Charles Dickens (Gissing, 1898)/Chapter 3

A glance over the literary annals of the time during which Dickens was apprentice to his craft shows us, in fiction, the names of Disraeli, Peacock, Mrs. Norton, Bulwer, Ainsworth, and Marryat. One and all signify little to the coming master, though he professed a high esteem for the romances of Lord Lytton, and with Captain Marryat shared the tradition of the eighteenth-century novelists. Tennyson had already come forth; Browning had printed a poem; Sartor Resartus had "got itself published," and was waiting for readers. In another sphere, Tracts for the Times were making commotion; regarding which matter the young student of life doubtless had already his opinion. It is of more interest to note that in 1832 were established Chambers' Journal and Knight's Penny Magazine; indicative of the growth of a new public, a class of readers which no author had hitherto directly addressed, and which was only to be reached by publication ​in the cheapest form. From the preface to Oliver Twist we learn that romances of highwaymen had much vogue, of course among the populace, and about this time Ainsworth responded to the demand with his Jack Sheppard. Against this prevalent glorification of rascality Dickens directed his first novel, properly so called.

Pickwick cannot be classed as a novel; it is merely a great book. Everyone knows that it originated in the suggestion of a publisher that the author of Sketches by Boz should write certain facetious chapters to accompany certain facetious drawings; it was to be a joke at the expense of Cockney sportsmen. Dickens obtained permission to write in his own way. Of the original suggestion there remains Mr. Winkle with the gun; for the rest, this bit of hackwork became a good deal more than the writer himself foresaw. Obviously he sat down with only the vaguest scheme; even the personality of his central figure was not clear to him. A pardonable fault, when the circumstances are known, but the same defect appears in all Dickens's earlier books; he only succeeded in correcting it when his imaginative fervour had begun to cool, and in the end he sought by the artifices of an elaborate plot to make up for the decline of qualities greatly ​more important. In considering Dickens as an artist, I propose first of all to deal with the construction of his stories. Let it be understood that in the present chapters I discuss his novels solely from this point of view, postponing consideration of those features of the master's work which are his strength and his glory.

However ill-constructed, Pickwick, I imagine, was never found uninteresting. One may discourse about it in good set terms, pointing out that it belongs to a very old school of narrative, and indicating resemblances with no less a work than Don Quixote,—Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller being in some degree the antitypes of the Knight of La Mancha and Sancho. Intrigue there is none (save in the offices of Messrs. Dodson and Fogg). The thing is aimed at the reader's diaphragm, and, by ricochet, touches his heart. Lord Campbell declared that he would rather have written Pickwick than be Chief Justice of England; yet here we have simply the rambles and accidents and undignified escapades of certain Londoners, one of them accompanied by a manservant, whom he picked up as boots at an inn; we have a typical London landlady, a breach-of-promise case, and a debtors' prison. What unpromising material, in the year 1837, for ​any author but the one who knew how to make immortal use of it!

As in the Sketches we found the germ of all Dickens, so in this second book, not yet a novel, may we mark tendencies soon to have full development. The theme itself admitting no great variety of tone, we have the time-honoured device of episodic stories; one of them shows that melodramatic bent which was to be of such importance in future books; another, the tale of Gabriel Grub, gives, thus early, a hint of the Christmas fantasies which so greatly strengthened their author's hold on the popular admiration and love. The close gives us our first example of Dickens's resolute optimism. Everybody (or all but everybody) is to be made happy for ever after; knavish hearts are softened by gratitude, and those of the good beat high in satisfied benevolence. This is the kind of thing that delights the public, and lucky would be the public if it were often offered to them with a noble sincerity like that of Dickens.

With Oliver Twist we take up the tradition of English novel-writing; at once we are reminded of the old books in the library at Rochester. Scenes and people and tone are new, but the manner is that long ago established. As for construction, there is a little, ​and a very little, more of it than in Pickwick; it is badly managed, so badly, that one seeks to explain the defect by remembering that the early part of Oliver and the last part of Pickwick were in hand simultaneously. Yet not in this book alone did Dickens give proof of an astonishing lack of skill when it came to inventing plausible circumstances. Later, by sheer force of resolve, he exhibited ingenuity enough, often too much for his purpose; but the art of adapting simple probabilities to the ends of a narrative he never mastered. In his plots, unfortunately, he is seldom concerned with the plain motives of human life. (Observe that I am speaking of his plots.) Too often he prefers some far-fetched eccentricity, some piece of knavishness, some unlikely occurrence, about which to weave his tale. And this, it seems to me, is directly traceable to his fondness for the theatre. He planned a narrative as though plotting for the stage. When the necessities of intrigue did not weigh upon him—as happily was so often the cause in his roomy stories—he could forget the footlights; at the first demand for an "effect," gas and limelight are both turned on. Cannot we often hear the incidental music? Dickens's love for the stage was assuredly a misfortune to him, as author and as man.

​In the idle mysteries which are made to surround Oliver, and in the incredible weakness of what is meant to be the darkest part of the story, we have pure stage-work. Chapter xvii. contains a passage ridiculing the melodrama of the time, a tissue of medieval villanies; what Dickens himself did, in these worst moments of his invention, was to use the motives of standard melodrama on a contemporary subject. Even the dialogue occasionally proves this. "Wolves tear your throats!' growls Bill Sikes, fleeing from his pursuers—a strange exclamation for a London burglar. And again, when brought to bay after the murder he calls one of the horrified thieves "this screeching Hell-babe"—phrase natural enough on the boards of the Adelphi Theatre, but incongruous in a London slum. That part of the book in which Rose Maylie and her lover appear smacks rather of the circulating library than of the stage. We read of Rose in distress that "a heavy wildness came over her soft blue eyes." I cannot remember that Dickens was ever again guilty of lapses such as these; but the theatric vice appears in his construction to the end.

In the years 1838 and 1839 he did far too much. Nicholas Nickleby was begun long before the end of Oliver Twist, as Oliver was ​begun before the end of Pickwick. Ill-considered engagements so pressed upon him that in February, 1839, we find him appealing to his publisher for patience, and expressing an opinion that "the conduct of three different stories at the same time, and the production of a large portion of each every month, would have been beyond Scott himself." It came as a natural result of his sudden and great success. Finally, he put himself at ease by a simple refusal to be bound by his undertakings; an extreme step, but one which has to be balanced against the interested calculations of a shrewd publisher.

It is plain that Nickleby suffered from these circumstances of undue stress; in spite of its popularity, and of merits presently to be recognized, it is the least satisfactory of the group of books written before Dickens's first visit to America. Five books in five years, from Pickwick in 1837 to Barnaby Rudge in 1841—a record nothing like that of Scott, but wonderful as the work of a man with only half Scott's length of experience to draw upon. Nickleby being much longer than its predecessor, the faulty construction is more felt, and becomes a weariness, an irritation; that is to say, if one thinks of the matter at all, which one never should in reading Dickens. Again we are in​volved in melodrama of the feeblest description; towards the end of the story there are wastes of stagey dialogue and action, unreadable by any but the very young. All this is quite unworthy of the author, but, following upon Oliver, it indicated the limits of his power as a novelist. Dickens never had command of "situation," though he was strong in incident. A great situation must be led up to by careful and skilful foresight in character and event—precisely where his resources always failed him. Thus, scenes which he intended, and perhaps thought, to be very effective fall flat through their lack of substance. A mature reader turns away in disgust, and, if he belong to a hasty school of modern criticism, henceforth declares that Dickens is hopelessly antiquated, and was always vastly overpraised.

Here, for the last time, we have episodic stories; admissible enough in a book which, for all its faults, smacks so of the leisurely old fiction. In The Old Curiosity Shop, which came next, there is more originality of design: one does not smell the footlights, but has, instead, delicious wafts of freshness from the fields and lanes of England. Of course we find an initial vice of construction, inseparable from Dickens's habit at that time of beginning to write without any settled scheme. Master Humphrey opens ​with talk of himself, enters upon a relation of something that befell him in his wanderings, and of a sudden—the author perceiving this necessity—vanishes from the scene, which is thenceforth occupied by the figures he has served to introduce. In other words, readers of the periodical called Master Humphrey's Clock having shown some impatience with its desultory character, Dickens converted into a formal novel the bit of writing which he had begun as sketch or gossip. Nowadays it would be all but impossible for a writer of fiction, who by any accident should have written and published serially a work with such a fault of design, to republish it in a volume without correcting the faulty part; a very slight degree of literary conscientiousness, as we understand it, would impose this duty; nay, fear of the public would exact it. But such a thing never occurred to Dickens. Conscientious he was in matters of his art, as we shall have occasion to notice, but the art itself was less exacting in his day; a multitude applauded, and why should he meddle with what they had so loudly approved? In the same way we find Walter Scott coming one fine day upon an old manuscript of his own—two or three chapters of a romance long ago begun and thrown aside. He reads the pages, smiles over them, and sits down to complete ​the story. In reading the proofs of Waverley, if not before, he must have been well aware of the great gap between its two portions, of the difference of style, the contrast of tone: the early chapters so obviously an experiment, the latter mature and masterly. It would have taken him a very few hours to rewrite the beginning; but why? The whole thing was done for his amusement. The public, in its turn, was something more than amused. And our grave Art of Fiction, a bitter task-mistress, had nothing to do with the matter.

For the rest, The Old Curiosity Shop is greatly superior from this point of view to the previous novels. The story has more of symmetry; it moves more regularly to its close, and that close is much more satisfying; it remains in one's mind as a whole, with no part that one feels obtrusive or incongruous or wearily feeble. In writing the last portion, Dickens was so engrossed by his theme that he worked at unusual hours, prolonging the day's labour into the night—never of course a habit with a man of his social instincts. The book gained thereby its unity of effect. It is a story in the true sense, and one of the most delightful in our language. Last of this early group—product of one continuous effort through five of the happiest ​years that man ever lived—comes Barnaby Rudge, which is in part a romance of private life, in part a historical novel. The two parts are not well knit together; the interest with which we begin is lost in far wider interests before we end; nevertheless Barnaby is free from Dickens's worst vices of construction. Granting the imperfection of the scheme, it is closely wrought and its details not ill-contrived. One defect forced upon our attention is characteristic of Dickens: his inability to make skilful revelation of circumstances which, for the purpose of the story, he has kept long concealed. This skill never came to him; with apology for so disrespectful a word, he must be held to have bungled all his effects of this kind, and there can be no doubt that the revealing of the mystery of Edwin Drood would have betrayed the old inability. Permit Dickens to show us the life he knew in its simple everyday course and he is unsurpassed by any master of fiction; demand from him a contrived story and he yields at once to the very rank and file of novelists.

A peculiarity of this book is the frequent opening of a chapter with several lines of old-fashioned moralizing, generally on the moral compensations of life. Later, Dickens found a happy substitute for this kind of thing in his ​peculiar vein of good-humoured satire, which had a more practical if a narrower scope.

The year 1842 was a turning-point in his career. He paid his first visit to America, and came back with his ideas enlarged on many subjects. After publishing American Notes, and the first of his Christmas books, the Carol, he completed, in 1844, what is in some respects the greatest of his works, Martin Chuzzlewit. The fact that such a judgment is possible shows how little the characteristic merit of Dickens's writings has to do with their completeness as works of art; for a novel more shapeless, a story less coherent than Martin Chuzzlewit will not easily be found in any literature. Repeated readings avail not to fix it in one's mind as a sequence of events; we know the persons, we remember many a scene, but beyond that all is a vague reminiscence. I repeat, that one can only feel astonishment at the inability of such a man as Dickens to scheme better than this. Had he but trusted to some lucid story, however slight! Misled by the footlights he aims at a series of "effects," every one void of human interest, or, at best, an outrage to probability. He involves himself in complications which necessitate leaps and bounds of perverse ingenuity. And at last, his story frankly hopeless, he cuts through knots, throws difficulties ​into oblivion, and plays up his characters to a final rally; so sure of his touch upon the readers' emotions that he can disregard their bewilderment. The first chapter, a very dull, long-drawn piece of ridicule directed against the supposed advantages of "birth," has nothing whatever to do with the story; the book would gain by its omission. Dickens in a splenetic mood (a rare thing) is far from at his best. Chuzzlewit surpasses all his novels in the theatrical conventionality of its great closing scene—its grand finale (see chapter lii.). Around old Martin (at the centre of the stage) are grouped all the dramatis personæ, whether they have any business there or not; Mrs. Gamp, Poll Sweedlepipes, and young Bailey coming in without rhyme or reason, simply to complete the circle. It is magnificent; the brilliant triumph of stage tradition. But it does not suffice; something more is needed that the reader's appetite for a cheerful ending may have entire satisfaction; therefore, before the book closes, who should turn up in the heart of London but that very family of miserable emigrants whom Martin and Tapley had left behind them in the wild west of America! Here they are, at the foot of the Monument, close by Todgers'—arrived on purpose to shake hands with everyone, and to fill the ​cup of benevolent rejoicing. What man save Dickens ever dared so much; what man will ever find the courage to strike that note again?

It is necessary to bear in mind that these novels appeared in monthly parts—twenty of them—and that the author began publishing with only three or four parts completed. Such a mode of writing accounts for many things. Dickens admitted certain disadvantages, but held to the end that this was still the best way of pursuing his art. Of course the novel became an improvisation. In beginning Chuzzlewit, he had no intention whatever of sending his hero to America; the resolve was taken, suddenly, when a declining sale proved that the monthly instalments were not proving so attractive as usual. Impossible ever to make changes in the early chapters of a story, however urgently the artist's conscience demanded it; impossible, in Dickens's case, to see mentally as a whole the work on which he was engaged. What he had written, he had written; it had to serve its purpose. One can only lament that such were the defects of his inimitable qualities.

The next great book was not finished till 1848; meanwhile there had been travel and residence on the Continent; a bright chapter ​in Dickens's life, but without noteworthy influence on his work. His Italian sketches are characteristic of the man; one cannot say more. Among the Alps he wrote Dombey and Son, not without trouble due to the unfamiliar surroundings. "You can hardly imagine," he declares to Forster, "what infinite pains I take, or what extraordinary difficulty I find in getting on fast. . . . I suppose this is partly the effect of two years' ease, and partly of the absence of the streets and numbers of figures. I can't express how much I want these. It seems as if they supplied something to my brain, which I cannot bear, when busy, to lose." In truth, away from London, he was cut off from the source of his inspiration; but he had a memory stored with London pictures. He tells us, and we can well believe him, that, whilst writing, he saw every bed in the dormitory of Paul's school, every pew in the church where Florence was married. In which connection it is worth mentioning that not till the year 1855 did Dickens keep any sort of literary memorandum book. After all his best work was done, he felt misgivings which prompted him to make notes. A French or English realist, with his library of documents, may muse over this fact—and deduce from it what he pleases.

​Dombey is the first of the novels which have a distinct moral theme; its subject is Pride. Here there is no doubt that Dickens laid down the broad outlines of his story in advance, and adhered to them; we feel that the book is built up with great pains, with infinite endeavour to make a unity. The advance is undeniable (of course we have lost something, for all that), but one cannot help noticing that with the death of Paul ends a novel which is complete in itself, a novel more effective, I think, than results from the prolonged work. Dickens tells, in letters, of the effort it cost him to transfer immediately all the interest of his story from the dead boy to his sister Florence; the necessity for it was unfortunate. As usual, we have loud melodrama side by side with comedy unsurpassed for its delicate touches of truth and fancy. The girl Alice and her disreputable mother, pendants to Edith Dombey and Mrs. Skewton, are in mid-limelight; perhaps Dickens never so boldly defied the modesty of nature as here, both in character and situation. An instance of far-fetched and cumbrous contrivance with gross improbability added to it, is Mr. Dombey's discovery of the place to which his wife has fled. Nothing easier than to bring about the same end by simple and probable means; but Dickens had ​an "effect" in view—of the kind that so strangely satisfied him. His melodrama serves an end which is new in Dombey, though afterwards of frequent occurrence; that of bringing together, in strangely intimate relations, figures representing social extremes. Dickens came to delight in this. His best use of the motive is in Bleak House; and a striking instance occurs in the last pages he ever wrote.

It was whilst telling the story of little Paul, a victim of excessive parental care, that, perhaps by force of contrast, the novelist looked back upon his own childhood, and thought of turning it to literary use. We learn from Forster (Book I. 2) that in the year 1847 was written a chapter of reminiscences which Dickens at first intended to be the beginning of an autobiography. Wisely, no doubt, he soon abandoned this idea; but the memory of his own sad childhood would not be dismissed, and it made the groundwork of his next novel (1850), David Copperfield. Dickens held this to be his best book, and the world has agreed with him. In no other does the narrative move on with such full sail from first to last. He wrote from his heart; picturing completely all he had suffered as a child, and even touching upon the domestic trouble of his later life. It is difficult to speak of David Copperfield in ​terms of cool criticism, but for the moment I am concerned only with its form, and must put aside the allurement of its matter. Once more, then, combined with lavish wealth of description, character, pathos, humour, we meet with poverty of invention, abuse of drama. All the story of Emily (after her childhood) is unhappily conceived. (Of course this part of the book was at once dramatized and acted.) Such a subject lay wholly beyond Dickens's scope, and could not be treated by him in any but an unsatisfactory way. The mysteries surrounding Mr. Wickham, the knaveries of Uriah Heep, have no claim upon our belief; intrigue half-heartedly introduced merely because intrigue seems necessary; even Mr. Micawber, in all his robust reality, has to walk among these airy figments, and play his theatrical part. In the scene between Emily and Rosa Dartle (chapter 1.) the orchestra plays very loudly indeed; every word has its accompanying squeak or tremolo. But enough; one has not the heart to dwell upon the shortcomings of such a book.

It may be noted, however, with what frankness Dickens accepts the conventionality of a story told in the first person. David relates in detail conversations which take place before he is born, and makes no apology for ​doing so. Why should he? The point never occurs to the engrossed reader. In Bleak House, where the same expedient is used (in part), such boldness is not shown, though the convention still demands abundant sacrifice of probability in another way. Finally, in Great Expectations, we have a narrative in the first person, which, granting to the narrator nothing less than Dickens's own equipment of genius, preserves verisimilitude with remarkable care, nothing being related, as seen or heard, which could not have been seen or heard by the writer. This instance serves to show that Dickens did become conscious of artistic faults, and set himself to correct them. But, in the meantime, he had touched the culmination of his imaginative life, and a slight improvement in technical correctness could not compensate the world's loss when his characteristic strength began to fail and his natural force to be abated.

Bleak House (1853) is constructed only too well. Here Dickens applied himself laboriously to the perfecting of that kind of story he had always had in view, and produced a fine example of theatrical plot. One cannot say, in this case, that the intrigue refuses to be remembered; it is a puzzle, yet ingeniously simple; the parts fitting together very neatly ​indeed. So neatly, that poor untidy Life disclaims all connection with these doings, however willingly she may recognize for her children a score or so of the actors. To be sure there are oversights. How could Dickens expect one to believe that Lady Dedlock recognized her lover's handwriting in a piece of work done by him as law-writer—she not even knowing that he was so employed? What fate pursued him that he could not, in all the resources of his brain, hit upon a device for such a simple end more convincing than this? Still, with an aim not worth pursuing, the author here wrought successfully. The story is child's play compared with many invented, for instance, by Wilkie Collins; but in combination with Dickens's genuine powers, it produces its designed effect; we move in a world of choking fog and squalid pitfalls, amid plot and counterplot, cold self-interest and passion over-wrought, and can never refuse attention to the magician who shows it all.

I have left it to this place to speak of the sin, most gross, most palpable, which Dickens everywhere commits in his abuse of "coincidence." Bleak House is the supreme example of his recklessness. It seems never to have occurred to him, thus far in his career, that novels and fairy tales (or his favourite ​Arabian Nights) should obey different laws in the matter of incident. When Oliver Twist casually makes acquaintance with an old gentleman in the streets of London, this old gentleman of course turns out to be his relative, who desired of all things to discover the boy. When Steerforth returns to England from his travels with Emily, his ship is of course wrecked on the sands of Yarmouth, and his dead body washed up at the feet of David Copperfield, who happened to have made a little journey to see his Yarmouth friends on that very day. In Bleak House scarcely a page but presents some coincidence as glaring as these. Therein lies the worthlessness of the plot, which is held together only by the use of coincidence in its most flagrant forms. Grant that anything may happen just where or when the interest of the story demands it, and a neat drama may pretty easily be constructed. The very boldness of the thing prevents readers from considering it; indeed most readers take the author's own view, and imagine every artificiality to be permitted in the world of fiction.

Dickens was content to have aroused interest, wonder, and many other emotions. The conception is striking; the atmosphere could hardly be better; even the melodrama ​(as in Krook's death by spontaneous combustion) justifies itself by magnificent workmanship. No doubt the generality of readers are wise, and it is pedantry to object to the logical extremes of convention in an art which, without convention, would not exist.

One wishes that Esther Summerson had not been allowed to write in her own person—or rather to assume, with such remarkable success, the personality of Charles Dickens. This well-meaning young woman, so blind to her own merits, of course had no idea that she was a great humourist and a writer of marvellous narrative; but readers (again the reflective few) are only too much impressed by her powers. Again one closes his eyes, and suffers a glad illusion. But for the occasional "I" one may easily enough forget that Miss Summerson is speaking.

I must pass rapidly over the novels that remain. Of Little Dorrit (1855), as of Martin Chuzzlewit, who can pretend to bear the story in mind? There is again a moral theme; the evils of greed and vulgar ambition. As a rule, we find this book dismissed rather contemptuously; it is held to be tedious, and unlike Dickens in its prevalent air of gloom. For all that, I believe it to contain some of his finest work, some passages in which he ​attains an artistic finish hardly found elsewhere; and to these I shall return. There were reasons why the book should be lacking in the old vivacity—never indeed to be recovered, in so far as it had belonged to the golden years of youth; it was written in a time of domestic unhappiness and of much unsettlement, the natural result of which appeared three years later, when Dickens left the study for the platform. As a narrative, Little Dorrit is far from successful; it is cumbered with mysteries which prove futile, and has no proportion in its contrasting parts. Here and there the hand of the master is plainly weary.

More so, however, in the only other full-length novel which he lived to complete. None of his books is so open to the charge of tedious superfluity as Our Mutual Friend (1865); on many a page dialogue which is strictly no dialogue at all, but mere verbosity in a vein of forced humour, drags its slow length along in caricature of the author at his best. A plot, depending on all manner of fantastic circumstances, unfolds itself with dreary elaboration, and surely gratifies no one. Yet I have a sense of ingratitude in speaking thus of Our Mutual Friend; for in it Dickens went far towards breaking with his worst theatrical ​traditions, and nowhere, I think, irritates one with a violent improbability in the management of his occurrences. The multiplication of wills, as Dickens insisted in reply to criticism, need not trouble anyone who reads the newspapers; at worst it lacks interest. With anything, however, but gratification, one notes that the author is adapting himself to a new time, new people, new manners. Far behind us are the stage-coach and the brandy-drinkers; the age, if more respectable, has become decidedly duller. Even so with Dickens; he feels the constraint of a day to which he was not born, and whilst bending himself to its demands, succeeds only in making us regret the times gone by.

For new schools of fiction have meanwhile arisen in England. Charlotte Brontë has sent forth her three books; Kingsley is writing, and Charles Reade, and Anthony Trollope; George Meredith, and, later, George Eliot, have begun their careers. We are in the time of the "Origin of Species." A veteran in every sense but the literal, Dickens keeps his vast popularity, but cannot hope to do more than remind his readers (and his hearers) of all that he had achieved.

Of Hard Times, I have said nothing; it is practically a forgotten book and little in it ​demands attention. Two other short novels remain to be mentioned (the Christmas books belong to a genre that does not call for criticism in this place), and one of them, Great Expectations (1861), would be nearly perfect in its mechanism but for the unhappy deference to Lord Lytton's judgment, which caused the end to be altered. Dickens meant to have left Pip a lonely man, and of course rightly so; by the irony of fate he was induced to spoil his work through a brother novelist's desire for a happy ending—a strange thing, indeed, to befall Dickens. Observe how finely the narrative is kept in one key. It begins with a mournful impression—the foggy marshes spreading drearily by the seaward Thames—and throughout recurs this effect of cold and damp and dreariness; in that kind Dickens never did anything so good. Despite the subject, we have no stage fire—except around the person of Mr. Wopsle, a charming bit of satire, recalling and contrasting with the far-off days of Nickleby. The one unsatisfactory feature is the part concerned with Miss Havisham and Estella. Here the old Dickens survives in unhappy fashion; unable to resist the lure of eccentricity, but no longer presenting it with the gusto which was wont to be more than an excuse. Passing this, one can ​hardly overpraise the workmanship. No story in the first person was ever better told.

Of the Tale of Two Cities (1859) it is impossible to speak so favourably. Like Barnaby Rudge, a historical novel, it is better constructed than that early book, but by no means so alive. In his two novels dealing with a past time, Dickens attacks the two things he most hated in the present; religious fanaticism and social tyranny. Barnaby is in all senses a characteristic book. The Tale of Two Cities can hardly be called so in anything but its theme. The novelist here laid a restraint upon himself; he aimed deliberately at writing a story for the story's sake; the one thing he had never yet been able to do. Among other presumed superfluities, humour is dismissed. To some readers the result appears admirable; for my part, I feel the restraint throughout, miss the best of my author, and, whilst admitting that he has produced something like a true tragedy, reflect that many another man could have handled the theme as well, if not better. It leaves no strong impression on my mind; even the figure of Carton soon grows dim against a dimmer background.

In the autumn of 1867, Dickens left England on his second voyage across the Atlantic, to give that long series of public readings ​which shattered his health and sent him back a doomed man. Upon this aspect of his public life something will be said in a later chapter. The spring of 1868 saw him return, and before the end of the year he had entered upon a series of farewell readings in his own country. Defiant of the gravest physical symptoms,—it was not in the man's nature to believe that he could be beaten in anything he undertook,—he laboured through a self-imposed duty which would have tasked him severely even in the time of robust health, and finally took leave of his audience on the 5th of April, 1870. Meanwhile (in a few months of rest to which he was constrained by medical advice) he had begun the writing of a new book, which was to appear in twelve monthly numbers, instead of the old heroic twenty; its name, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Six numbers only were finished. As an indication of the disturbance of mental habit caused by the author's life as a public entertainer, Forster mentions that Dickens miscalculated the length (in print) of his first two parts by no less than twelve pages; ominous error in one who had rarely found his calculation in this matter wrong even by a line. Beyond the sixth part, only a disjointed scene was written. He worked in his garden house at Gadshill,—the home endeared to him by ​Shakespearian associations,—till the evening of the 8th of June, and an hour or two later was seized by fatal illness. The next day he died.

Edwin Drood would probably have been his best constructed book: as far as it goes, the story hangs well together, showing a care in the contrivance of detail which is more than commonly justified by the result. One cannot help wishing that Dickens had chosen another subject—one in which there was neither mystery nor murder, both so irresistibly attractive to him, yet so far from being the true material of his art. Surely it is unfortunate that the last work of a great writer should have for its theme nothing more human than a trivial mystery woven about a vulgar deed of blood. For this, it seems to me, his public readings may well have been responsible. In the last series he had made a great impression by his rendering (acting, indeed) of the death of Nancy in Oliver Twist. The thing, utterly unworthy of him in this shape, had cost him great pains; his imagination was drenched with gore, preoccupied with a sordid horror. Casting about him for a new story, he saw murder at the end of every vista. It would not have been thus if he had lived a calmer life, with natural development of his thoughts. In that ​case we might have had some true successor to David Copperfield. His selection of scene was happy and promising—the old city of his childhood, Rochester. The tone, too, of his descriptive passages is much more appropriate than the subject. But Dickens had made his choice in life, and therefrom inevitably resulted his course in literature.