find anything in Hogarth which can for a moment be compared with that quality in Dickens. Hogarth smiles, it is true, but how grimly! There prevails in him an uncompromising spirit of which the novelist had nothing whatever. Try to imagine a volume of fiction produced by the artist of Gin Lane, of The Harlot's Progress, and put it beside the books which, from Pickwick onwards, have been the delight of English homes. Puritans both of them, Hogarth shows his religion on the sterner side; Dickens, in a gentle avoidance of whatsoever may give offence to the pure in heart, the very essence of his artistic conscience being that compromise which the other scorned. In truth, as artists they saw differently. Dickens was no self-deceiver; at any moment his steps would guide him to parts of London where he could behold, and had often beheld, ​scenes as terrible as any that the artist struck into black and white; he looked steadily at such things, and, at the proper time, could speak of them. But when he took up the pen of the story-teller, his genius constrained him to such use, such interpretation, of bitter fact as made him beloved, not dreaded, by readers asking, before all else, to be soothingly entertained. On this point I shall have more to say presently. Enough here, that Hogarth undoubtedly helped to concentrate the young writer's mind on the subjects he was to treat in his own way. Evidence, were it needed, is found in the preface to Oliver Twist, where, after speaking of the romantic types of rascality then popular in fiction, he declares that only in one book has he seen the true thief depicted, namely, in the works of Hogarth.

A friend, himself a painter, suggests to me that the true parallel in this sort would be between Dickens and Wilkie. Certainly there is strong resemblance, though, it must be remembered, only on one plane of Dickens's observant and imaginative powers; Wilkie's spirit, in his familiar pictures, strikes one as no less tolerant, no less mirthful, than that of the greater man in whose work he was known to delight; he has the same inborn appreciation of homeliness, the same seeking after ​quaint truth in the commonplace. With another contemporary artist Dickens had closer relations. The Sketches were illustrated by George Cruikshank; so was Oliver Twist, and a foolish bit of gossip, troublesome at the time, would have it that Oliver's history had come into being at the suggestion of certain drawings of Cruikshank's own. For my own part, I can enjoy only a few of the famous woodcuts in these early books; it appears to me that a man of less originality than Cruikshank's, the late Fred Barnard, has done incomparably better work in his pictures to the novels. But in their leaning to the grotesque, author and illustrator were so much alike that one can at all events understand the baseless story which Dickens took all possible trouble to refute. Some years afterwards, when Cruikshank published his picture called The Bottle, intended as a blow in the cause of temperance, Dickens constantly spoke and wrote of it with high admiration, though he had fault to find with the manner in which its lesson was conveyed. There could not but exist much sympathy between these workers on lines so similar in different arts; but beyond the fact of Dickens's liking for the artist's designs from the beginning of his own career, nothing, so far as I know, can be advanced in proof of his having ​been guided or prompted by Cruikshank's genius.

It was in imitation of his father's example that Dickens, by learning shorthand, prepared himself to become, first a reporter in one of the offices in Doctors'-Commons (the remarkable region so well known from David Copperfield), and after that in the gallery of the House. Thus far had he got at nineteen. With the vivacious energy which was always his leading characteristic, he made himself, forthwith, a journalist of mark in the sphere to which he was restricted. Prior to this, whilst earning his livelihood as a clerk in an attorney's office, he had somehow read a good deal at the British Museum, and had devoted most of his evenings to the theatre. It may safely be said that the evening amusement was much more important in its results than any formal study he undertook; unless, indeed,—a not improbable conjecture,—he, like Charles Lamb, sought the reading-room of the Museum chiefly for dramatic literature. At this time of his life, Dickens had resolved upon a theatrical career; whether as dramatist or actor he did not much mind, feeling equal to either pursuit. His day's drudgery, however thoroughly performed, was endured only in the hope of release as soon as he found his ​chance upon the stage. Of course he would have succeeded in either capacity, though with a success far less brilliant than fate had in store for him. He did in the end become, if not strictly an actor, at all events a public entertainer whose strongest efforts were produced by the exercise of melodramatic talent; as an amateur, he acted frequently throughout his life. His attempts at dramatic authorship—The Strange Gentleman, a farce played in 1836; The Village Coquettes, a libretto, produced in the same year; and The Lamplighter, a farce written in 1838, but never acted—gave no serious proof of his powers in this direction; they were hurriedly thrown off at the time when his literary fame was already beginning. But in the year or two before he wrote his Sketches, when the consciousness of vague ability and high ambition made him restive in his mechanical calling of shorthand writer, he applied to the manager of Covent Garden Theatre for an opportunity of showing what he could do. The accident of illness interfered with an appointment granted him, and, owing to some start in journalism, the application was not renewed. Plainly Dickens came very near indeed to entering upon the actor's life, and so close throughout is his connection with the theatrical world, ​that one cannot glance at this incident as a mere detail in the story of his youth. It declares a natural bent of mind, not the passing inclination which is so often felt by lads more or less gifted.

When, in the full enjoyment of his fancy, Dickens amused himself and served charitable ends, by getting up dramatic performances, we note a significance in his selection of a play. He chose Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, himself taking the part of Bobadil. How early he read Ben Jonson, I am unable to say; I should like to be assured that it was in those hours spent at the British Museum, when all his work yet lay before him. One can well imagine the delight of Dickens in a first acquaintance with rare Ben. Forster gives an excellent description of the zeal and gusto with which his friend entered into the character of Bobadil; how for some weeks he actually became Bobadil, talking him and writing him on every opportunity. What more natural than his enjoyment of the sterling old writer whose strength lay in the exhibition of extravagant humours! Dickens had no such life about him as the Elizabethan; in comparison, his world was starved and squalid; but of the humours of the men he knew—humours precisely in Jonson's sense—he made richer use than any​thing in that kind known to English Literature since the golden age. All Dickens might be summed in the title of Jonson's play; no figure but is representative of a "humour," running at times into excesses hardly surpassed by Ben himself. On several occasions (1845-50) he acted in this comedy, and one can hardly doubt that it helped to confirm his tendency to exuberance of grotesque characterization.

So much, then, for that part of his selfeducation which came from books. Meanwhile life had been supplying him with abundant experience, which no one knew better than Dickens how to store and utilize. Théophile Gautier, an observer of a very different type, says somewhere of himself: "Toute ma valeur, c'est que je suis un homme pour qui le monde visible existe;" in Dickens this was far from the sole, or the supreme, quality; but assuredly few men have known so well how to use their eyes. A student is commonly inobservant of outward things; Dickens, far from a bookish youth, looked about him in those years of struggle for a livelihood with a glance which missed no minutest feature of what he saw. We are told that his eyes were very bright, impressing all who met him with a sense of their keenness. Keen they were in no ordinary sense; for they pierced beneath ​the surface, and (in Lamb's phrase) discerned the quiddity of common objects. Everything he looked upon was registered in his mind, where at any moment he could revive the original impression, and with his command of words, vital, picturesque, show the thing to others.

His work as attorney's clerk lasted for not quite two years (1827-28); his reportership in the courts of Doctors'-Commons seems to have been of even shorter duration; but in this time he probably acquired most of his knowledge of the legal world, which was shown first of all in Pickwick, and continued to appear, in one form or another, throughout his books. For exactitude of observation, this group of professional figures, from office-boy up to judge, is the most valuable thing in Dickens. It strikes one as noteworthy, on the other hand, that he never cared to use his experience of journalism. Practically, he once attempted to resume his connection with the press, and became editor of The Daily News—for not quite three weeks (1846); but the novels (unless we take account of the caricatures in Pickwick) have no concern with that side of literary life. Within limits the picture is supplied by Thackeray. But Dickens might have put to wonderful service his memories of the time when ​he reported for the True Sun, the Mirror of Parliament, and the Morning Chronicle (1831-36). He told the story, long afterwards, in one of the best and brightest of his speeches, that given at the dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund in 1865; when, speaking to a generation which travelled by steam, he recalled how he had been upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country, and had carried reports to his editor in the teeth of difficulties insuperable by any man of merely common energy and resource. What use he made of his experiences in travel by highway and byway, we know well, for these are among his characteristic pages. Never is Dickens more joyously himself than when he tells of stage-coach and posting-vehicles. He tried his hand at a description of the railway, but with no such gusto, no such success. His youth belonged to the pre-locomotive time, the time of jolly faring on English roads—jolly in spite of frost and rain, and discomforts innumerable. All this he has made his own, and he learned it as a newspaper reporter.

For the acquiring of knowledge of his own country he could hardly have been better placed. Hither and thither he sped, north and south, east and west, to report the weighty words of orators now long forgotten. He saw ​most English towns; he marked with pleasure the hamlets and villages; of inns, great and small, he learnt all that man is capable of learning. And in that old England, there was more of the picturesque, more of the beautiful, than we see to-day. I have insisted upon the ugliness of the life of that time; indeed, it can hardly be exaggerated; but there is another aspect of Dickens's England, one which might be illustrated with ample detail from all his better books. Side by side with the increase of comfort (or of luxury), with that lightening of dark places which is surely good, goes on the destruction of so much one would fain preserve. Think, for instance, of Yarmouth, as seen in David Copperfield, and the Yarmouth of this year's railway advertisements. What more need be said?

Not only, then, in London, but through the length and breadth of the land, Dickens was seeing and studying his countrymen. Nothing that he learnt embittered him, any more than had his own hardships in the years happily gone by; but he noted many a form of suffering, with the tyranny, great or small, the hypocrisy and the thickheadedness which were responsible for it; and when his time came, he knew how to commend these things to the ​sympathy, the indignation, the mirth of larger audiences than any author had yet controlled. Overflowing with the enjoyment of life, he naturally found more sunshine than gloom, whether in crowded streets, or by the wayside with its scattered wanderers. Now, as always, he delighted in the amusements of the people, in fairs and shows, and every sort of humble entertainment. A conjurer, a fortune-teller, a shabby acrobat, a cheap Jack—one and all were irresistible to him; he could not pass a menagerie, a circus, a strolling troop of players; the squeak of Punch had as much charm for him as for any child. Merely to mention such folk is to call up a host of reminiscences from the books which bear his name. He had not the vagabond nature which we see, for instance, in George Borrow; he is a man of the town, of civilization; but the forms of vagabondage which arise amid a great population, quaint survivals, ragged eccentricities, laughter-moving incarnations of rascality and humbug, excited his unfailing interest. He lived to take his place in a society of wealth, culture, and refinement, but his heart was always with the people, with the humble-minded and those of low estate. Among these he had found the material for his genius to work upon, and, ​most important of all, among these he learnt. to make himself the perfect mouthpiece of English homeliness.

In Oliver Twist we come upon a casual mention, quite serious, of "continental frivolities." The phrase is delightfully English, and very characteristic of Dickens's mind when he began to write. Ten years later he would not have used it; he outgrew that narrowness; but it was well that he knew no better at five-and-twenty. Insularity in his growing time was needful to him, and must be counted for a virtue.

A year before Queen Victoria's accession appeared, in two volumes, Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Everyday Life and Everyday People, a collection of papers which had already seen the light in periodicals. This book came from a 'prentice hand, but it contains in germ all the future Dickens. Glance at the headings of the pages; here we have the Beadle and all connected with him, London streets, theatres, shows, the pawnshop, Doctors'-Commons, Christmas, Newgate, coaching, the River; here we have a satirical picture of Parliament, fun made of cheap snobbery, a rap on the knuckles of sectarianism. Hardly a topic associated with Dickens in his maturity is missing from the earliest attempts. What ​could be more prophetic than the title of the opening chapters—Our Parish? With the Parish—a large one, indeed—Dickens to the end concerned himself; therein lay his force, his secret of vitality. He began with a rapid survey of his whole field; hinting at all he might accomplish, indicating the limits he was not to pass.

He treats at once of the lower middle class, where he will be always at his best; with the class below it, with those who literally earn bread in the sweat of their brows, he was better acquainted than any other novelist of his time, but they figure much less prominently in his books. To the lower middle class, a social status so peculiarly English, so rich in virtues yet so provocative of satire, he by origin belonged; in its atmosphere he always breathed most freely, and had the largest command of his humorous resources. Humour is a characteristic of Boz, but humour undeveloped, tentative; merely a far-off promise of the fruit which ripened so rapidly. There is joking about the results of matrimony, a primitive form of facetiousness which belongs to the time and the class, and which it took Dickens a good many years to shake off. Vulgarity was, of course, inseparable from his subject, and that the young author should have been ​himself involved in the charge is easily understood. A vulgar expression may be here and there discovered (I mean, of course, in the author's own words), but the tone of the whole work is as far from vulgarity as that of the eighteenth-century sketches and meditations of which we are occasionally reminded. As for the form, it strikes one as more original than that of the subsequent books. No one, indeed, had ever made such use as this of materials taken from the very dust-heap of decent London life; such common paltry stuff of the town, yet here so truthfully described, with such intimate touches, such glimpses of mirthful motive, as come only from the hand of the born artist. Veracity I take to be the high merit of these sketches. Dickens has not yet developed his liking for the grotesque, the extravagant; he pictures the commonplace, with no striving for effect, and admirably succeeds. Some of these descriptions of the town in its various aspects, day and night, he never surpassed; they abound in detail, yet never by any chance admit a false note. His persons live and move; you may encounter nearly all of them to-day, affected by the course of time, but still recognizable from his fine portraiture. It was no slight achievement for a youth of four-and-twenty, this putting on record once ​for all of so large and significant a portion of English life.

Therewith ended Dickens's apprenticeship. He had stored his material, was on the point of attaining full command of his powers. When next he sat down to write he produced a masterpiece.